Philosophy Is About How to Live a Good Life: For This Reason Alone, It Should Be Taught in Secondary Schools

When you think of philosophy you probably imagine a bunch of pretentious snobs competing over who has a better grasp of Kant or Heidegger. “Well if you actually understood Heidegger’s Dasein”, one might say,sipping away at some stupidly priced bottle of wine. Another might intone “No I mean différANCE, as in Derrida.”

Philosophy appears to most people as a self-indulgent, impractical subject. This could not be further from the truth.

We all operate within a philosophical framework. We all have opinions or assumptions about reality; what John Stuart Mill called the furniture of the mind. And so to live and think is to, by definition, to philosophise: to interpret the world, and see meaning in it; to identify things, and categorise them; to reflect on what is real and what is mysterious.

“Well, if I’m already philosophising, why bother learning about it at school?”

We cannot answer what sort of subjects are important to education without first considering the purpose of education in the first place. In our hyper-utilitarian world, the liberal establishment has reduced education almost entirely to market-driven individual outcomes.

The upshot is that educational policy works on the basis of maximising certain performance measures that are geared around employment. Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper referred to this phenomenon as: “the reduction of human life to practical goals and the reduction of the human being into utilitarian value.”

Career is hugely important, and ensuring that children have opportunities to be financially successful must remain a priority. But we also have to concede that not everything should be in service of future employment, and part of education should also be “for itself”: for enjoyment, for wellbeing, for engaging with what is culturally important to us and facilitating social relationships with others.

It is for these reasons we might agree that P.E. should be a compulsory part of our curriculum despite training almost none of us for a career in sport. Why not philosophy too?

From ancient to medieval times, the study of philosophy was essential because it engaged us in all that is meaningful: truth, goodness, beauty. Contemplation and disputation were a part of the whole method of knowing the world and God. This might all sound a bit woo-woo, but put it in a modern classroom context it is simply the practice of asking: “what is actually worth inquiring and caring about?

After all, the fundamental question of philosophy from the Greeks was about how to live the good life. In a social-media world, which spreads the idea that the good life is measured by one’s salary or status, philosophy asks: what will actually make us happy and fulfilled? What do we owe to others? And how ought we to go about living?

Teaching philosophy in schools is not, therefore, about transferring some corpus of information. Instead, a philosophical education forces pupils to engage with fundamental questions over what is important for them and for society, and asks them to continually and critically reflect on this.

Such reflection is important no matter what we do in life. Whether one becomes a financial services director or a joiner, the ability to prioritise one’s life and take responsibility for one’s actions is surely crucial.

Though we may already be asking philosophical questions, formal study helps us to structure these, and learn from traditions of people who have already thought about them.

After all, there is a strong heritage of philosophy in Britain, especially in Scotland – not only with the Enlightenment thinkers, but with medieval philosophers like John Duns Scotus and Richard of St. Victor. Where France has retained their philosophical heritage by making philosophy a compulsory school subject, most school-aged students in the UK have never heard of David Hume.

Furthermore, aside from the fact that philosophical interrogation might be just the thing to save us from the banality of AI and brain-rot doomscrolling, the study of philosophy encourages us to understand one another’s point of view and engage meaningfully with it without distorting it.

Education must serve a better future. But if we continue to view our schools purely as an assembly line for future taxpayers, we will continue to produce adults who know how to make a living but have no idea how to live.