Asking Big Questions at Dean Tech
Marina Pérez del Valle is a philosophy PhD student at UMass Amherst and a PLATO fellow for the academic year 2024-25. When not doing philosophy, she can be found climbing, biking, or hanging out outdoors.
Teaching Philosophy at Dean Tech: Asking Big Questions in a Vocational Setting
When I approach schools to see if they would be interested in having philosophy sessions in their classrooms, I am often met with some degree of initial perplexity. It can sometimes be hard to convince educators and school administrators of the value of philosophy, and if at the start of the year I had to list the schools where I thought philosophy would take root and flourish, Dean Technical High School would not have ranked very high.
Dean Tech is a vocational high school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Students planning to be mechanics, electricians, and make-up artists enroll in core programs that range from Auto Collision to Diesel Technologies to Web Development. In addition to their program requirements, they also choose electives. This year, for the first time, one of the electives is a philosophy class.
At first, I wasn’t sure how philosophy would fit in a vocational school. I assumed that it would be an easy class that students would pick to cruise through, leaving them more time to focus on the more practical skills that they would be learning in the rest of their classes—that is, the skills that would get them a job in the future.
This was not the case. The philosophy students were curious, willing to engage in debate and discussion, and eager to grapple with life’s big questions. They reminded me that philosophy is not a luxury activity or a fun if pointless exercise, but rather a necessary tool to navigate the world as fully-fledged human beings. Dean Tech students are hands-on learners who build, fix, and create — and precisely because of that they were excited to use the philosophy toolbox and put it to use in their own lives.
In our first session, we ran an adapted version of the Split and Steal game from the PLATO Philosophy Toolbox. The game is in essence a prisoner’s dilemma, and the bags of candy that we brought to use as prizes made the stakes very concrete. It served as the introduction to a unit on moral philosophy, and we used the activity to bring the students’ moral intuitions about cooperation and trust to light. We also wanted to give them the chance to work with their peers, deliberate in their teams, and talk to the opposing team to try and reach a cooperative solution.
Very soon, different positions emerged. In one team, two students said that they thought they should choose to cooperate because even if each team got only half of the candy rather than all, that was more than plenty and meant that they all would get to enjoy it. “This candy doesn’t belong to any of us,” one of them said, “so why should we try to get all of it rather than just dividing it up?”
Other students disagreed. “We know the people on the other side,” a girl said. “They’re not going to cooperate; they just want the candy. So if we choose to split and they choose to steal, we’re just going to get nothing. Even if it’s the right thing, it doesn’t make sense to split if we know they’re going to steal.”
During the ensuing discussion, some students proposed stealing but lying to the other team so that they would choose to split and get nothing. Two students strongly opposed this. One of them said, “I don’t want candy that we get through lies. I don’t think it’s right to lie for any reason.” I asked him if he knew who Kant was. He didn’t.
Like all teenagers, they loved to defend radical positions, argue, and one-up their classmates. One team stole in the first round and won a whole bag of candy while the other team got nothing. The Kantian-leaning students were overridden in the second round, but when their team stole and won the second bag, they swore they would not eat any of it. In the third round, both teams chose to split. To my surprise, they all got the same amount of candy in the end.
When we moved on to a whole-group discussion, we tried to prompt them to think of real-world cases that work like the Split and Steal game. With the presidential election campaign in full swing, one student hesitantly said, “Aren’t elections kind of like that? If you choose not to bother and not get informed about who you’re going to vote, this is better for you individually, because it’s just less work and you don’t have to think about it. But if everybody does that it’s like if everybody steals, and then it’s worse for everyone collectively.”
This kickstarted a lively discussion about democracy, the presidential election, and what individual responsibilities we each have in political processes. I have had undergraduate students sit in silence when asked to link the Split and Steal game to real-world scenarios, so I was thrilled to see the enthusiasm with which students discussed these issues.
And, of course, having the opportunity to work with teachers who are involved with the material and participated in activities and discussions, setting an active example for the students, was a fantastic plus.
I truly believe that philosophy will help these students build lives worth living, and that the skills they acquire at Dean Tech’s philosophy elective will stay with them long after graduation, regardless of what they choose to do in life.
