Conservative states have been making efforts to reform secondary education. Florida, a front runner in this movement, banned the ideologically dubious Advanced Placement African Studies course in 2023 and recently launched a college-level US history course designed to offer an alternative to the left-leaning AP US History course. Florida has moreover shown support for Turning Point USA’s high school movement, Club America, and was the first state to approve the Classical Learning Test for state university admittance.
Ad hoc efforts like these are worthwhile, but there remains a subtler problem for public high school curricula that conservative states are missing. Without this problem addressed, high schools remain apt to impart a perverse understanding of human life, even if purged of leftist-leaning Advanced Placement classes.
The problem is this: Sound philosophy is, without reason, absent from public high school curricula. As a result, a reductionistic pseudo-philosophy—usually history or psychology—takes philosophy’s place in the student’s mind. And the consequences are cataclysmic.
High School Classes Are Parts of a Whole
High school classes are like the parts of a body. As the head, heart, and liver serve the whole body by being good parts, so too the classes taught in high school are parts of a complete high school education and serve the whole. One rightly measures the success or failure of a part by evaluating its relation to the whole. An underdeveloped or overgrown part of the body, therefore, is “unhealthy” precisely because it is bad for the whole.
This type of disproportion occurs in high school curricula when philosophy is not taught. (First and foremost, however, disproportions occur when high schools become secular, banishing religion from a student’s education, but this is beyond the focus of my essay.) Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is that science which seeks the most profound truths, the highest principles, and the first causes available to human reason. Philosophy teaches us to examine our lives, our beliefs, and our ways of thinking. It teaches us how to recognize and make distinctions. Philosophy, moreover, is the queen of the natural sciences. It pertains to philosophy to order the lower sciences and mark their limits. This is precisely because philosophy examines the ultimate account of logic, causation, and knowledge.
In the absence of an explicitly taught philosophy, other classes are bound to grow cancerous and make claims beyond their rightful due, acting as pseudo-philosophies.
A high school’s choice not to teach philosophy, therefore, is a grave omission. And in the absence of an explicitly taught philosophy, other classes are bound to grow cancerous and make claims beyond their rightful due, acting as pseudo-philosophies.
Psychology, insightful in itself, goes above its rightful domain in this way when it claims to offer a foundational or exhaustive account of human behavior or attempts to reduce human thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to facts about the brain. These reductionistic claims may not be explicitly taught in the classroom, but they are liable to creep into the student’s mind in the absence of true philosophical wisdom. If a student is fed a steady diet of psychological experiments and theories but has never read Aristotle’s De Anima or Plato’s Meno, she is likely to find facts about the immortal soul to be fanciful.
History, too, insightful in itself, goes beyond its domain when it attempts to reduce human belief to historical circumstance or proposes to offer a comprehensive account of the human person. Again, this reductionism may not be taught explicitly in the classroom but is likely to creep into the student’s way of thinking. What else should we expect to happen to the student when her educators merely parade before her the various human cultures throughout time but never teach what is good and true or evil and false about such cultures?
What I am describing is reminiscent, mutatis mutandis, of what John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University. Newman argued that since each individual science has its proper domain, there must be, in a sense, a “science of sciences” that sits over and above the rest of the sciences. Newman’s argument is more complex than I can explore here, but his fundamental insight applies neatly to the case of high school education. A sound philosophical propaedeutic provides a framework to ground a student in her studies. It enables her to see each class as offering a valuable portion—but only just that—of the whole.
Objections to Philosophy in High School
One might object to the teaching of high school philosophy by claiming that philosophical matters, like religious matters, ought to be left in the private sphere. Philosophy, the thought goes, is just too sensitive and important to be taught in public schools.
I respond to this objection by noting that the omission of philosophy in high school is unlike the omission of religion in high school. The latter has some justification behind it—grounded in the distinction between the church and the state, between nature and supernature, between faith and reason—but these justifications do not defend the former. The truths of philosophy, like the truths of biology or physics, are natural and are therefore available to all men and women.
Another objection to my proposal goes like this: Philosophy should not be taught in high schools because it is too difficult and abstract for students of high school age to comprehend.
While I concede that high school students will not fully appreciate the profundity of philosophy (then again, who can?), we have good reason to believe they can grasp the essentials of philosophy. Firstly, the success of classical schools like Chesterton Academies testify to the possibility that high school students can in fact learn philosophy—fait accompli. And secondly, given that Advanced Placement educators have already entrusted high school students to learn advanced concepts such as psychoanalysis and critical historical theory, it would seem that the basics of philosophy are well within student reach.
A final objection may be raised on the grounds that there could never be sufficient agreement on which philosophy, or which philosophers, to teach.
I believe this objection is overly skeptical about how much disagreement there would actually be among conservatives in this matter. Few conservatives would object to the teaching of proofs for the existence of God; demonstrations of the immateriality and immortality of the human soul; the law of noncontradiction; the distinction between the sensitive good, the useful good, and the good as such; God as the natural end of the human person; the priority of the common good over the private good; the division of the rational soul into intellect, will, and passions.
Teaching these things, in addition to teaching logic and critical thinking (so the student can recognize the rigor of the aforementioned arguments), could constitute a robust two-year curriculum for high schools. This philosophical course of study would help our students return to natural truth and right reason. And that would be a far more effective means to combat leftist ideology than any stopgap alternative course.