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Huddled in an intimate circle, half a dozen students discuss the explanatory roles of Christianity and science and how to question social norms and ideologies. One student raises his hand to talk about the “meta-structures” of reality, and others eagerly listen in. The weighty discussion would not seem out of place in a Contemporary Civilization classroom or the hallway of a first-year dorm, but the students here are not Columbia undergraduates: They’re students at Elizabeth Irwin High School attending the inaugural meeting of the school’s philosophy club.

Discussions like these are happening in high schools across New York City as part of Philosophy Outreach, an initiative started last year by graduate students from the Philosophy and Education program at Teachers College and the department of philosophy at Columbia University. Last year, a group of four graduate students, Michael Seifried, Sebastian Watzl, Guillermo Marini, and Timothy Ignaffo, met to discuss how they could collaborate to bring their passion for philosophy to high school students.

The group quickly garnered interest among other students interested in volunteering with the program, including the two students leading the Elizabeth Irwin discussions, Adam See of the School of Arts and Sciences and Yoshiaki Nakazawa of Teachers College. With the support of faculty members David Hansen, Philip Kitcher, Megan Laverty, and Achille Varzi, the students put their teaching plans into action and approached local schools with their proposals, with great success. Last semester, volunteers were working with students at seven high schools in New York City, and they plan to add three more schools to the program this year.

Club meetings, like the ones at Elizabeth Irwin, are only one lesson plan the students prepare: They also offer self-contained lunch lectures, assemblies, and guest-teaching sessions to supplement normal curricula covering a variety of subject material. At Elizabeth Irwin’s inaugural meeting, students discussed philosophers such as Berkeley, Kant, and Socrates. When he volunteered as a guest lecturer at The Beacon School last semester, See introduced topics like hermeneutics, ancient skepticism, and existential literature. The volunteers are all guided by a common belief in an intimate relationship between philosophy and education. “When one is doing philosophy, one is educating, and vice versa,” Nakazawa explains. The idea, emphasized by See, Nakazawa, and Ignaffo, is that philosophy teaches students to be critical of the world around them and question things in a way that’s fundamental to the educational experience.

Continued enthusiasm and attendance from high schoolers is another testament to the program’s merit. “Even though this was just put together last year by graduate students, we made enough of an impact that the schools want us back and more want it,” Ignaffo says, “That’s phenomenal.” He also stresses the positive reactions he’s heard from students: At Elizabeth Irwin, the students were clearly excited by the topics being discussed and eagerly stimulated further debate by contributing their own thoughts and asking questions. The students had so much to say, in fact, that an effort by See and Nakazawa to enumerate the different branches of philosophical inquiry got sidetracked by a long discussion of the first field listed—ethics—as students’ hands shot up to present problematic questions. “If we had all been brought up to think that the Holocaust was a good thing,” one student asked, “then would it have been good?” The students explored moral relativism, deontology, and consequentialism, and See and Nakazawa were left with just a few minutes to give a brief introduction to metaphysics.

Despite the positive reactions, there are still lingering questions about the utility of Columbia’s Philosophy Outreach program, as well as similar enterprises conducted by New York University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Colorado. In the current economic climate, budgets for humanities departments are being frozen or slashed at universities nationwide, and many observers worry about the future vitality of humanities programs in education. If programs in the humanities, such as philosophy, aren’t valued at the university level, it’s hard to see why they should be expanded to include high schools. Is there really any practical value to the high school students in studying philosophy? Will they have a future in higher education?

The program is trying to back up its anecdotal claims of success with more quantitative data this year, hoping to have records of philosophy club attendance and to identify a correlation between involvement in these clubs and academic performance in other classes. The people involved in Philosophy Outreach also claim that the study of philosophy is instrumental in other practical matters. Ignaffo holds that one of the main attractions of the program is that “we get to see philosophy in practice. I think a lot of times philosophy is seen as abstract, a chase up the ivory tower.” See and Nakazawa note that ethics, “questions about technology,” and generally “questions relevant to the concerns and interests of their [students’] own lives” tend to be the most popular topics for discussion.

It’s these sorts of questions that the organizers of the program plan to pose to more high school students this year, including students at Columbia Secondary School, a public school founded through a partnership between Columbia University, the New York City Department of Education, and the West Harlem community. The school plans to develop a full four-year curriculum next year, and the participants in Philosophy Outreach hope to make philosophy a centerpiece of that curriculum. In addition to its short-term goals, Philosophy Outreach also hopes to help bring philosophy into high schools on a larger scale—even at schools where Philosophy Outreach is not directly involved.