Having taught Philosophy A Level in Further Education for two years now, I still find it so striking, and perhaps frightening, the expectations and pressures that our society bestows upon our young people. It hits me every time on enrolment day. A sixteen-year-old student comes to the college, GCSE transcript in hand, sits across from me or another teacher. In that moment this child is expected to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives.
“Are you a vocational student or an academic one? A Levels or a BTEC diploma in catering / engineering / health and social care? If A Levels, which three subjects? Are you going to university? An apprenticeship perhaps? What do you want to do?” No pressure, right?
It’s borderline uncomfortable to be a part of. At the age of only sixteen, these young people find themselves on the edge of something they couldn’t even possibly yet have the words for. They are asked to make choices that appear definitive, forced to specialise in a subject that may shape the rest of their lives, to commit, to plan, all at a time when so much about who they are is still so tender, still becoming. Because beneath all our added pressure, most of these young people are carrying things they haven’t even been given space to name. This age sees many navigating the first ruptures and challenges of life. Many are dealing with the first losses of loved ones or family stability. Some are falling in love, or trying to work out what love even means. Others will no doubt be wrestling with loneliness, identity, beliefs and values. All of them are figuring out what it means to move through the world which we ourselves as educators find so hard to navigate.
And yet, for all that they’re carrying, the structures we place around them rarely make space for any meaningful reflection. The timetable must march on, the specifications must be covered, the exams must be studied for, and their futures must be shaped. Even in A Level Philosophy, a subject in which one might expect to find some kind of sanctuary, the curriculum often remains abstract and disinterested. Students are taught how to argue and evaluate, but ultimately only in the context of an exam. Even if John Hick’s Replica Theory is kind of interesting, the curriculum is not designed to show them how to attend, how to be. It does not allow space to explore how to sit with what is difficult or urgent in these students’ lives. The questions most fundamental to them – Who am I? What matters? How should I be? What does it even mean to be? – are rarely named let alone explored.
The danger here is huge. Philosophy becomes absent and disembodied, another abstract discipline to master, rather than being recognised as a mode of attending to the world and to the self. The structure of Further Education forces us to teach our young learners to treat philosophy, and I argue other subjects by extension, instrumentally rather than relationally, to study it from a distance rather than dwell in it as something embodied. And it is precisely at this stage of their lives, on the threshold between adolescence and adulthood, that philosophy would matter the most, not as some career skill but as a space to become.
Last year, towards the end of the academic calendar for my Yr12 philosophers, I found myself wanting to offer something different for that last half term before summer – not instead of the curriculum for Philosophy A Level, but perhaps a bit beyond it. Once their AS exams were over and the pressure had eased off, I created for them a short, voluntary module introducing them to university level philosophy called A Crash Course in Existentialism, something I have continued to deliver to my subsequent Yr12s. There are no grades or any formal assessments for this impromptu module, but just an offer of space to ask questions and to reflect in such a way that the curriculum disallows for.
Each week we would explore a single question: What is a philosopher? Is time really real? Is the world really real? What am I? Who am I? What does it mean to be happy? The module sees us begin with Socrates to explore the importance of philosophy as Philosophia, before moving through to Bergson to introduce ideas of ontology and phenomenology. We look at Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre before finishing with a look at de Beauvoir. The structure is deliberately simple. We will have a short presentation to make ideas accessible, students will engage with extracts from primary texts, and most importantly we will engage in open discussion. There is no demand for any mastery of the content, no exam or measurable outcomes that might undermine its worth. There is simply an invitation to sit with the questions asked, not to resolve them, but to dwell with them, slowly, together as a class.
At the end, I do invite students to write a short, reflective essay if they want to – an opportunity to write their first university essay before they go to university. Many do and some don’t. I’ve read some of the most stunning reflections and understandings of such challenging philosophers – why Bergson’s concept of time as duration is existentially significant, how to live authentically according to Heidegger – far better essays than I ever did write during my undergraduate. Yet what stays with me most is not the content of the conversations, or even the essays themselves, but the atmosphere of the classroom. The philosophy we study together invites such seriousness into the classroom that does not come from any academic pressure or performance, but merely from presence. The students bring themselves in ways that the curriculum just does not allow.
I don’t offer this as any kind of teaching strategy. In no way is this an offer of a bold teaching experiment or carefully designed programme. The half-baked existentialism module I have created is, at most, a modest attempt to make space for what I believe the A Level Philosophy curriculum, and perhaps Further Education more broadly, in its current form cannot hold. Why should students have to wait until the end of the year, in an unofficial and unexamined space, to be invited into questions that speak most directly to their experience? Why should the richest forms of philosophical reflection come only after the formal teaching of the subject has ended?
Philosophy, when it’s allowed to be more than theory, when it becomes an encounter, doesn’t provide answers. Instead, it offers companionship and a mode of being. In Further Education, and perhaps in education more broadly, we need more of that. Young people deserve exposure to philosophy not as enrichment, not as extra or as what we get to when the ‘real’ learning is done, but as something necessary, as something radical and deeply human. If we took this seriously, I suggest that it wouldn’t just change the way we teach A Level Philosophy, but perhaps it would reshape how we think about Further Education itself. Students aren’t just preparing for life – they are already in the middle of it. They don’t need more pressure to know and more expectations to become something the socio-economic structures of the UK have already decided they should be. On the contrary, they need to be granted more room to ask and more space to become who they are.
