“Overall it seems clear that children benefit from the teaching of philosophy, with the strongest evidence so far in the area of reasoning ability.”
I like P4C and I’ve seen quite a few schools use it well, but my impression of the education literature is that children benefit from the majority of interventions, because teachers or practitioners tend to put more effort and enthusiasm into these programmes while they’re being studied. How can you tell that P4C is better for children’s reasoning skills and/or moral development than another intervention (for example, spending an extra hour a week on religious education)?
Hi Khorton, thanks for your comment. MichaelA makes a similar comment which I have replied to—I would suggest checking out my comment to him.
To respond to your question about other interventions, the Trickey and Topping (2004) review study mentions: “Many of the studies could be criticized on grounds of methodological rigour, but the quality and quantity of evidence nevertheless bears favourable comparison with that on many other methods in education.” This is a somewhat subjective statement and not one I can comment on with expertise. As I emphasise in my answer to MichaelA, the most accurate way to interpret the existing evidence for teaching philosophy might be that the evidence is highly promising, building a strong case for further research.
As an atheist it might not surprise you that I am not (that) enthusiastic about religious education. Admittedly I don’t know much about how RE is taught, but I can’t see it being better than general philosophy. My main thoughts are (I expect you to disagree with much of this!):
I’d imagine some part of RE involves teaching children about different faiths. This is certainly desirable in that we should know about these faiths and accept them in society, but I’d imagine such learning would be quite factual in nature and so wouldn’t afford the same critical thinking skills which I think are particularly important from an EA perspective. Personally, I’d make learning about faiths compulsory in History class and scrap RE
Maybe in RE class there is some discussion/debate about the actual ethics of particular religions which is hoped to stimulate critical thinking. This might be my bias entering here—but my understanding of religious ethics is that it is pretty much handed down from god and, as such, the scope for independent thought is somewhat restricted. I’m not saying it is completely restricted—you can for example discuss different interpretations of what the holy books say which will build comprehension skills—but I doubt these critical thinking skills will be built to the same extent as in general philosophy
Teaching Christian ethics can feasibly foster altruism (golden rule and such), but I don’t see it as widening our moral circle particularly far (e.g. non-human animals, future generations?), so it wouldn’t really foster the moral growth ‘I want’. I mean, I guess this is another way of saying that I simply don’t think religious ethics is valid so why would I want it taught? Obviously that’s a personal view, but I do think a strong case could be made that religious ethics should be left to parents/churches
Hi Jack, it sounds like what you really want is for children to be introduced to the case for utilitarianism at an earlier age. You’re interested in children building other skills through P4C, especially critical thinking, but if you found out that children learned more critical thinking through a specific class that focused just on critical thinking and didn’t talk about philosophy, you might still prefer P4C. Is that a fair characterization?
Yes it’s possible, but not definite, that I would prefer P4C (or another method of teaching philosophy). Critical thinking alone has no ethical dimension. Someone with better critical thinking skills may be more able to grasp important ethical principles, but would they be interested in doing so? Maybe not.
Michael A’s post introducing the benevolence, intelligence, power (BIP) framework seems relevant here. It may be bad to increase the intelligence of actors who aren’t sufficiently benevolent in the first place. That’s why I am interested in the evidence that P4C can improve empathy.
I should note that I don’t necessarily see utilitarianism as the best ethical theory we will ever have, but I do think it’s probably the best one we currently have (although I understand Parfit has some interesting things to say on this in his 2011 book which I haven’t read). More people studying philosophy increases the probability that we will one day make further ethical progress towards the ‘best’ or ‘true’ ethical theory if in fact such a thing exists.
I also appreciate the reference to my/Convergence’s post, and agree with how you’ve applied it. But I just want to quickly note that that post doesn’t take a clear stand on:
how benevolent is “sufficient benevolent”
how that differs for different intelligence improvements
precisely what “benevolence” involves (though we gesture at some likely components, and state that “we essentially mean how well an actor’s moral beliefs or values align with the goal of improving the expected value of the long-term future”)
Relevant paragraph from the post for the first two of those points:
Determining precisely what the relevant “threshold” level of benevolence would be is not a trivial matter, but we think even just recognising that such a threshold likely exists may be useful. The threshold would also depend on the precise type of intelligence improvement that would occur. For example, the same authoritarians or militaries may be “sufficiently” benevolent (e.g., just entirely self-interested, rather than actively sadistic) that improving their understanding of global priorities research is safe, even if improving their understanding of biotech is not.
I say this because I want to note that that post doesn’t rule out hypotheses such as “improving the critical thinking of (lets say) 99.99% of schoolchildren is beneficial, and the slight harm from improving the critical thinking of the last 0.01% (perhaps those predisposed to unusually high levels of malevolent traits) is outweighed by those benefits.”
But I think the key relevance of that post here is that it suggests that:
improving benevolence may be more clearly or more strongly beneficial than improving intelligence
improving intelligence of especially benevolent actors (or improving intelligence and benevolence in tandem, which seems roughly equivalent) may be more clearly or more strongly beneficial than improving intelligence of just a random/general subset of people
(And therefore, long story short, I’d also be particularly excited about an intervention which increases things like empathy, moral circle expansion, inclination towards EA ideas, etc.)
“Overall it seems clear that children benefit from the teaching of philosophy, with the strongest evidence so far in the area of reasoning ability.”
I like P4C and I’ve seen quite a few schools use it well, but my impression of the education literature is that children benefit from the majority of interventions, because teachers or practitioners tend to put more effort and enthusiasm into these programmes while they’re being studied. How can you tell that P4C is better for children’s reasoning skills and/or moral development than another intervention (for example, spending an extra hour a week on religious education)?
Hi Khorton, thanks for your comment. MichaelA makes a similar comment which I have replied to—I would suggest checking out my comment to him.
To respond to your question about other interventions, the Trickey and Topping (2004) review study mentions: “Many of the studies could be criticized on grounds of methodological rigour, but the quality and quantity of evidence nevertheless bears favourable comparison with that on many other methods in education.” This is a somewhat subjective statement and not one I can comment on with expertise. As I emphasise in my answer to MichaelA, the most accurate way to interpret the existing evidence for teaching philosophy might be that the evidence is highly promising, building a strong case for further research.
As an atheist it might not surprise you that I am not (that) enthusiastic about religious education. Admittedly I don’t know much about how RE is taught, but I can’t see it being better than general philosophy. My main thoughts are (I expect you to disagree with much of this!):
I’d imagine some part of RE involves teaching children about different faiths. This is certainly desirable in that we should know about these faiths and accept them in society, but I’d imagine such learning would be quite factual in nature and so wouldn’t afford the same critical thinking skills which I think are particularly important from an EA perspective. Personally, I’d make learning about faiths compulsory in History class and scrap RE
Maybe in RE class there is some discussion/debate about the actual ethics of particular religions which is hoped to stimulate critical thinking. This might be my bias entering here—but my understanding of religious ethics is that it is pretty much handed down from god and, as such, the scope for independent thought is somewhat restricted. I’m not saying it is completely restricted—you can for example discuss different interpretations of what the holy books say which will build comprehension skills—but I doubt these critical thinking skills will be built to the same extent as in general philosophy
Teaching Christian ethics can feasibly foster altruism (golden rule and such), but I don’t see it as widening our moral circle particularly far (e.g. non-human animals, future generations?), so it wouldn’t really foster the moral growth ‘I want’. I mean, I guess this is another way of saying that I simply don’t think religious ethics is valid so why would I want it taught? Obviously that’s a personal view, but I do think a strong case could be made that religious ethics should be left to parents/churches
Hi Jack, it sounds like what you really want is for children to be introduced to the case for utilitarianism at an earlier age. You’re interested in children building other skills through P4C, especially critical thinking, but if you found out that children learned more critical thinking through a specific class that focused just on critical thinking and didn’t talk about philosophy, you might still prefer P4C. Is that a fair characterization?
Yes it’s possible, but not definite, that I would prefer P4C (or another method of teaching philosophy). Critical thinking alone has no ethical dimension. Someone with better critical thinking skills may be more able to grasp important ethical principles, but would they be interested in doing so? Maybe not.
Michael A’s post introducing the benevolence, intelligence, power (BIP) framework seems relevant here. It may be bad to increase the intelligence of actors who aren’t sufficiently benevolent in the first place. That’s why I am interested in the evidence that P4C can improve empathy.
I should note that I don’t necessarily see utilitarianism as the best ethical theory we will ever have, but I do think it’s probably the best one we currently have (although I understand Parfit has some interesting things to say on this in his 2011 book which I haven’t read). More people studying philosophy increases the probability that we will one day make further ethical progress towards the ‘best’ or ‘true’ ethical theory if in fact such a thing exists.
I agree with this comment.
I also appreciate the reference to my/Convergence’s post, and agree with how you’ve applied it. But I just want to quickly note that that post doesn’t take a clear stand on:
how benevolent is “sufficient benevolent”
how that differs for different intelligence improvements
precisely what “benevolence” involves (though we gesture at some likely components, and state that “we essentially mean how well an actor’s moral beliefs or values align with the goal of improving the expected value of the long-term future”)
Relevant paragraph from the post for the first two of those points:
I think some of this comes down to one’s more general views on differential progress, and on whether “speeding up development” in general is currently beneficial (see Crucial questions for longtermists).
I say this because I want to note that that post doesn’t rule out hypotheses such as “improving the critical thinking of (lets say) 99.99% of schoolchildren is beneficial, and the slight harm from improving the critical thinking of the last 0.01% (perhaps those predisposed to unusually high levels of malevolent traits) is outweighed by those benefits.”
But I think the key relevance of that post here is that it suggests that:
improving benevolence may be more clearly or more strongly beneficial than improving intelligence
improving intelligence of especially benevolent actors (or improving intelligence and benevolence in tandem, which seems roughly equivalent) may be more clearly or more strongly beneficial than improving intelligence of just a random/general subset of people
(And therefore, long story short, I’d also be particularly excited about an intervention which increases things like empathy, moral circle expansion, inclination towards EA ideas, etc.)
Thanks for these clarifications Michael