What a moral philosophy course offers high school students

As they engage with thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Gwendolyn Brooks and Spike Lee, students in the course “Searching Together for the Common Good” are not just observers; they are active participants in a centuries-old quest. The class is modeled on Stanford's intensive freshman residential experience and seminar, Structured Liberal Education, or SLE (pronounced “SLEE”). It is available to Title I high schools through a partnership between the National Education Equity Lab and Stanford Digital Education. Learn more about Stanford courses for Title I high school students.

Greg Watkins, a longtime SLE lecturer, tapped Stanford alum and high school teacher Mike Taubman to help pioneer the course, which Watkins designed and teaches using online lessons, a digital textbook, and synchronous discussion time over Zoom that includes Stanford SLE students as participants. At a gathering to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Structured Liberal Education, October 21, 2023, Taubman reflected on what the course has created for his students at North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey. (Note: In his remarks, he refers to SLE founder Mark Mancall, who died in 2020, and briefly addresses former SLE lecturer and program pillar Suzanne Greenberg. He also mentions FloMo, the dormitory that houses SLE students.) 

Transcript

MIKE TAUBMAN: I've had the privilege, the last couple of years, of being on both sides of this SLE and high school development process, because I've worked with Greg and Jamie, who is somewhere, who helps us design the course, and lots of people at Stanford to figure out what this can look like. But I've also spent all my time, since Stanford, in schools as a teacher. And so I'm actually working in a high school with students who are doing SLE in high school, seeing them go through it. I wanted to share some quick vignettes about what I've been seeing from the classroom perspective.

I'm sure everyone in this room is very aware that we have a crisis of culture in American high school education right now, partly because there's different parts of our society vying for supremacy in the classroom about what gets taught, and other places, we have an abnegation, where schools are actually forgetting that you can create culture in classrooms, as opposed to just working through various curricula, which isn't the same thing. And so one of our insights, early on, was: it's the culture of SLE even more than the texts that make SLE SLE, and that we wanted to bring to high schools.

And in particular we found, the last couple of years, that there are three specific aspects of SLE’s culture that are powerful for high school students. I'm going to explain those in a kind of SLE essay. Suzanne, I checked my active verbs. Greg read this beforehand, so hopefully the prose is there.

The first aspect of SLE’s culture that is powerful for high school kids is the challenge, the same challenge we all faced going into SLE, when you take a tenth grader or an eleventh grader or a twelfth grader, and you give them moral philosophy. You give them these books. They feel intimidated, for sure, but they also feel respected by the challenge. They know this is not what most kids in America are reading in high school, and they love that they're being stretched in that way.

And they also love the challenge of stretching their minds outside the books and into the world, into daily life, the way Mark always talked about. We have an activity we do, whenever we can — it doesn't work at every high school. But once during the course, we try to have the kids order lunch together. That's the class: order lunch. What are we going to have today? A real lunch, that will come to the school. And watching teenagers try as a group to order lunch and then decide how to decide what's for lunch against the backdrop of moral philosophy and all these texts talking about “What's the common good?” — it's quite a sight, and in particular, watching it dawn on them slowly that competing conceptions of the common good are all over the place in our world. They underlie the life around us. Maybe they especially underlie Chipotle group orders.

The second part of SLE that’s been really powerful for kids in high school is the conversations. They have these conversations with each other in classrooms, talking about the books, and they also get on these calls with Greg and SLE undergrads once a week to talk about these things.

And when they do that they get welcomed into a conversation we have all been welcomed into over the last 50 years, which is the century-spanning search for the common good. They enter the conversation not as observers, but participants. They know that they're not just observing this. They're ready to engage. They're ready to jump in between Confucius and Mencius, between Plato and Aristotle, and have their take, like what do they think about that debate?

There was a student last year, a senior in high school in my class, and we were reading the 1844 manuscripts by Marx, and at the end of the class — it’s this pink reddish book — he closes the book in a huff. Shaking his head, he leaves the room. He's muttering to himself. He's muttering to me because he cannot believe how poorly Marx understood human nature. The role of competition…anyways. For a week after that he was talking about it. And I was like, that's SLE. There it is.

And the final thing that SLE brings to high schools, and I think brought us all here today, is intellectual community. Students in high school, as you can imagine, have a hard time finding intellectual communities. There's a lot of communities in high schools, but they're not always intellectual. Here is one that is, and it becomes a home to a lot of the students in it, even though they're not living together, because they're in high school.

I had a student last year, a young woman who was a senior, who towards the end of the year, was evicted from her home by her family, and had to finish high school at a friend's house where she was living. And it's the last day of the class, the end of the course, and we're reading Gwendolen Brooks’ poetry. And this young woman happens to make the last comment of the course.

And she makes this great point about the poems, and the kids in the room are nodding and are thinking about it, and on the Zoom call the undergrads are nodding, and Greg affirms this really beautifully. And we close the laptops, and I look across the room, and I happen to see her, and she's smiling. And it was the first time in days, it felt to me, that she had smiled. And she turns to her friend, and she says, “I told you I'm a philosopher.” And I was like, that's it, that's it.

And I had to imagine that Mark was smiling somewhere, too, when that happened, watching the SLE lounge slip the bounds of Flo-Mo and get out into the world.