High School High

I did some volunteer philosophy in my friend’s 10th and 11th grade classes at Chief Sealth High today. Mostly, I tried to engage students in philosophical questioning; the topic that lurched us into discussion was free will; seemed like the dialectic got off the ground pretty well.

A couple students were sympathetic to the determinist position; one kid did a nice job of articulating—without prompting—the view that if all were are are physical systems, then it’s not clear how choice gets into the equation, and another came up spontaneously with the objection that if we are determined, then it doesn’t make sense to punish people; at those moments, I felt like Socrates in the Meno, where the slave boy does geometry just by answering Socrates’ questions.

A number of students, though, pushed back at the determinist view; one kid was pretty adamant that his ability to choose not to be a crack addict demonstrated his freedom; another pointed out that the same stimuli that causes one person to grow up to be abusive might make another absolutely committed to not behaving abusively; this, she argued, was evidence that people are free.

My favorite part, though, was when one of the students, in context of a question my friend asked about a play the class had been reading, said that it didn’t really matter if the character’s actions were justified or not because she was just a character in a play. It would make a difference, he said, if they were talking about real person, but since this was fiction, it was all the same one way or another.

I never get to hear people say things like that; in my world, the behavior of people who don’t exist is just as important as people who do—sometimes even more so, since thought experiments provide offer much clearer examples than reality.

So, I wanted to start wondering about reality with them, but that’s when the bell rang. For real.