philosophy at school

LesRitaMitsouko

I'm interested in introducing philosophy at school. I'm looking for ideas, worksheets, textbooks, websites and so on ... resources in general.

DadaKopf

Do you speak French? Hehehe, no, they teach philosophy in schools in France. Maybe there are some French resources you could use.

I haven't seen anything in Ireland.

The_Minister

Secondary school? In what class would you teach it?

arctic lemur

I used to teach RE and i did a bit of philosophy, i started it with transition years. Used a lot of my college notes/booklists. started them off on Sophies World as a basic intro and explored topics from there. Theres also a book called 'practical philosophy' cant remember who wrote it but it was great foor examples etc. Did a fair bit on Descartes and aquinas ie proofs of God's existance from empirical means.

DadaKopf

Not exactly philosophy, but you could consider integrating development issues into classes.

www.developmenteducation.ie should have some resources on it. www.comhlamh.org should have some information, links and contacts on it.

Devt issues are philosophical in that they're ethical and involve philosophical issues all over the place. Ask me if you're interested.

Spectator#1

I think that's a great idea, definitely not for every student though. I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have been capable of following a lot of the reading I had to do for my degree in secondary school, then again I'll never know, I definitely would have welcomed a good philosophy/religion teacher/class to the retards and dos classes I had for the most part though!

If I was doing it I'd try and start with the most basic overview of the entire history of philosophical/religious thought from the beginnings, in short metaphysics-epistemology-language and then how modern philosophy in the west is seen as split in two and slowly work my way through chronologically before I'd go into any great detail in one area.

That's the only problem I had with my course, one single tutorial putting thinkers and movements in temporal context and linking them, perhaps through timelines and some kind of cursory thought family tree - easier suggested than drawn up I'm sure - would have saved me a lot of work, work I don't know that most students would be interested in at a secondary level age.

That said, I think the one's that are genuinely interested could benefit a lot from such a course. There's always a few bright sparks in school that could pick it up.

One other suggestion I'd have is a class on philosophical argument and rigour, demonstrating the different fallacies that can be used to decieve in an argument and on how different strains of philosophical thought express themselves differently in language, most obviously continental and analytic.

There's a series of books by Frederick Copleston called the 'History of Philosophy', I haven't read them in any great length, the collection numbering about 15, but it looks pretty detailed, might be useful for sourcing material.

Whereabouts do you teach if you don't mind me asking? My old school in Malahide seems to have taken on a few philosophy graduates that want to teach it to 4th years too, I think it's a good thing.

GoldieBear

Copelston is really good. You could do something on 'what is everything?' i.e. the early thinkers archimedes, aximenes etc. Another thing i find fierce interesting and can be taught in Transition Year (linked to history module perhaps?) is philosophical anthropology e.g the symbolism of Newgrange, Sun Worship/ Ra in the Nile Delta etc.