| | No, I meant all schools. And I was counting 9-12 as grades.
Philosophy requires that the student be backed in all the other areas of knowledge. A high school student is busy with literature, composition, history, biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, calculus, foreign languages. All real practical philosophy is implicit in these courses, such as politics in history, aesthetics in literature and metaphysics in science. His study of explicit philosophy should either be individual and extracurricular, or deal only with such things as basic logic in geometry class.
Almost all introductory formal philosophy is the study of the history of fallacies. That is properly handled in college in an introductory course. Proper implicit philosophy is taught to children as soon as they start to reach for things in the crib. Formal philosophy should wait. I do not have a copy of Philosophy, Who Needs It, which I where I suspect Rand comments. But it may have been a Q&A. I do remember her surprising me with her opposition to teaching formal philosophy in high school, which I read when I was in high school. I have come to agree with her fully.
A child who is interested will find a book on atheism in the library on his own. I'd rather have children set loose to read as they will in a library, even if it means books of sports trivia rather than Robert Ingersoll.
(Edited by Ted Keer on 10/04, 9:13pm)
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