It would be weird, right, were I to witness a murder out on the streets and then just get back on with my life without properly dealing with the trauma? To just put it behind me, bar maybe the new wearing of a small badge on my lapel to reassert some desperate confidence in the symbols of my old life, and an annual pledge that I will “never forget” the awful events that I saw and cannot forget.

Of course I’ll never forget it — what I saw would imprint itself on my soul for the rest of my life. I watched someone get killed!

We understand now that soldiers returning from our two World Wars weren’t simply “shell-shocked”, as we so quaintly called it, but utterly messed up with the significant trauma of witnessing so much death and destruction and having their own lives be in constant jeopardy. We recognise, now, the need for a proper debrief for those returning from conflict. Therapy. Counselling. Time to recover. But not then.

Having lived in the world before 9/11, I believe I can say with some authority that the world started to lose its collective mind in the weeks, months, and years that passed those tragic events. Weeks, months, and years that also coincided with the rise of the internet and the internet’s ability to polarise and outrage, spreading misinformation, hate, and horror quicker than at any previous point in human history.

Was it the internet? Or was it the internet put into the hands of a deeply traumatised public still reeling from the massacre they watched on TV?

The sort of massacre people in other parts of the world were well used to. The type of thing they had historically been privy to the live show of. Bombs dropping on their homes, the bodies of friends and loved ones strewn bloodily across the rubble that once was their neighbourhood. In some ways it was a sign of our privilege that so many of us had managed to avoid seeing something like that for so long.

But we did see it:

Buildings falling with people still inside.

The ones who jumped before the buildings fell.

The ones in the planes, phoning their loved ones in terror as they saw from the windows their fate.

We saw it all.

And all the wars that followed.

The rendition and torture.

The further attacks.

The decapitation videos online.

For many years, teaching ethics to thirteen year olds, I used to ask my classes to admit if they had seen any of those beheading videos people were sharing on the internet. Too many young hands went up, and so soon I stopped asking.

They too had seen a murder, shared to them innocuously through their phones. Watched it along with music videos and videos of animals doing hilarious things, and then got off the bus to school and went about their lives. No therapy. No counselling. No acknowledgment that they had just witnessed somebody really die. Keep calm and carry on.

And the world got worse. Angrier. Irrational. Self-destructive.

If one of those soldiers returned from war and showed these same behaviours, what would we say?

If our friend who had witnessed a murder on the streets began to act uncharacteristically angry, irrational, and self-destructive, would we perhaps suggest they speak to a professional about it? Someone who could help them work through what they were feeling?

And then, of course, the world shut down in 2020. More deaths. Less visible — we didn’t always see the bodies — but we sure saw the statistics. The fatal curves on all the graphs. The shocking images of intubated patients. The empty streets. The sounds of ambulance sirens blaring eerily into the too-quiet air. The eerily empty funerals.

And we lost our real-life connections to each other. Our physical spaces. Our previous way of life.

Meanwhile some discovered that they hated the partner they were now trapped inside a bubble with. Others discovered they hated their kids. Worse still, many discovered the person they shared a life with was violent, or drunk, or cheating on them, or any number of horrors that they were now locked down with.

Many discovered they hated their jobs; the way they lived their old lives.

Others discovered they loved their jobs and now missed them dearly. Their colleagues. Their friends. Their favourite haunts: pubs, restaurants, places to socialise and feel free.

Another mass trauma suffered collectively, yet alone.

And instead of reckoning with it, we re-opened the world as soon as we could, racing back to normal without looking back. Without confronting the trauma. Without speaking of it again for fear it might come back.

We put it behind us.

And the world got worse still. More angry. More irrational. More self-destructive…

All that time on our computers, living virtually and falling down rabbit-holes. Our minds co-opted and colonised by algorithms designed to encourage sensationalist clicks-for-profit and gather data on us to be sold to the highest bidder. Our dependency on tech normalised and embedded just in time for the advent of AI a few years later. The ever-present large language models that are impossible to avoid by design, encouraged to let them do even more of our thinking for us.

Again — our returning soldier, our friend who witnessed a murder: we see them start to retreat more and more from the world, spend more time in isolation, talk to artificial chatbots and imaginary friends instead of other people, find themselves distracted to the point of obsession by niche ideas and conspiracy theories… Do we think they are dealing with their trauma well? Do we not all agree that they need help?

It remains my conviction that life in 2026 can only be properly explained as the psychological consequence of multiple generations now suffering deep and unresolved traumas from a range of violent global shocks that we have utterly failed to create the appropriate structures for us to process healthily. That we are acting out in dangerous ways and normalising our pathology because we have still not collectively dealt with witnessing mass-murder on an unprecedented scale and living through a terrifying and life-altering pandemic (not to mention coexisting uneasily every year of with the clear growing evidence of widespread ecological collapse and there being no clear plan to deal with that either).

Until we take such traumas seriously, therefore — until we get ourselves the help we collectively need; a truth and reconciliation commission for the last quarter of a century — it is my sad conclusion that we will continue to spiral only deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

If you are not aware, Professor Arday was the Cambridge sociology of education professor who was hounded to death over the summer by accusations of plagiarism and academic misconduct. Accusations which were clearly racist at heart, and sadly part of a playbook of general hostility towards black academics Arday himself had spent much of his professional life writing about. He was a target, he was vulnerable, and his blood is on the hands of every journalist and academic who forced his resignation, and the universities that failed to protect him.

The memoir is a tough read for several reasons. First, because it is rare to hear about life in the classroom from the perspective of a non-verbal, non-reading, dyslexic, and autistic person and it really brought home to me, as a teacher, how difficult the standard classroom environment can be for so many students, and how unfit-for-purpose the one-size-fits-all approach of our education system can be, even with the meagre SEND support we can offer. (SEND support still, ultimately, has to get a child through a rigid education system intentionally not designed for their universal success). But the memoir is mostly tough to read because you can see, as a range of amazing teachers, friends, and family, support the young Arday’s educational journey, how the very things which unlocked words, language, and ideas to him as a young student are likely to be the very same things which lead him into an approach to academia which, under academia’s arcane and exclusionary rules about the nature of intellectual work, would make him an easy target for accusations of plagiarism later on down the line.

As I read about the ways in which friendly colleagues in his classes would share their notes with him when he couldn’t make his own, or verbally summarise books and papers he couldn’t read, I was touched by the innovative ways Arday was able to be educated and his celebration of the collective effort and will to get him through his schooling, which was praised within the book. The idea is beautiful — if I can’t take notes myself, someone else might do it for me and talk me through them. If I can’t write an essay by myself, maybe I can talk to you about my ideas and you can act as a scribe, shaping them for me to better articulate what I really want to say. The same way a ghost writer will work with a celebrity to turn their life into a book. The words are not “written” by the celebrity, but by their scribe, yet though not in the exact language used verbally by the celebrity, the words on the page communicate the truer message of what the non-writer wanted to say than they could ever have articulated if they had tried to write it themselves.

Students with special educational needs and/or disabilities in the classroom use a range of these sorts of methods to access the curriculum and produce work of their own every day: scribes to articulate a student’s thoughts in a more appropriate way for the format of a given assessment, or simply more quickly than they could by themselves, to meet the arbitrary time constraints of examination. Note-takers or immersive reading devices which can break down complicated texts or speeches into more digestible chunks of information to be processed. AI summaries of lengthy books to give their minds a better handle on the key points of otherwise overwhelming assigned reading, or simplified teacher notes which outline key ideas, vocabulary, or scholarship.

The idea is a simple one: if you cannot access the materials in one way — the standard, traditional way taught to the vast majority of neurotypical pupils — there are infinite alternative methods that can get you to the same end-point eventually. All different routes are equally valid.

I have personally embraced this idea in a course I have written, unique to my current school. A GCSE-equivalent Level 2 course in Philosophy. I have intentionally designed assessment in the course to play to my students’ diverse array of strengths, purposefully eschewing terminal written examination at the end of two years for four modular assessments after each distinct unit. Importantly, these unit assessments are not tests of memory and recall. They are intentionally practical assessments where students need to demonstrate skills of actually doing philosophy rather than simply the regurgitation of pre-taught scholarly arguments. They are tasks where scholarly understanding is seen through application, and the emphasis is on their own arguments, not simply those of learnt scholars. Although each assessment has a particular focus, students are also allowed, where possible, to choose the way in which they present their work so they can present it at their best. If a verbal presentation is assigned, they can perform the presentation live in front of the class, or they can pre-record it to video if they worry about speaking in front of an audience. No student should lose marks on their philosophy because of stage fright as a performer. And if they want, if speaking in general isn’t their thing, they can ask me to assess the script of the presentation rather than the verbal presentation itself.

Another task is set where a “philosophical response” can be presented as an essay, a documentary, a piece of creative art, or any other reasonable method of communication the student feels can allow them to meet the criteria. Importantly, the course is designed in such a way that I want them to meet the criteria. I want them to succeed. It is not written (as a GCSE course must be) to ensure that some pass but others fail. It is not written to sort and rank the students into best to worst. It is written to ensure that any able philosopher who does their best will be credited for that ability and effort.

I had noticed over my many years of teaching that so many great and able student philosophers who were excellent thinkers and brilliant verbally, were being put off studying GCSE Religious Studies or A-level philosophy because the focus on essay-writing and memorisation in those courses was something they knew they were weak at. Dyslexic students, especially, were put off studying RS or Philosophy. Every year my department was losing out on potential philosophers all because the system was set up to silence their best expression of philosophy and dictated that they fit their ideas into a mode of articulation they struggled with. And it made me wonder how many other great philosophers across the country we have all failed to nurture because of this sort of academic obstacle.

I have been delighted, therefore, to see such students flourishing within our new philosophy course, and producing high-level argument and synthesis of scholarly ideas in ways they never would have been able to were we to have insisted on the standard assessment approach of memory-based written exercises found in most GCSEs.

But what has this got to do with the tragic death of Professor Arday this summer?

At the time of the witch-hunt against him, I largely ignored the stories, because I could see the familiar and depressing theme emerging without needing to know all the details: another black individual was having their credentials and integrity questioned within an earned position of institutional authority because white colleagues (and white society in general) continues to struggle with the idea of racial equality. This happens over and over again, either organically, because of biases both conscious and subconscious within institutions and their members, or, more sinisterly, because of concerted and well-organised far-right, white supremacist campaigns to intentionally undo such progress in public life. I wasn’t interested in seeing another name dragged through the mud and career ruined by vultures in the media. But since his death, and after reading his memoir, I finally looked back this week at the actual accusations that had been made against his work. It was even more devastating to see that the supposed “academic misconduct” Arday had been accused of, which led to the end of his life, were all instances of allegedly copying passages from one source into his own work, without citation. Essentially passing off someone else’s work as his own.

Historically and unthinkingly, that has always been the very definition of plagiarism to me. Or at least sloppy scholarship. I was nine years old when I did it myself for the first, and last, time. A junior school project on the history of television and I had diligently gone to the library to do my research and then proceeded to copy out pages and pages of the books I’d borrowed to explain to my teacher the various ways in which the TV changed the world. When I was asked to speak to my teacher after school a few days later, along with my parents, it was the day I learned that such copying was actually a terrible thing called “plagiarism”. I had “stolen” someone else’s work and was meant to, instead, put the ideas I read about in the books into my own words. Or, if I was going to use another writer’s words, quote them, and attribute them clearly as a source.

Ever since that humiliating afternoon I have made sure never to pass someone else’s work off as my own. As a teacher, I have described such a thing to my students as one of the worse academic crimes imaginable. But after reading Arday’s memoir, I am now starting to question this inherited assumption I received from my teacher in Year 5. After all, I speak often to students (and fellow philosophy teachers) about the gatekeeping ways that women and people of colour have historically been excluded from academia, with works of philosophy not presented in the traditional ways demanded by the university often dismissed as lacking supposed rigour or validity despite the force of their alternatively presented arguments. Arguments in novels, pamphlets, speeches, and song. Thinking now about ableism, and the ways an education system already built for differentiated and unequal outcomes merely so that a future workforce can be ranked for different jobs and incomes in an economic system built on inequality and exploitation can make life doubly difficult for SEND students facing additional obstacles within this inherently flawed system, I suddenly realised that the norms around sources and citations actually have little to do with the worth of an argument. Worse — they might actively form obstacles to those, like Arday, who have based all previous learning on a more communal and collaborative model of shared resourcing.

I am not saying that Jason Arday did plagiarise work in his writing. But I am saying that if he did, we have to recognise that the so-called wrongness of doing so might not be immediately apparent to someone who has come through their education differently to the standard higher education academic. If, for example, a Teaching Assistant can give me a set of notes which articulate what I am trying to say better than I can myself, and I can then call those notes my own, drawing from them in assignments and other work, why can the same not be true about an idea expressed perfectly within an academic journal? If scholar X has already said it, or done the research for me, why can’t I take from that in the same way I was always able to claim ownership of the words of an academic “scribe” who wrote my essays for me?

When our (correct) practice of help for someone, is to help them articulate themselves better using someone else’s expertise, there needs to be an understanding that it might be far more difficult for such a person to differentiate between “stealing” someone else’s work (plagiarism) and simply “using” it. Perhaps something equivalent to the fair-use distinction in American copyright law? But also, it might also be worth asking why these standards of citation and referencing are deemed so essential within academic work in the first place? After all — is not a good argument a good argument regardless of the names of all the thinkers who provided its building blocks?

Despite wanting there to be some lofty answer to why academic referencing is so important, all I can think of right now when I consider the reasons we have it is ego, gatekeeping, and careerism. Essentially: I don’t want you using my words and ideas without crediting me because I want the credit. And why do I want the credit? Because we live in an individualist, dog-eat-dog world, and that credit is currency in a precarious career based on individualism and where there are only a limited number of positions. Having my name cited more than yours makes it more likely that I get the next job or promotion. Also, my hard work needs to be recognised or else people who currently employ me won’t know that I have worked so hard, and may choose to end my employment!

Gatekeeping I will come to, but if we take ego, gatekeeping, and career out of things, does it really matter if you were the first one to say something if I later use your idea as a jumping off point for my own ideas without citing you?

It is perhaps different if all I do is repeat your idea and say that it is my own. I guess if I am adding nothing to it and not building from your suggestion, I really am just parroting your words and passing them off as mine. But if your ideas are part of what lead me to my own, you don’t actually need to credit and kudos for this unless it matters to you either for your ego, or for your job. After all, in any normally referenced piece of academic research there are always going to be loads of people whose influence and ideas go uncredited. The conversations we had with friends, family members, students, colleagues, where ideas were gestated, born, road-tested and tweaked. The books, movies, songs, plays, and television shows that planted little seeds in our heads without our even knowing. The stray thought half-heard from a podcast or radio interview. A story on the news and the words of a journalist whose name you didn’t pick up. Smith and Jones (2026) may have written the classic academic source to which you attribute a definitive reference, but it was just as likely to be some unattributed friend or co-worker who really set you off on thinking about all this. As always the South African idea of Ubuntu is instructive here: I am because we are.

I am not necessarily saying the current system of academic referencing is terrible, or even wrong (for the purposes it is put in place for). But I am saying that citing all your sources is not actually essential to the quality of an argument in itself, and is more of a professional norm designed to prop up and perpetuate the closed shop of academia and keep out certain unwanted elements from academic writing. Both of these things (especially the idea that there are “unwanted elements”) have been historically exclusionary against women and people of colour, but now I am starting to see that this sort of gatekeeping also excludes against those with learning difficulties too. Not just in the obvious way — where general expectations of what a “good” piece of academic writing must look like, and which prior qualifications you are expected to hold before you are allowed to even have your work considered, form barriers to entry for those who struggled in schools that failed to meet their educational needs — but in the scenario which might well have been that of the late Professor Arday: where practices which enabled someone to overcome academic obstacles in the classroom potentially set them up to fail later in life once they try to use those same techniques within an academic career.

Giving credit where credit is due is an idea that only makes sense in a world where credit is currency and that currency is limited. This is not the only world that is possible. And every time we fail to see the contingency of our current norms and arrangements, especially where they exclude people or fail to properly serve our needs, we fail to see the opportunity to make the world a better place.

In the wake of reading Jason Arday’s memoir, I will continue to think about obstacles to learning faced by SEND students each day, and the obstacles in academia that continue to exist for people of colour, but I shall also rethink my inherited views about “academic misconduct” and plagiarism, and consider what academia might look like if what was focused on were the quality of the arguments, the data, and the public understanding of its published research, from a wide range of diverse and different voices, and not merely on ensuring an endless stream of barely-read publications that tick a box in a research-exercise and cite the right names in the preferred house-style so that each named academic’s (and your own) professional “impact” can be properly measured by those who hold the university’s purse-strings.

Author: DaN McKee

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

There’s a fifty/fifty chance I have the gene. If I don’t, it would surely be good to know. And if I do, it will mean I get the benefit of increased screening for prostate cancer through the NHS. So, my sister reasoned, it’s information worth knowing and I should get the test.

And I do agree with her. I shall get the test. But she could tell from my voice that I wasn’t happy as we talked.

“Information is power”, she offered. And the philosopher in me couldn’t help himself.

“Not always.” I answered back.

You see, information is used badly everyday. We see it with our obsession with data everywhere. Metrics of information used to supposedly justify this or that action — a redundancy, a promotion, an opportunity, a closed door — but which are, in fact, misdescribing the world they purport to represent and leading us to conclusions that have no actual basis in reality, even though they are supported by “information”.

Knowing you have a higher risk of developing certain cancers (or any disease) might well be powerful knowledge…but, with a certain kind of mind, it could also be disastrous.

My own mind, for example, has always been one which suffers from anxiety around health. I have had therapy for this anxiety, and have a range of tools for dealing with it, but certain triggers can still kick it off and, though the tools I have usually work, it still leads to an unpleasant few hours, days, or even weeks when spiralling. While I agree with my sister that getting the screening, if I have the gene, should appease my anxiety by catching anything untoward early, I still think, for someone like me, knowing for sure that I have a genetic mutation which increases the likelihood of developing a fatal disease for which there is already an incredibly high likelihood of developing for all of us anyway (if not prostate, specifically, there are many other terrible cancers out there which could develop in anyone), such information is more likely to lead to worry, panic, and anxiety, than to anything positive. After all, even if it catches such a cancer early through screening, it won’t undo all the preceding weeks, months, and years, of worry that this must be cancer, or that must be cancer…all because of the knowledge that I’ve got that terrible gene!

My caveat, of course, is that I do want the screening. In fact, I think that might be where the problem lies: I think we should all get the screening as a matter of course. Genetic mutation or not, cancer is famously unpredictable, ever evolving, and if we have the tools to spot it in someone early, why not use them as much as we can? Not just prostate cancer — any cancer. Test us for all of them. That information seems incredibly powerful!

But I am thinking in the theoretical ideal. In real life, such tests come at a cost. With limited resources available, the idea is that we use the tests carefully, only on those most likely to need them, and then roll them out more generally only when that general population is older and likely to yield results. All kind of blood tests, probes, swabs, samples, MRIs, etc. could theoretically be taken from all of us regularly, from a very early age, if we really believed in early prevention. But the costs would be astronomical. And it seems a colossal waste of money (potential life-saving be damned) to give such tests to children or teenagers when there is such low probability of them having these particular problems at that age (even though we know that a small minority, of course, do).

There is also another problem with such frequent testing, relating to my problem with the idea that all information is power. Sometimes medics find things when they look that, once found, need to be dealt with, or at least acknowledged, but which, had they not been found, might never have actually bothered you at all. Let’s say, for example, a benign mass is found which will never cause you any issues — once found, the knowledge it is there might well curdle into a low-grade worry that causes a small bit of unhappiness for the rest of your life anyway. (What if it does turn malignant?) Or, perhaps it will need to be removed, and in the process of removal some infection occurs that makes you very ill for a while. Or some other part of your insides are disturbed in the removal that leads to further, different, complications down the line?

This is not an argument that we should not get checked for things that may be wrong with us, but it perhaps is an argument to ask whether knowing everything that might be wrong with us is as helpful as it seems? Unless there is a clear cure, treatment, or concrete preventative measure that can be enacted, does having knowledge that several possible illnesses are more statistically likely for you than others actually help? Especially when it remains true that something unexpected can always happen too. While your eye is on your family history, genetic markers, or the recent scans you had, some other, completely anomalous, ailment can always blindside you from a different direction (or organ). Not to mention all the non-medical ways in which our lives can be tragically ended or altered forever.

Philosophically it comes back to the old question: if somebody had the information about when you would die, and what you would die of, would you want it?

Some people would. It might be nice to plan around it and not have to worry about all that other stuff. Heart attack at 65 — great! No more worrying about cancer or strokes! Nor should I worry too much about my pension plan. Hit by a bus at 30? A shame — but at least I won’t be wasting my twenties now working hard for the future.

For others though, rather than peace of mind, such knowledge might merely fester inside them, souring the good years in between. Could I prevent the heart attack by doing something different with my lifestyle before then? Could I avoid the fatal bus crash? We’re all going to go some way, and no way is particularly nice — why not leave it a surprise and spend the limited time we have alive thinking about other things?

Discussing the idea of God’s perfection with students this week, the idea was raised that our common ideas of perfection were ableist and prejudiced towards a particular view of human life. The age-old problem of God’s presumed omniscience clashing with God’s supposed perfection — if God is supremely perfect, God can’t fail, God can’t be ill, God can’t do wrong things, so how could God know what it is like to fail, to be sick, to do evil, etc.? Such debates are predicated on the idea that a perfect being wouldn’t be frail, human, weak, and mistaken. But perhaps perfection might come from being all those things and dealing with them in the right way? Being imperfect as perfectly as anyone possibly can.

A similar idea is found in Buddhism — the end of suffering comes only from recognising that there is no end to suffering. We don’t change the state of suffering, instead we change our relationship to that suffering. A life will end. A life will feature pain and disease. Some lives are luckier than others in that respect, genetically speaking. Some are more susceptible to bad things happening. But what matters is not how long or pain free the life is, but how it is lived, moment to moment. Do we enjoy the moments we have, or waste them trying to ensure more moments in the future? Moments, our current behaviour suggests, we shall also likely waste…

Again — this isn’t some head-in-the-sand post about ignoring the doctor and spitting on all of Western medicine. I’ll get the genetics test done when the letter comes through and give myself the curse of knowledge, whatever it is, just as I happily submit the blood pressure readings to see if I need medication and go to my asthma check ups each year. I was first in line for my Covid vaccinations when they arrived and I’ll take any screenings for cancer they’ve got going. Concrete information really can be powerful. Speculative information, not so much. And even then there is a question about our relationship to all this so-called knowledge. If only so much can be done with the information we are given by doctors, and ultimately it won’t save us from some future grisly fate, would it still maybe be better to stay in the dark on some things? To focus on other stuff and just enjoy the time we have?

On the one hand — I’d kick myself if I died of something easily preventable because I didn’t do the easy work. But on the other hand — I’d kick myself too if I wasted too much of my life fretting about things I didn’t need to fret about just because someone needlessly put the idea in my head that I should.

I think my sister’s call bothered me because it was forcing me to confront something I’d already come to realise myself as the investigations into her illness were underway last winter. It doesn’t take a genius (or a note from a geneticist) to say that if your grandfather and your mother died of cancer, and your sister is currently suffering from cancer, then a genetic propensity for certain cancers might be in your family. Indeed, it was in many ways already realising this that set me off on my health anxiety journey in the first place, as it started shortly after my mother’s death from multiple myeloma. But that knowledge seemed like something unhealthy to dwell on then, hence seeing the therapist. OK — so I’ll probably die of cancer one day. About fifty percent of us do. About the same percentage that there is I have the genetic mutation. Fingers crossed though that I get my gran’s genes instead and die of old age at nearly one hundred. Those potential genes are, after all, also in the mix.

Taking the test and potentially being told the chances of lucking out like my gran just got cut significantly seems, with a catastrophizing mind like mine, more like a form of self-harm, given I already suspect the worst. Such information might not actually be power; it might be self-sabotage instead.

To be told you’re genetically more likely to develop a certain type of cancer doesn’t preclude you from developing all the other cancers too. Nor does it outweigh the other threats to your life from other things in it — such as stress, carcinogens in our foods, air pollution, exposure to harmful substances at work, pre-existing health conditions, stupid drivers, etc. For someone predisposed to anxiety, the information just adds one more thing to worry about to an already very long list. Meanwhile it shuts the door a little bit further on some of the few sanity-saving glimmers of possibility that still remain.

Is information power? Not always. For some people, people like me, it’s maybe the information that kills you.

Author: DaN McKee

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

It’s been a long summer, hasn’t it? And yet, as always, also far too short. Much as I enjoy writing Philosophy Unleashed every week (when school is in session), knowing that I am sitting down to write this necessarily means that summer is over:

1. PU only comes out during term time,

2. This is a new PU,

3. Therefore it is term time and I am back at work.

After several months of heatwaves, it was disconcerting walking to the dentist on my final day of the summer holidays yesterday and seeing piles of golden leaves everywhere, scattered across the roads and pavements. Autumn is early. As I write, leaves are blowing past my window and the sky is a dreary grey. Collectively, it could be argued, we lost our minds a long time ago, but now we have lost our seasons too.

Could the state of the environment be a metaphor for why we will never have nice things? Global warming, climate change, the “greenhouse effect” — these are all things known about and taught to me since childhood, nearly half a century ago, and yet little has been done to halt or change our impending climate disaster. I’m not even sure it can be called impending anymore — in many places it seems to already be here.

All these eager young minds we have encouraged into STEM subjects, and we’re still facing the same threat that loomed back when one could study the Humanities with impunity. What was it all for?

Talking to friends with young children over the summer, we lamented how the current generations will never know higher education as we once did. As a place to find yourself, grow, and explore. We were the first generation to miss out on university being entirely free, but the costs then were still relatively affordable. Parents who had the money didn’t yet mind the idea of paying a few thousand quid to get you out of their hair for a few years so you could learn how to cook and clean for yourself, make some new and interesting friends, and discover who you really were. But now, with the astronomical costs of a university education, as with all things capitalism ruins, an actual return on their significant investment is sought. That their child grows up and becomes a fully-fledged person is not enough. They also need a job which will yield a salary high enough to reimburse them for the nearly thirty thousand pounds they have spent on the project.

Once education is no longer for its own sake and becomes only an instrumental stepping-stone to future qualifications, the intrinsic value of learning is lost. Three years spent reading poetry or thinking deep thoughts about philosophy for £9,000 a year is a bourgeoise privilege few can afford. Literature degrees, philosophy degrees? They are now only the bastion of the economically wasteful or the super-rich. Another thing we could long see coming but did little about. First they came for my SAT grade and I did not speak out because back in my day they didn’t test me at that age. Then they came for my GCSE grades and I did not speak out because O-levels were harder…

It should come as no surprise that an education system narrowing itself towards only standardised tests and economic outputs at primary and secondary level would eventually lead to a similar transformation in higher education. But that’s what you get when all the academics are myopically hyper-specialised into their own specialist silos and not keeping their eye on the bigger picture around them. There are no more frontiers of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, only opportunities to put something on your CV which will make you stand out from your competitors, or research into product development so that some private company funding your endeavour can make more money.

So what is all this about — my rambling and slightly depressing stream-of-consciousness rant about the slow and inevitable decline of both the environment and our education systems? Well, like all things these days it’s about AI.

What began a few years ago as a gnawing discomfort I had about how quickly people were outsourcing their thinking and creativity to generative Large Language Models (LLMs) now feels like being one of the few people who noticed a pattern of minor symptoms (coughs and rashes) appearing in the years before a deadly plague wiped out a whole civilisation.

We all were intrigued enough to play with it and give AI a go at first. But many of us saw quickly enough that complex algorithms determining a statistically probable series of words in a sentence was not quite the machine intelligence we had been promised. Mistakes were spotted quickly and frequently. (A few weeks ago, for example, Googling cooking instructions for a particular brand of vegan meat substitute, I tried to find out if the product could be cooked from frozen. “Of course it can” — Google’s impossible to ignore AI overview told me, before giving me the instructions on exactly how to do it. Luckily, I actually checked the source, where specific danger warnings reminded you to NEVER cook the product direct from frozen. But for an LLM, doing probability with words, the word “frozen” was frequently paired with the words “cooking instructions” and so it made an unfortunate calculation. One which could have made me very ill!)

Yet there was no doubt that the LLMs enabled us to outsource annoying tasks we hated doing ourselves, and get them done in seconds rather than hours, and so, fairly soon, despite the many imperfections and dangers of the AI-generated end-product, we were being encouraged to use them anyway by those who wanted those end-products expedited.

Again — capitalism’s disastrous logic: rather than eliminate pointless and time-consuming tasks because they are not really needed, bosses (or teachers!) still demand they get done but encourage you to prompt an LLM to do it for you. Then, for tasks which are time-consuming but not pointless (tasks for which the time spent crafting them might even be the point), the desire for economic “efficiency” leads to encouragement that these tasks, too, are outsourced to AI. And, of course, while you could hold out and refuse — do the hard work yourself because you believe it to be necessary, even desirable — if the system in which you operate (your workplace, your classroom) assumes AI will be used, you are no longer given the time needed to complete the task properly and are forced into compliance with the system-norm of using AI. A task for which you might previously have been given a deadline of several weeks is now given a deadline of only an hour, the assumption being you will write a prompt and quickly forward the LLM’s output as your own.

All of this is done because of a persistent myth, peddled by the companies who stand to profit the most from our adoption of their products, that if we don’t get on board with AI now, we will be left behind. The self-fulfilling prophecy (good for shareholders, but maybe bad for humanity) that these flawed and worrisome products will be used everywhere in the future driving us all to learn how to use them, then — because we’ve put in the effort to learn — using them, thus making the myth come true, even though there are so many warning signs that our dependence on such technologies will lead to skills atrophy and cognitive and creative decline.

And then there’s the environmental impact. The water-guzzling data centres contributing further to the climate change we are still yet to stop. Another kick to the planet’s guts every time we accidentally click on one of the integrated AI products’ disruptive-by-design tabs smuggled unhelpfully into one of the computer programmes we have used for years previously without the help of AI so that “usage” data of our accidental clicks can get some programmer a promotion. Let alone all those times we intentionally use it too. Floods and heatwaves because we couldn’t be bothered to do our homework or write that blog post ourselves. Droughts brought on by the creation of “hilarious” deepfakes idly noted, then ignored, by scrolling eyes on TikTok.

It was depressing to note the change in people’s communication over the last year. Social media posts, school assemblies, speeches, essays that all had that distinct cadence of generative AI. A change, or just a growing awareness? Some friends and I started posting each other images of every poster we found that was lazily generated by AI to advertise a business. It stopped being funny pretty quickly and soon became sad.

Noticing the outsourcing of aesthetic and creativity in so many public places makes me feel like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live, seeing the previously hidden subliminals through my sunglasses: I have no personal taste or ideas, or, if I do, I found this particular task not worth using them on.

I guess what I am saying is that we have known about the devastating impact of human-created climate change on our planet for decades and done little to stop it. Just as we have known that we were sacrificing any pretence to “education” within our public schooling systems to build a more efficient sorting system for employment and unemployment, yet let it happen anyway, even as inequality became more and more embedded as a result. And these two consequences of human apathy towards well-known threats have now reached a perfect storm in our latest mass inaction about another: our use of AI. Schools with little interest in genuine learning anymore unthinkingly encourage the use of environmentally destructive AI to their students, using spurious and under-scrutinised industry arguments about competitive advantage, so students can skip to the end-product of their qualification with as much efficiency (and as little deep thought or intellectual struggle) as possible. To me, this seems like something that will not end well for us as a civilisation. There are already reports, for example, of university students using LLMs to write assignments which are then marked by LLMs, meaning no human has been involved at all in the work.

Although some schools are doing what they can to stem the tide rather than add to it, the general trend seems to be heading in the wrong direction. But disastrous and well foreseen outcomes have, sadly, never seemed to stop us before.

It’s been a long summer…but there are, I fear, many far longer days for us ahead, so buckle up.

Author - DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

If all goes as planned, the earliest the match could end is around 3am. If it goes to extra-time and penalties, then around 4am. A storm could push it to 5am, or even later. This has led to the obvious problem all around England: what do we do about work, or school, on Monday morning? For those of us working in schools we have the same problem twice.

As a lifelong fan of American professional wrestling, I grew up as a school-child familiar with solving the problem of how to watch a three hour sporting event that starts at 1am and navigate the following school day. The answer back in the 1990s was easy: you get a 3 or 4 hour VHS tape and either get a parent to press record at 1am or midnight (depending on tape length), or when the technology allowed, use the timer function on your tape recorder. Go to sleep early then wake up at 4:30am and watch the whole thing back before school.

Although the tech is better for timer-recording in 2026, and the BBC iPlayer app will allow you to catch up easily, this strategy doesn’t work with live football because of the issues around starting and finish time already mentioned. I have to leave for work at 7:20am. Professional wrestling, being pre-planned, is wonderfully predictable. A three hour event will be three hours, so you can set a clock around its timings. If the football goes as planned, even into extra time and penalties, the 4:30am wake up would mean, with a bit of tactical fast-forwarding over half-time and hydration breaks, being able to leave for work on time. But any weather delays, and the whole thing falls apart. To avoid spoilers, you won’t know at 4:30am when you wake up how long you will need to give yourself. Therefore watching live seems to be the only option. But even an early nap and a sleep after the final whistle means staying up most of the night will leave you tired for work or school the next day. And that’s if, unlike me, you are actually good at sleeping. Insomniacs like myself find it difficult to command our bodies to just go to sleep. Buzzing from and England victory or disappointed with an England loss, it will take a while to get my mind to switch off enough to sleep.

So the reality is that many of us will face Monday July 6th very tired.

As an adult, that’s not something unfamiliar to us. People still go into work after being up most of the night with a feeding baby or a sick child. I’ve gone into work before after live-broadcasting an anarchist commentary on the 2024 general election and many watch general elections live as the votes come in, getting by on very little sleep the following day. And as an insomniac, some nights I just don’t sleep very well. Importantly, I don’t drink alcohol. So staying up late and watching an England match doesn’t mean drinking all night and a hangover on top of tiredness. But for children, needing more sleep and more regulation of their bodies to feel ok about a busy day ahead, it is not so easy. And lots of children want to watch the big game.

Earlier in the week, England manager Thomas Tuchel provided clear guidance: “Write an excuse for school and let them watch. There’s so much school to go to but the World Cup is every four years. Let them watch.”

Tuchel’s advice seems compelling at first: this is a one-off historical moment and school is something you do every day. Sometimes historical moments take precedent. Don’t miss amazing moments in your life out of blind obedience to the routine. The problem with the logic of this is that we don’t actually know yet if this is a one-off historic occasion. If England lose to Mexico and crash out of the World Cup, it is business as usual. Nothing special. We’ve seen England do this before. England not winning the World Cup has been as predictable as any day in school since they last won it in 1966. And if England do win the match and go on to the Quarter Finals that means there is no real need to watch their match in the Last 16 at 1am on Sunday. The far more important Quarter Final will take place on the following Saturday night, at 10pm, and staying up to watch it will not impact on school.

So either you don’t need to watch the match because it is nothing special — England crash out as per every World Cup since 1966. Or you don’t need to watch the match because there is another, more important one, coming up after this one — England qualify for the Quarter Finals. Either way, there is no compelling reason to watch the match live at 1am on Monday morning.

Certainly Tuchel’s suggestion was not well received by Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education. She stressed the importance of school attendance, and many schools echoed her thoughts as they resisted calls to open up later on Monday, even as the Prime Minister gave the order to allow pubs to stay open until 5am for the game.

I have to, however, note the issues with Phillipson’s argument too though, as it seems many schools have forgotten the underlying rationale for the claim that school attendance matters.

School attendance is important because of what goes on in the school. Data has suggested quite consistently that students who miss a lot of school lose a lot of learning and end up with worse educational outcomes (such as lower exam results). And this makes a lot of sense: if you miss two weeks of school you will be missing a lot of content. If you miss just one day, you will still be missing out on five or six lessons’ worth of learning. But all of this is predicated on the fact that learning is what is happening in the classroom while you are away. What Phillipson is intentionally ignoring is that this is for many schools the last or penultimate week of term. Very little meaningful learning is actually happening in schools, despite the schools’ best intentions. There are a lot of trips, drop-down days, and end of year festivities taking the place of normal lessons. Where normal lessons are occurring, it would be a very odd choice indeed for a teacher to choose this week or next to introduce important new stuff given the impending six weeks absence where any learning from the last few weeks of school is likely to be pushed out of minds no longer concerned with school.

I would wager that even under ideal circumstances, a student could miss school on Monday July 6th (and especially just miss the morning of school and come in at lunchtime) and it literally have no impact on their overall education. I very much doubt crucial and unmissable learning is taking place this close to the summer holidays and, as a teacher, know from my own approach to these weeks, that where it is taking place, it will be gone over again in September to mitigate against holiday forgetting.

But this won’t even be ideal circumstances, as many of the adult members of staff will, like me, probably be staying up or getting up early to watch the game ourselves. Tired already after a long academic year, aware of the forecast of another looming heatwave, and shattered from the football, teaching a dynamic and unmissable lesson will be far from our frazzled minds. We’ll do our best, as we always do, but no teacher can teach five star lessons every time and part of work/life balance is working out where and when to put in the effort for maximum impact. A week or two from the end of term, with an uncertain attendance likely because of the match, even if you don’t stay up to watch the football, this probably isn’t going to be the day to pull out the five star lesson.

Related to this is the recognition that in every school I have been in since I first started my journey as a teacher in 2010, getting pre-holidays work experience during the South Africa World Cup, often schools at this time of year suspend lessons when England are playing in either the World Cup or the Euros, and show the match in school anyway. I have watched matches that took place during the school day in 2010, in 2016, and in 2018 in school halls, sixth form centres, and classrooms, the whole school deciding that sometimes there are things more important than doggedly following the academic timetable. Schools regularly suspend normal lessons for special events — an open evening, sports day, a special visitor speaking to year groups, sports fixtures, trips, academic conferences, etc. In my time as a teacher I have been unable to teach important lessons to students because of royal weddings and state funerals and my colleagues and I have simply adapted. The idea that this Monday’s timetable is too important to miss is a nonsense.

Which is not to say that schools should be closed or not open at all on Monday morning. After all, schools serve a lot of social functions. Many children depend on them for things like free school meals and many parents depend on them for childcare during the working day. And not all people care about football. For many others across the country, Sunday night is a normal Sunday evening in July and they will go to bed at a normal time. This includes school staff. Schools could happily run on a skeleton crew of non-football-watching staff until lunchtime, as well as, as previously said, adults who feel up to it even if they did watch the football, coming in at normal time anyway. Schools can fulfil their regular social purpose outside of any educating duties even if we acknowledge that many students won’t be in at all that day, or will be coming in late. (Indeed, it is only our punitive approach to coming in late that forces those who want the additional sleep to take a whole day off instead of merely a half day). And with a well-considered system in place they may even be able to do the education bit too. (A school with an open approach to the 1am kick-off could, for example, ask staff planning on watching the match to set work on Teams or Google Classroom in advance for their students to complete by a certain deadline which can accommodate also the students who watch the match and will miss the timetabled lesson.)

Watching a football match might seem like a small and petty thing to write all this about, but to me it points to a general inflexibility in systems and structures, such as our education system, marked by plainly false arguments made on behalf of sustaining the status quo that do not survive even the briefest scrutiny. Thomas Tuchel’s argument for watching the match might also be flawed, but only if you analyse it as I did earlier, based on the match’s unique historical status. An alternative way of valuing the match survives my criticism completely: namely the idea that what makes the match important and historical is not the match’s specific function within this particular tournament for progression or failure, but as a memorable and formative aesthetic experience in a young person’s life. Every England fan watching World Cup football since 1966 has experienced the drama of near-victory and the devastation of knockout loss, and our earliest memories of this play an important role in building the overall narrative of England’s role in international football which gives these matches meaning. I myself barely cared about football until about four years ago, but still would watch World Cup matches with interest after the indelible impression left on me by England’s loss in the semi-finals of Italia ‘90, my first World Cup. Gazza’s tears when he received a booking which would have prevented him from playing in the Final had England won the match told me the story of the importance of getting to the Final for these players and made me shed tears of my own when they failed in their efforts. Six years later, watching England play Germany again in the semi finals of Euro ‘96, I wasn’t a football fan and had been dragged to Wembley by my father mainly so he could gain access to a ticket to the final under the UEFA pyramid scheme ticketing system, but I understood the weight of yet another high-stakes semi-final against Germany because of watching that Italia ‘90 match. When Southgate missed his penalty, even as a non-fan, I understood the weight of the moment.

When I look back at my own school days, I don’t remember a lot of the everyday lessons. But I remember the day my parents allowed me an afternoon off school so I could go down to London and watch Green Day play at the Astoria. And I remember the two weeks of Sixth Form I missed to go touring with my punk rock band around Italy. I remember the week we had off in November of 1996 to spend our first and only Thanksgiving with our American grandmother (and watch WWE Survivor Series at Madison Square Garden). These memories were special moments in my life. Family moments. Aesthetic moments. And they were all far more important than being in school that day. A first class degree, an MA and a PhD later, I don’t think missing all that school for that stuff made my education suffer.

A kid staying up late on Sunday to watch the England match, whatever happens, will remember the weirdness of staying up so late on a school night; of the excitement and anticipation of the match and the moment; of the family or friends around them who they are watching it with; of the history made in the match, good or bad, that they will carry with them into the next match, or the next tournament. And they will be educated too. Educated about the importance of putting some things in your personal life above the never-ending demands of work; about the value of taking time to enjoy the things you love. These are lessons and experiences just as important, if not more important, than anything I will be offering my students in the classroom on Monday morning.

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Right - that’s it for this academic year. Summer starts next week and unless inspiration hits I won’t be posting a new PU until we’re back at school in September. In the meantime — enjoy the archives!

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Yes that’s right — it’s time for another rant about capitalism. Because those of us experiencing Europe’s heatwave last week were all victims of capitalism and we need to talk more about it.

I’ll begin with the easy bit: the climate crisis. We’ve known that rapacious human production and consumption have been destroying the environment for about fifty years now and instead of doing anything meaningful about it, we have let capitalism continue to attempt to sell us small-scale, individual, solutions that maintain the most damaging structures and ideologies which perpetuate the problem and ultimately change nothing. We still have McDonalds but now we drink our milkshakes from paper straws. Meanwhile Europe burns.

The main reason last week was so unbearable, as many have said, is because the UK (where I suffered through it) was just not built for these temperatures. Well, why wasn’t it built for them when we’ve had nearly fifty years of warnings that this was coming? It wasn’t built for it because updating public buildings, private homes, transport infrastructure, schools and hospitals, etc., to accommodate global warming is costly. It is costly because we have allowed capitalist economics to continue to set the prices. It is costly because capitalist ideology has poisoned us against paying higher taxes to fund such things. It is costly because capitalist thinking has stopped us being able to invest in long term solutions when we crave only short-term gains. It is costly because capitalist individualism means we’d rather leave it to individuals to pay for their own adaptations and updates than ensure collective survival, meaning the wealthy can buy relief from the heat while the poor sweat, suffer, and even die.

As professional wrestler CM Punk might say: “tell me when I’m telling lies?”

Last week had winners and losers, as has always been capitalism’s design. Those with air conditioning in their cars, their buses, their trains, their workplaces, their homes, had a bearable time. Business news gushed about the profits being made by anyone in the air conditioning and home cooling sector. Personal fans sold out everywhere. A roaring trade in larger fans allowed those without air conditioning to at least move the hot air around the place, if they could afford it.

But many people did not have these luxuries. And those with health conditions which worsen in the heat just had to hope for the best if they couldn’t afford to keep themselves cool. As happened with Covid, essential workers had little choice but to sweat through airless work days and leave it to chance that they got home ok. Wealthy parents booked air conditioned hotel rooms so their babies could get to sleep. Poor parents hoped their babies wouldn’t die.

In my own workplace, as the heatwave soared and I sought solace in my corner classroom where I’d managed to take the safety catches off the windows so they could open wide enough to let a thin breeze in and use the fan I purchased in my first year as Head of Department to create the illusion of cooling air (all matters of individual luck or decision-making; other colleagues in other rooms were not so lucky), I spent much of the time working on a unit for a new Political Philosophy course we are running next year on the philosophy of healthcare. The main thrust of which, is to ask the question how best we organise healthcare in a society? Is the best approach to fund doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc., or is it to recognise that most of our health conditions are caused by social factors and that taking money away from those doctors, nurses, and hospitals, and making better investments in tackling poverty, our living and working conditions, our social services and public spaces, etc. might actually lead to better health outcomes?

One of the things I love about philosophy is the way philosophers probe our assumptions and intuitions about ideas we take for granted. Seeing things from different angles and asking questions others have forgotten to ask, or never even considered before.

“What should a government healthcare policy look like?” stops being about how much they will or won’t privatise hospitals and medical services, or whether medicines should be freely prescribed or come at a cost, and starts being about increasing regulation on the food and drink industries to stop filling our bodies with carcinogens, fat, and sugar; or about lifting people out of poverty.

“Why is it so hot?” must be treated similarly. Stop talking about the climate as if it is an isolated phenomenon. Stop pretending driving an electric car instead of a petrol one will make things better. Stop talking about our individual responsibilities to the environment without acknowledging the real obstacle to saving the planet: the selfish and damaging economic system which makes our self-annihilation inevitable. “Why is it so hot?” Because of capitalism. And if we want things to ever improve, we need to resist and reject this insatiable ideology of economic individualism and re-arrange the world in a way that profits us all.

Last week was hot. And it will get hot like that again. And again. And again. Air conditioning might help in the short term, if you can afford it, but so long as we think that this is a problem for which a solution can just be bought if you have enough money, the world will continue to burn.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

The last two years I have written up a report on here about how the event went. Having been one of the founding members of the APT, and organiser of the first two conferences, as well as a philosophy teacher for nearly 20 years, I have a vested interest in the success of the organisation, and last year, as I wrote on here, I was worried the APT had lost its way.

This year may well be make or break for me. A positive email from the organisation yesterday told us that the conference had sold out, which was great news to hear. I had been troubled over the last few months that so few people seemed to even know it was even happening. Besides an email, found in my junk folder, with a link to get my free ticket, there had been no other visible marketing of the event until the last few weeks. Not really enough time for working philosophy teachers to get time off and arrange cover to attend. Although they had mentioned the 2026 conference in an email sent to members in October 2025, the date given then was not the date that the conference ultimately happened. I wasn’t confident that sufficient word had got out, and as this was the fourth one of these in a row, if anything, if we were doing a good job as an organisation, attendance and knowledge about the conference should be high.

Communication — or the lack of it — has been a bit of a theme for me with the APT over the last twelve months. Ignoring the fact they seem to be the only professional organisation I am a member of whose emails routinely go to junk mail no matter what changes I make to my settings, those emails have been few and far between. The October email I mentioned was the only communication we got after the conference in 2025. (They did not send us the conference slides). It advertised an upcoming international philosophy Olympiad and a “resources competition”. Then there was nothing more until January, where we were invited to an online Teams Meeting which would cover the upcoming 2026 British Philosophy Fortnight in March, the aforementioned resources competition, and the planned official APT response to the government’s curriculum review.

The latter item was actually quite worrying to me, as the proposed response seemed to be to back down on some of the core lobbying that had been the entire point for forming the APT. I couldn’t attend the meeting due to other commitments (and the short notice!) but sent my (lengthy) thoughts for discussion to the Chair, who said they would be passed on to members. I still have no idea if they ever were (as a member I certainly did not receive an email), or what members thought about the agenda items (there has still yet to be any minutes from that meeting shared with the group). No further communication came by email from the APT until April, advertising the conference and its new date. That email also noted that the Chair and Treasurer would be stepping down at this year’s conference.

Over a month later, another email, this one with the speaker schedule for the conference (now just a month away). A few weeks after that we got a reminder email, including an acknowledgment (at last!) that emails seemed to be lost in people’s junk folders and an announcement that the resource competition would not be running “due to lack of entries”. Also an acknowledgement that the membership portal to pay to become a member on the website has not been working. So someone interested in the conference (our only recruiting tool) and thinking of joining, evidently couldn’t. Nor could we current members renew our membership. In previous years the conference fee was the membership fee. This year the conference is free, and you can’t sign up as a member, so I have no idea as I am writing this if my membership has expired or will continue following the conference. (Note: typing this up at the weekend after the conference, the link for membership still does not work).

So I sit on the train right now with low expectations. There is still little sense of a cohesive association or shared mission amongst the members and, other than the January Teams meeting which has no shared record of what was discussed, has been no professional discourse about what we want from the organisation. But I still sit hopeful that I will be proved wrong in my doubts. Maybe a rich sense of purpose will be made clear by the conference’s end? I hope that the fully booked conference will be a success and this year, unlike last, I shall come away from London feeling a sense of renewed purpose from the organisation. After all, the lineup this year looks good, despite the fact there was never a public call for papers put out to members as there was in previous years. Solid speakers and a cohesive set of talks that I guess the committee just hand-selected. Lisa Bortolotti is always great, and as a keynote speaker should send us off in the right direction for the day. Kant on animals is interesting and useful for teaching the A-level, so the fact John Callanan’s talk is the only one on offer for session one suits me just fine (though after previous years’ wealth of choices the lack of choice here does seem strange). There is choice for session two, and I shall be attending the session on Philosophy, Teaching and AI with Anja Steinbauer, Alexandra Konoplyankif, Tom Berman, and Helen Ratesvich. An interesting, timely, and potentially very useful talk given the current climate in education. I am not interested in Heidegger (and not just because of his Nazi sympathies. Strange after all these years at the APT conference previously focusing on decolonising and diversifying the subject that we now have two consecutive talks about the philosophies of white racists, Kant and Heidegger) but the competing session, run by the current Chair, is offering a talk on him for those who are. Then, after the AGM, which I hope is more than the brief set of notices last year’s was, there follows a talk from the chief examiner of AQA Philosophy, Jamie Swann, on their difficult 25 mark essays, which should be useful CPD. If I didn’t owe it to my students to go to that, I’d be just as happy seeing Jeremy Hayward’s competing talk on making safe spaces brave spaces, although I have seen Hayward’s different talks at the conference the last two years in a row.

That’s where I shall leave it now, as the train approaches Euston and the venue at UCL. Quiet hope, but that lingering doubt. I shall report back on the train home…

*****

…ok, I’m actually reflecting at a table outside a chain of Leon at Euston station after grabbing some pre-travel dinner, but I am happy to report that this year’s conference seemed like a success…ish.

The heat in London today was sweltering, so it is a testament to the speakers’ quality that we all seemed happy to spend the day in a stuffy, windowless, studio room with no air conditioning down in the basement of UCL’s Institute of Education to hear them. The iced coffee I’d grabbed on the way to the venue melted before I’d even walked a block on from the store and I regretted my decision to wear a backpack as the sweat clung beneath it, making me feel like a sticky mess as I signed in and got my delegate lanyard. But it was good to see familiar faces milling about the tea, coffee, and cakes as I entered Punnett Hall.

I’m terrible with names at the best of times, and struggle in these sorts of professional situations where you meet people again who you have seen consecutively at these things three or even four years in a row and still don’t remember who they are by name. Only a vague familiarity at the face and the general content of their character. But I did the proper thing and tried to mingle in my socially awkward way as best I could before the opening remarks.

Jeremy Hayward wins the prize for best reference of the conference and he did it in the first two minutes of housekeeping, noting how we philosophers were now all stuck in a dark subterranean cave staring happily at a PowerPoint reflecting on the wall, meanwhile fire-exits would lead us up out of the cave and out into the sun. Then Lisa Bortolotti kicked things off with an excellent talk about Epistemic Injustice and Agency. Although she applies it in her work a lot to healthcare, especially mental health, she showed how taking all people seriously as epistemic agents, including young people, has obvious application in the school. Essentially, the more we feel in control, the more we have agency. But denying people the status as a “knower” due to some prejudiced and unjust dismissal takes that agency away from them, causing them a moral harm, and all of us an epistemic harm, as their potential contributions to collective knowledge are lost.

As someone who thinks epistemic injustice is a hugely important issue and have been trying to incorporate it into my teaching for several years now (it is vital to understanding why the current Philosophy exam specification is so limited and why the philosophy canon needs expanding) I found it a really useful and informative session that gave me lots of further ideas to bring back to the classroom. Again though, for the second year in a row, I didn’t feel the talk was utilised by the conference organisers as an effective keynote. Bortolotti’s talk could have been a brilliant opening to a conference themed around epistemic injustice’s role in our profession and the need to expand the voices we listen to as philosophers, continuing the diversification and decolonisation theme. Or a conference themed around looking at old thinkers in new ways, once different voices were added to the conversation. At its simplest, were the APT to better coordinate between the various professional strands of philosophy teaching, the AQA exam board has recently sent round guidance to teachers about diversifying our teaching of the A-level they run by better including the “wartime quartet” of Midgley, Foot, Anscombe, and Murdoch. Their historic exclusion is clearly a case of epistemic injustice, and a session on that today would give a sense of cohesion and vision to the conference.

Instead of this cohesive vision, professor Bortolotti’s talk was followed by John Callanan’s session on Kant and animals. The subject is interesting, and Callanan was an engaging speaker. (Again - are we doing an epistemic injustice to animals when we exclude them from our thinking might have been a thread to connect these two non-optional talks). Lack of cohesion aside, I really enjoyed the session. Alongside the fact that it is a relevant, slightly tricky, bit of the AQA Philosophy A-level spec so always good to be walked through by an expert, Callanan’s specific focus on pedagogy as he did so made it useful even if you were familiar with the arguments he covered. Callanan talked through the thinking not only around the issue in Kant’s philosophy, but the choices he would make as a teacher in the seminar room when asking students to think about it. Essentially using the ethical tension in Kant’s conception of moral value and our intuitions about animals to encourage students to break down how their own intuitive responses to an issue might be understood if applied to everyone, and then perceived by “the other” who disagrees. His focus on common structural issues exposed in different solutions to the same question allows the topic of the moral standing of animals to act as a jumping off point for more general considerations about philosophical inquiry. Once we think about our obligations as moral agents to animals who can never be agents, only moral patients, we are led having to think if the same is true of other moral patients who can’t have moral obligations back at us, such as the environment, or artificial intelligence.

The talk was followed, appropriately, with an entirely vegetarian lunch, and a chance to leave the stuffy room for some fresh air. The fresh air turned out to be even hotter outside, but a group of us found a nice spot in the shade and ate beans, peppers, and arancini in the sun while discussing various things arising from the two talks, as well as my recent decision to eat fish again after so many years, which one of them had read about here on PU a few weeks ago.

The lunch was good, and the break from the cave was welcomed. But like Plato’s freed prisoner, we had spent enough time in the sun and it was soon time to return to the shadows.

Unfortunately, this is where the conference took a turn for me. Opting for the symposium on AI, Teaching, and Philosophy with Anja Steinbauer, Alexandra Konoplyankif, Tom Berman, and Helen Ratesvich, instead of the Chair’s talk on Heidegger, I expected some deep discussion about this potential threat to the cognitive skills so crucial for philosophy in our students, or at least some thoughtful defences of AI and ways to make it work. All we got instead, after a set up from Anja and Alexandra sort of listing various concerns about AI and also various potentials of it, were pitches from Helen and Tom, two people working in AI, who had various platforms to advertise to us as apparently brilliant tools for philosophical thinking. Sadly both platforms just seemed to me like more outsourcing of human thinking, offering various buttons we could press to simulate interrogation of our ideas and offers of different perspectives, as well as the usual summaries of existing thought, instead of allowing us to develop thinking for ourselves. But there was no real attempt to argue why this was a good or desirable thing (besides the obvious reason which justifies all AI use: it’s quicker, it’s easier, I don’t have to work for it). But this is a philosophy conference. Assumptions should be interrogated. Why is quicker better? Is this particular quickness better? Is my resistance a prejudice I need to overcome? Are AI tools something we should be exploring alongside, or instead of, traditional learning methods? It just seemed, instead, like they both thought the tools were cool because they had created them. That we should use them because we can. Because they’re there.

Later, when it finally became a Q&A and not simply an infomercial, I asked about whether they thought AI arriving at a time when our educational system is so flawed is a perfect storm that might doom the developing cognitive skills of young people? While we adults in the room might see additional functions from AI that can supplement and add-to existing cognitive skills we’ve already developed, because the current UK school system is so hyper-based around instrumentalism — learning as a means only to get grades — which encourages students to aim for the end (the grade) and not really care about the journey, is it not likely young people using these AI tools will not use them in the thoughtful ways that might be possible on paper, or in a demonstration to a room of philosophy teachers? They are far more likely to use them as a shortcut and leave behind the possibility of being able to philosophise for themselves?

The question was not really answered, and the session ended rather unsatisfactorily. Again I was thinking, would a session on AI as a potential epistemic agent have been more thematically relevant? Or a session on why AI-generated epistemic claims from our students should not be so readily dismissed by teachers as “not their work”?

Oh well. It wasn’t for me, but others in the room seemed eager to try out the two platforms we’d been shown and might have found it useful. I probably should have just gone and learned about Heidegger!

Disappointment piled on disappointment as the advertised AGM did not happen during its advertised time-slot at the tea and coffee break. That was mainly disappointing because, assuming it was happening as advertised, I opted not to go to the toilet despite having chugged water in the hot room throughout the AI chat. When the final session began, and I realised my sacrifice of personal comfort had been for nothing, I was certainly a little bit miffed. I also wondered what it meant for the APT? Without the AGM, there really would be no real mention of the APT as an organisation at the whole conference! The talks so far had been interesting and thought-provoking, and met the vague conference brief of “Sharing Ideas, Enriching Practice, and Advancing Philosophy Education”, but what was the APT? Now that we’re all here in the same room together, what are we for? What are our aims and objectives? What do members think about those aims and objectives? If the organisation is so unimportant that we can forget to do its AGM and take things seriously, why have a formal organisation at all? After all, the original APT was an ad hoc zoom meeting. We were encourage by the British Philosophical Association to create a more formal structure because of the supposed benefits it would bring for lobbying purposes and for galvanising teachers of philosophy as a collective group. If we’re not doing those things as an organisation, why bother?

If I could sum up my frustration and disillusion with the APT in the last year, it is exactly this: the sense that it is a closed shop, where decisions happen at a secret committee level, behind closed doors, and are then communicated to members without any real consultation or discussion. Because I was on the inside as part of the conference organising committees the first two years, I think I felt the organisation was far more transparent than it actually was. Maybe it even was back then? Or maybe information I thought was being shared with everyone was probably only being shared with us who were organising the conference and I didn’t notice because I was one of the lucky ones? Once I was on the outside though, as a bog-standard member, I began to see how opaque our organisation actually is. And how little it felt like “our” voice was being asked for and shared.

If the annual conference is just a collection of random talks and some food, with no intentional and specific APT focus about what we as philosophy teachers collectively want, and we also have no other APT meetings across the year (or only one, advertised at short notice), then when exactly are we philosophy teachers associating?

As those thoughts flew around my head, Jamie Swann from the AQA began his talk on the A-level’s 25 mark questions. Annoyingly, given regulations on the exam boards, he began the session by pointing out he couldn’t say anything we hadn’t already been told, as the AQA could not provide new materials to us not made public to everyone. So although the talk was a comforting assurance that I am teaching and marking the 25 mark question correctly, it added nothing new to my understanding. In fact, for a few of the questions I was able to offer answers the examiner said put it better than he could. A session on incorporating the wartime quartet into our teaching would have been far more valuable. I probably should have seen Jeremy Hayward again for the third time in a row.

But again — a conference is not just for me, it is for everyone. There is no denying that this talk on 25 mark essays was incredibly useful for people who hadn’t heard it all before, and it was, in itself, a worthy and valuable thing to have on the programme for a conference of people, many of whom teach A-level philosophy. I didn’t end the day annoyed I had heard it, and, as I said, it was good to feel validated in my approach to teaching this part of the course.

And then, miracle of miracles, before the day wrapped up, the missing AGM! A vote on new roles. Robert Penny stepping down as Chair and taking on a new role as Web Officer, the Treasurer leaving (not yet replaced), and then the vote for a new Chair.

This is where the “ish” comes in when I said the day was a success. Because it turns out only one candidate (or rather a pair of candidates as co-Chairs) had offered themselves up for the important role of leading the organisation (before you ask — I considered it, but don’t want APT to be my whole life. I want to be able to use it as a member, not run the thing. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for a functioning professional organisation to exist, and a good one should engage with the views of its membership, so any Chair would still get to hear anything I felt I could offer). I’m sure they’re very committed and intend to do well, and I don’t want to write them off without giving them a chance. I don’t know them personally at all and I am sure they’re very nice people. But Jon Donnelly and Patricia Copeland, the pair standing to be new co-Chair together, were two of the key organisers from last year’s problematic conference where, for my mind, the wheels started coming off the APT, and Jon Donnelly was specifically the guy who gave the talk I personally found most contrary to the original vision of what the APT was supposed to be. I hadn’t attended Patricia’s talk that year precisely because as “I think philosophy should be about more than “high-impact” retention and “direct instruction”, and don’t think discovery learning should be a dirty word in our profession, I knew the talk would just leave me angry.”

In other words - under the new leadership voted in during the closing minutes, I fear we may go further in last year’s wrong direction and undo any encouraging steering back on course that this year’s improved conference seemed to offer.

I also found it odd that we ended up with a “new” Committee which still looks very similar to how it looked before, with the old Chair simply moving over to a different role, and the two conference planners from last year back behind the reins. One of whom, Robert Penny described as his unofficial “deputy” anyway. As far as democracy goes, it all felt very performative and showy rather than a genuine election from an organisation that takes itself seriously. A public show of hands to vote them in. No proper counting of votes. No request for nos or any abstentions. Just an assumption that one candidate offered and it was a done deal. In fact the only mention of any process for replacing the current team before the election was being asked to email Robert if you had any interest in the roles. We knew the vote would happen at the AGM, but there was no further pushing for people to put themselves forward, or deadlines for applications given. Nor even instructions on what to submit if you were thinking about it. Compared to the BPA, who had their own elections earlier this year, and encouraged candidates repeatedly to step forward before the vote was held (electronically and formally) it felt very much like a caricature of democracy rather than anything real. After all, the lack of other candidates could be perceived as a testament to how poorly the APT has been run by the old team and how detached the membership feel, and yet we appear to have re-voted in the exact same team?

As any classroom teacher knows, dissent in a public show of hands in front of the very people you are voting for is very hard to do. Peer pressure works. I know this because looking around the room each time and seeing that mine was the only hand down, I felt churlish not voting. Yes — I myself voted for the only choices on offer. But only because I hand’t been given the chance to vote against or abstain. Robert was doing the website anyway, it felt somehow wrong not to let him continue given no one else was standing, even though this is the website which doesn’t actually work currently if you want to be a member. But when I kept my hand down when the vote for Chair took place I felt petty so sheepishly raised it in the end. After all — maybe I’m the only one who feels this way? Maybe the other members absolutely adored last year and wish for more? It’s not my conference and not my association, it’s for all of us, and all of us can be catered for. But I do wonder what the membership vote really means when at no point in the last few years has there ever been any serious discussion about what we want the APT to be and if it is doing it or not?

Again — I want to give the new team a chance. I can’t assume anything until they actually start to run the thing. For all I know they share the same frustrations that I do and are going to do great things. Time will tell. I might just be unfairly judging them on some talks that weren’t to my taste last year. Again, as with today’s conference, I hope to be proved wrong. But it felt like a step in the wrong direction for the Association not to have a proper discussion, debate, or any real talk across the whole day about who we are and what we stand for, irregardless of any elections. The elections just cemented the fact that I don’t really know if we’re all on the same page when we talk about the importance of promoting philosophy. Ultimately, I shouldn’t have to write these thoughts on my own personal blog if lines of communication were available to express them within the organisation. Hopefully, under the new leadership team, communication might get better?

Those gripes aside, on balance, it was a lovely day, and did leave me feeling invigorated and inspired. I shall be applying several new things I thought about today into the classroom and speaking to other members across the day was good. A lot of them are interested in the new GCSE-equivalent philosophy course I have devised at my school, and I hope to talk to members about it at the conference next year when we have seen our first cohort through. My quibbles are not with the conference, but with the running of the APT in general and my sense that it lacks a point or might have lost its way. Ultimately, it’s always nice to meet up with fellow people in your profession, especially for those who work alone (as is often the case in Philosophy). I felt broadly positive as I left the Hall, and what better way to end a day of philosophy talk than with Jeremy Hayward taking us on a quick trip up to see Bentham’s body encased in his plastic tomb and pay homage to the father of utilitarianism. Ultimately it’s about maximising happiness for the most amount of people, and the majority of people at this year’s APT conference (including me) seemed to enjoy it. Hopefully it will be onwards and upwards for 2027.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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I refuse to say “courageous battle” with cancer, although Dermot was certainly courageous in his acceptance of the disease, as well as proactive in his fight against it. I say “co-existence with” instead because, since his first diagnosis, although he went to great lengths to stave off the inevitable, including hard and risky surgery, Dermot was always so inspiringly stoic about the whole thing: it’s happened, it’s not great, I’ll do what I can to push back, but let’s do all the living that we can while we can and not let it ruin things too much. His courageous battle was with life, not with the cancer. The cancer could go fuck itself. “Life is not a battle or a race or a competition”, Dermot told me in one of his recent emails. “Avoid such metaphors. Life is life, and not some other thing.”

Another friend who was with me in Dermot’s philosophy class back in ’98 put it this way when I told him Dermot’s health was deteriorating: “we didn’t know it at the time, but he was exactly what we wanted to find when we rocked up to college looking to have our philosophical worlds rocked”. And he is so right. At that point in my educational journey I just knew that I wanted something that wasn’t school, but I didn’t know what that something might look like. Turns out it looked like Dermot, All of a sudden those annoying questions the two of us always used to ask at school, which got us into so much trouble, had now found their audience. If anything, Dermot’s questions were even more annoying and challenging than our own, making us think in ways we’d never thought before and introducing us to whole histories of norm-upending ideas.

Suddenly, after years of hating it, I was now enjoying being in a classroom again. An average student at best before taking up philosophy, Dermot’s lessons made me want to read way beyond what we needed to know for our course because Dermot himself was so clearly well-read. Ideas and interesting stories oozed from him. To assist in his students’ intellectual journeys, he would always be happy to lend you a book or recommend something you might like if he didn’t have a copy himself. I had come to Sixth Form a disaffected student, angry at God and wanting to use philosophy only to finally disprove the supposed existence of the ridiculous divine, but Dermot’s passion for the subject showed me there were far more interesting things to think about in philosophy than theology (ethics, for example, and politics), and that theology itself was not as simple as being pro, or anti, the idea of God. The rational was wonderful, he taught us, but there could be beauty in the irrational too.

Dermot was the first teacher I ever saw myself in. I loved the adult way he treated us. As with all teachers at that particular college, he allowed us to call him by his first name instead of Mr O’Keeffe. But he also expected us to do the reading ourselves so we could discuss our thoughts together next lesson and not waste precious time in the same room staring dully at individual copies of the text. He would ask us what we think, not what we thought he wanted us to think. And he would introduce us to films and art as well as philosophy, showing that philosophy enriches, it doesn’t replace, other forms of thought and expression. Best of all, for a historically “naughty” student like me, he negotiated with us as equals when it came to any behavioural issues (such as the time I insisted on jokingly calling philosopher G.E. Moore Patrick Moore for a whole term every time he was mentioned which, Dermot explained to me, had caused several of my peers to mistakenly name the astrologer rather than the ethicist in their last assessment. Or the time he asked my friend and me to not try to answer every question so that other people in the class would actually have a chance to speak). Tellings off which felt humane and educational rather than punitive or coercive. My behaviour actually improved instead of what had happened previously at school, where stupid enforcement of petty rules always felt like an invitation to break them further.

And then there were the “kick about” lessons where we were free to discuss whatever we wanted, so long as we made it philosophical. Sometimes these discussions ended up in the pub afterwards, Dermot smoking at a few cigars (it was a different time) as we all nursed our lemonades and cokes and debated the finer points of some unsettled debate. The website I have run since 2019, Philosophy Unleashed, was, and is, entirely inspired by those “kick about” lessons because it was first inspired by lessons I have run myself ever since becoming a teacher trying to give my own students that same thrill of a Dermot “kick about”.

I’m burying the lead. Forget the website; I became a teacher myself because of those “kick about” lessons. How could Dermot not be our favourite teacher when he even agreed to write and record a few short spoken word clips for a song on the 7” punk ep our teenage band was recording? “Everything was fine until Marx met Spencer” and “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chain stores”. We even included a photo of him for the inlay.

Eventually, Sixth Form ended, but Dermot kept in touch with a few of us as we all went our separate ways across the country to study Philosophy at university. When my friends and I popped back to the Midlands to see friends and family during breaks from studying, we’d be sure to organise a catch up with Derm and continue one of our “kick abouts” at a mutually convenient pub or cafe. More cigars for Dermot and, for me, a lifelong non-drinker, more lemonades. Although I’ve never smoked, for a while I used to keep all my guitar plectrums in one of Dermot’s old discarded Cafe Creme tins salvaged after one of these, always stimulating, sessions.

Sometimes, we would go to his house to chat over a meal, meeting his wife and children along the way, feeling welcomed into his family’s home. An insight into philosophy as lived practice. Discussions about books and politics, theology and mind, epistemology and ethics. Art, television, and the meaning of life. I would always go back to university invigorated in ways that few of my academic lectures ever made me feel. As I continued my studies — MA, then PhD — Dermot always kept an interest. We continued our regular chats even as others lost touch across the years. I added a wife of my own to mix and he welcomed her warmly. Eventually, having rejected a career in academia and not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life besides a vague idea about teaching, I went to him, as I often did, for advice.

“How do you become a teacher?”

He told me how his daughter had trained with something called a “consortium” and expressed all the ways he thought I’d make a great teacher. I googled the word as soon as I got home, along with the phrase “teacher training” and found a place nearby. Filled in the application. Got a phone-call soon after and, within a month, was on a training programme ready to start at a school in September. Life forever changed by Dermot again.

Days before my first term was due to begin, my dad died. Unexpected, world-shaking. I foolishly decided to carry on with the teacher training anyway. Dermot understood. Again that stoic wisdom: death will come for us all eventually. Don’t let it put off your living. Good advice as it turned out. My mother died a few years later. Que será será.

As I trained in Dermot’s profession, I’d share my observations with him and he’d give me the advice of experience: focus on the teaching, not all the non-teaching stuff; listen to your students more than some of your colleagues (you’ll know the ones); good philosophy lessons can be found everywhere — the right single sentence or line of poetry can be the stimulus for a whole hour’s discussion if you use it right; enjoy the holidays when they come and read a lot; take a walk. All advice I still follow to this day.

Over the next sixteen years we continued to meet regularly, sharing resources and ideas as well as gripes and groans about the profession and the world. Sharing book and TV suggestions, as well as funny stories and personal updates about our lives. Grandchildren, nephews and nieces, holidays to beautiful places, the latest headaches…. At some point quite early in all that, Dermot retired early after my old college decided to drop Philosophy from its curriculum in a fit of short-sighted perniciousness. He was glad to be out. The place was crushing his soul. He wrote poetry, painted, went on long walks and holidays, and no longer had to mark a single tedious essay or sit through another dull staff meeting. I was jealous. I wished I could retire too! But as happened to me when I did eventually step away from teaching briefly in 2022, the bug had bitten Dermot too deep to ignore forever. Retirement? Be careful what you wish for. There are always more bills to pay. Dermot returned to teaching again.

Bizarrely, as an experienced Head of Department now myself, I was one of his references. I even found I had a few things I could help him with after some changes in the exam specifications while he was away. It was nice to be able to pay back his own professional kindness and generosity with something helpful of my own. We became peers as well as friends.

The world got worse though, no matter how much we tried putting it to rights over coffee. The austerity years of consecutive Tory governments and the butchering of education by Michael Gove. Continued environmental self-harm. Racist rhetoric. When Brexit came it was a kick in the teeth. Trump kicked us both again while we were down. Twice. And Covid brought its own challenges even as it forced us to take our chat away from pubs and coffeehouses and into the fresh air of local National Trust locations. But we tried leaning towards dark humour when everything got too much rather than the bleakness of utter nihilism. There was always something to laugh about and, through that laughter, find hope.

Our conversations weren’t always verbal. Dermot wrote essays and poems too. We’d often swap essays and poems. Swap notes and encouragements. When I wrote my first book, he was one of its first readers. When he wrote his, I read it the day it came out. Emails were common — a link here, a rogue thought shared there. Outrages and new reasons to cheer. In the last few years, when his health issues started emerging, Dermot got more reflective. He sent me stories of his past, his history, more stray thoughts in the middle of the night.

A month before he died, he sent a flurry. He knew what was coming from the titles of the missives he attached: Ignorance; Desiderata; My Education; and, most tellingly, Final Poem.

Dermot was teaching right until the end. From Ignorance: “The future isn’t adumbrated, or sketched even lightly, by the authority of the past. The future has never existed. Never. Only past futures. Never future ones. We have no data whatsoever on tomorrow.” From Desiderata: “We can’t directly control our beliefs, but we can invite reason to their birth, baptism and confirmation. Develop your beliefs deliberately and responsibly. Don’t be afraid to change your mind. Your beliefs aren’t you. You don’t need to have a view on everything. Tread lightly.” From My Education: “What I learnt at school was of small account compared to what I learnt at home, in the village library, and from my part-time jobs…The hardest but most important thing to reflect on about my education is both what I wasn’t taught, and what I failed to learn…I was practically deterred from studying history by the clever stratagem of being taught it. ” And then there was his Final Poem, which was simply a list of words in one column paired with their conceptual opposite in another. A reminder that picking a single lane will lead only to the most impoverished life. Be open to everything. Certainty is the death of understanding.

We were supposed to meet for a final coffee together on May 19th. However, a sudden decline in health just as I was set to meet him changed plans rapidly. “I’m in bed and full of morphine.” He explained later that day in an email. “Less fun than it sounds.” And with the explanation a cartoon he’d drawn “in the middle of an especially awful night.” One which, he promised, “helped.”

We had rescheduled the coffee for three weeks later, though he did warn me in that last email “I can’t plan anything with full confidence which is annoying! I’ll be remembered as a slacker.”

Sadly, the coffee never happened. I got an email from his wife warning me that he was entering palliative care a few days before. By the following Saturday, he was gone.

Gone, but never to be forgotten. A singular teacher, thinker, friend, artist, writer, humorist, and human being, Dermot was a cornerstone of what made me who I am, and the loss of him will be deeply felt by anyone who was lucky enough to have known him over his too-brief life. I am just one of the many students he changed the lives of over the years and I know many more who will hear the news of his passing will feel as devastated as I do today. But as I said to his daughter when she told me the news, those of us who knew Dermot enough to be saddened by the loss of him will, through our having known him, undoubtedly have been given the very tools we need to make, and remake, sense of the whole thing.

It is one of the great unfairnesses of death that often the person you most want to talk to about the loss is the very person that you are missing. I’ve certainly felt this week like I need to sit in a pub garden somewhere in Warwickshire and speak to my old philosophy teacher about how unfair this whole thing is. Get his well-considered take just one last time in the always welcome warmth of a long June evening. Find something to laugh about to take the sting away.

Looking through his recent emails though, I see that in that instinct to find something to smile about, Dermot’s influence lives on; his take is already known: “Laugh if you can. (It’s often a choice.)” he says in Desiderata. “Choose joy over dismay and cynicism.”

And so, happily, in this time of extreme grief, I will do just that. Instead of wallowing in the cynicism of what I have lost, I shall take joy and comfort in what I, and all of us who knew Dermot, have had. After all, although my friend is dead — my brilliant, philosophical, friend for whom the most profound insights and well-articulated wisdom always seemed to come so easily and whose gentle guidance across the decades changed my life in multiple ways — and we shall never have one of those chats together again, the unfairness of the whole situation was perfectly summed up in the final email he sent me, in what he did not necessarily know would be, at the time (at least from my perspective), his last words: “Winnie the complete shite”.

As last words go, they’re not bad.

And they will forevermore bring a smile to my face,

even through the tears.

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Why am I saying all this? Well I guess because on some level the decision to call in sick to work is a philosophical one. There is the epistemic element: how do I know that I am too ill to complete a day’s work? (After all, there are other times where I have gone to work not at 100% and struggled through the day). How do I know that the soreness in my throat is the start of something medical and not just voice-strain from too much improv? What made that initial sneeze in the car ring an alarm bell in the way that other sneezes wouldn’t? And, of course, as a teacher, do I know how to effectively translate the lessons I had planned for that day into something comparable that can be done as a cover lesson, without a subject specialist in the room? Do I know that my absence will not impact my students’ education that much?

This brings us to the ethical element. Is it right to call in sick when I’m sick or should I go in anyway if my absence will impact too many people? My view on that is always and absolutely yes — it is always right to call in sick when you need to and take a day or two off work to get better. Firstly, you won’t get better working through something when your body is telling you to stop. If you’re ill to the point that taking the day off feels necessary enough to consider it, then that’s already a compelling enough reason to do it. The body knows best. When you woke up with that nagging headache and knew you could work through it, there was no inner debate about taking a day off. if today’s ache or pain leads to a different inner monologue, listen. Secondly, going to work sick is selfish, and puts everyone else you work with at risk of infection. I’m 100% sure I picked up whatever I’m suffering with at work (and could tell you exactly the snotty colleague who shouldn’t have been in who gave it to me). The short-term personal gain of going in and getting some task done that you don’t want to put off ignores the long-term loss that ultimately comes from so many people eventually going off ill as your silly bug does its unnecessary rounds in the aftermath of your bad decision. Third, so long as it’s legitimate illness, you don’t owe your job your health. Jobs take enough from us. They will use us and spit us out without a second thought for our welfare if the economic circumstances demand it. Your personal sacrifices over the years will not be compensated or buy you any favours, so do not make them unless you are doing it for yourself. Unions and labour movements have fought for our right for paid sick days without recriminations and there is a reason that fight was fought. This is why they exist. Use them.

But being ill also raises questions about the nature of reality. After all, here I am mooching around my home and unbound by the demands of my job for the day. Were this the weekend or a holiday, this would be a lovely situation. But the filter of illness steals all joy from the circumstance. Lying in bed long past the usual alarm feels like a sign of infirmity rather than indulgence. A book on the couch feels like a chore rather than a luxury as the distraction of coughing and snorting makes it hard to concentrate on narrative. Trying to watch some TV instead reminds you of childhood illnesses and a day off school back when there was someone there to care for you as you spluttered away; the house feels empty as all the well people enjoy their regular day at work. Eating is good. This illness hasn’t stolen my appetite. But not planning on being home for these lunches there is nothing in and a trip to the shops feels too onerous, so you just heat up some stodge from the freezer or guzzle a Pot Noodle, adding to the general sense of unhealth. There’s still work you could be doing on your laptop that doesn’t require you to speak, and you’re not completely incapacitated so better now when you’re supposed to be working than leaving it all until the weekend, but as soon as you log on you feel a sense of somehow wasting the day off work by working. Yet as you put the laptop away and try to sleep a little instead, incomplete tasks and things you could be doing keep you awake as they skip through your fevered head. You drift through your house and the whole place feels uncanny — so this is what it’s like when we’re not here? A glimpse into Berkeley’s denial of unperceived existence — this is what God exists to hold together?

Even the cat seems unsure of how to interact with me. He appreciates the company and jumps on my lap and up onto my shoulder as I tried to catch a doze on the sofa, but also paws at me suspiciously. You’re not usually here, mate. What’s going on?

Our cat is another cause of medical unease. Four weeks ago to the day I write this, we were called by the vets after asking that he comes in for more tests following some troubling bloods. They told us he was in terminal kidney failure and would likely not last the weekend. Despite being on fluids for 48 hours his bloods were getting worse. We could come and pick him up for a few “sofa days” (as they called them) before the inevitable. It’s now been a month and he’s still here. Those first days we worried as he refused to take his renal meds and laughed as he woke us multiple times a night as we allowed him the luxury of sleeping in the same room as us. Then a week had passed and we were shattered from the lack of sleep. He still wasn’t taking the meds and it looked like we’d have to add some more cat food and litter to the next grocery shop (previous to that we had assumed we’d not get through the supplies we already had). We went back to closing the bedroom door at night. Now, when I wake up, I go and find him expecting every morning to find him dead, no longer breathing. But no. Every morning so far, miraculously, he’s still there, happy and eager for breakfast, renal failure be-damned. And he’s still not taking the meds.

Meanwhile I have a human friend in the final stages of palliative care as they await their end from cancer. When the cat was first given his death sentence, this friend was still living independently and hoping to meet me for a coffee one day soon. I couldn’t have imagined at the time that the cat might actually outlive him, but that’s the way it looks right now. Reality once again upended by the filter of illness: instead of coffee I got an email from his wife telling me he was deteriorating rapidly and ended up going home that day to my cat who should have been dead.

Speaking of the way the filter of illness can distort reality, last Friday we babysat my niece. It took me a while, sitting there on the sofa with this five year old and my wife watching Disney’s Hercules before I figured out what was feeling so strange. It was the sofa. Since December, my sister had been receiving treatment for breast cancer. As the chemotherapy knocked her out, it was easier to set up a bed in the lounge downstairs than have her struggle upstairs and down again several times a day. The chemo now finished, it was the first time in 2026 that the lounge felt like a lounge again and not a sickroom. It felt strange because it, at last, felt normal. The filter of illness had been removed.

Forget taking a day off work. My sister’s whole life has changed since her diagnosis. A fitness instructor with a physically demanding job, surgery, chemo, and radiotherapy has made it impossible for her to work while getting her treatment. Her workplace has been fantastically supportive, but it’s been a massive adjustment for her to be without that weekly routine for so many months. Again: take away the cancer and tell her last summer she’s going to be able to spend half a year at home without ever having to do the lengthy commute to work and she would probably light up at the idea. Add back in the grim reality of the cancer and the break from work loses its sheen. Days of doing nothing are robbed of their luxuriance by the physical reality of suffering the side effects of treatment. These days she dreams of one day being able to get back to work.

It certainly puts my sore throat and sniffles into perspective.

And so, slightly delirious and trapped inside the filter of illness, I sat down at my computer to write with no real plan. A stream of consciousness as my eyes and nose streamed merrily away. If, that is, consciousness is even a thing?

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

I rolled my eyes. Such silly “would you rather” questions have been around forever. We were asking them when I was at school to idly pass the time, and I still found myself indulging their stupidity every now and again even now as an adult. The day before the philosophy lesson, in fact, I had been seriously debating with my improv group whether we would rather be attacked by a swarm of bee-sized crocodiles, or a bee the size of a crocodile. But I rolled my eyes because, cynic that I am, I see these “would you rather” questions coming from my students a lot more recently and, unlike back in my day, where we made them up ourselves, a lot of the time they just tend to be some dumb online trend. A viral engagement where everybody weighs in and the originator of the video gets money from the number of clicks and shares. So my instinct at first was to dismiss the question as not being serious.

Instead of that, and instead of answering it, I asked a different question: why do we think dumb “would you rather” questions like this are worth answering? After all, their enduring nature over generations as a fun thing to do and the fact that such things really do go viral precisely because so many people like to engage in them are clear evidence that people do seem to think such questions are worth answering. Or, at least if not answering, thinking about. Why?

One student agreed they seemed pointless and silly. Her reasons were because the questions have no bearing on your real life. If I thought seriously about whether I wanted the head of a dog or the body of a dog, my answer would never matter. It isn’t a real-life worry.

She compared it with films, which were equally fantastical and not set in the real world, but from which we could at least draw some real life lessons. A romantic movie, for example, might not actually be happening in the real world, but by watching it I might be able to apply some of the ideas from the film into my real-life romances.

As she spoke, she realised she had possibly stumbled onto something about the “would you rather” questions she hadn’t considered before. Dismissing them as “not culture” (unlike these other cultural engagements with the fantastical) I asked her why they weren’t culture, given that groups of humans over time seem to have shared similar practices of engaging in whimsical thought-experiments and fanciful thinking about the absurd. We were creatively expressing ourselves and our ideas as a collective — surely the very definition of something “cultural”?

She realised something more. There was an undeniable creativity that came from playing with these ideas. Using our imaginations, etc. In other words, by asking such questions we engage in the sort of fantasy play which might eventually lead to something more. A spark of an idea that becomes a proper cultural artistic expression later. After all, stories exist full of weird and wonderful animal combinations, including human and animal creatures which borrow parts of existing things and splice them together. What is a werewolf if not part human, part dog, and what would happen if the full-moon transformation only happened to part of the body?

She told us a story she had heard about JRR Tolkien, writing his first ideas for what would eventually become The Lord of the Rings on a scrap of paper (it was actually on a student’s exam paper he was marking at the time! Tolkien wrote “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a blank page between answers while bored.) From small scraps of inspiration, big ideas come. So why not play about with fantastical ideas and “would you rather” questions? The silly fun today might be the germ of the next great idea tomorrow.

I agreed that there might well be instrumental value in such questions, practicing our creativity like this, keeping the muscle warm, but was there any value in the questions themselves?

Another student attempted an answer, but hit on only another instrumental value to “would you rather” questions. They allow us to express ourselves and be heard. In a world where people don’t always feel they have a voice, or their opinions don’t matter, it’s nice to be asked if you’d rather have the head of a dog and the body of a human, or the body of a dog and the head of a human, and have your answer be listened to. They also work, psychologically, as a nice break from thinking about serious questions. The dumb dog question is a lot more fun to think about than whether the current US/Israeli war on Iran marks the end of the international order, or whether the UK is sliding perilously close into far-right extremism!

These are not insignificant things, but they are not values intrinsic to the question itself. Nor was the value given to training our intellectual muscles, though “would you rather” questions give us that too. Not everyone has read Wittgenstein, and therefore you can’t go down the pub and engage everybody in an intellectual debate about some finer point in the Tractatus, but you can ask about crocodile-sized bees versus bee-sized crocodiles because the terms of the debate are understandable by everyone. Importantly, the level of inquiry can be just as profound as the more academic discussion, and use just the same language of logical argument and counter-arguments. As philosophers we should therefore value these questions because they make better philosophers of people who may not have studied any philosophy.

But that remains instrumental. “Would you rather” questions train creative and intellectual muscles, they allow us to practice and experience having our voices heard, and they may be the first spark of some creative idea that will go on to be the next great novel, film, video game, painting, or TV show. But, of itself, is there any value in asking whether I want to swap my head, or my body, with that of a dog whilst keeping the rest of me human?

Of course there is, I finally told them.

If I sacrifice my human head for that of a dog, what will I lose? By asking the question it confronts me with reflecting on what I value of myself right now. Will doggy vision be the same as my human vision is? Will it be better, or worse? And which dog is it? Different breeds have different attributes. Some dogs have been messed up through breeding and can barely breathe because their noses have been squashed over time…but if I had human lungs but a pug dog’s nose and mouth would that make it better or worse to breathe? If I had a human nose and mouth but a dog’s lungs un-used to such large amounts of air coming through, would the lungs fail to cope?

The question of speech brought out other philosophical concerns. If I had the dog’s head, I would obviously have the dog’s tongue and the dog’s brain, but where does the head end and the throat start? Would I retain a human voice box and still be able to make speech sounds, albeit filtered through my doggy brain? And if I kept my human brain and mouth, would I struggle to form the words through my canine voice box, fit only for barking?

Do I value my hands? I’d lose them if I traded in my human body for a four-legged dog’s body. But is it worth it to run faster? Do all dogs run fast? Again — breeds matter. And given that I myself am in my forties, and dogs don’t tend to last that long, would my decision to take on a dog’s body instead of my own lead to immediate death? Would the dog’s body match my own age?

The brains obviously cause questions too. If I kept my own human head, would I still be me, albeit with the body of a dog, or would the biological chemistry of the whole of me impact on the brain chemistry. Is it purely a matter of keeping my brain, or do I need my brain and all the bits of the rest of my body that send signals there to make me who I am. Would the physiological changes below change who I am mentally?

It turns out, that a seemingly silly question might have serious philosophical value because, to engage with it properly, we must engage in serious questions about what makes us who we are, what we care about, and, ultimately, what we believe “the good life” to be. Any “would you rather” question is asking us — would you like this life, or this one? And what is that if not a serious question philosophers have been tackling for generations?

Would you rather have philosophy, but it includes silly “would you rather” questions, or no more “would you rather” questions, but no philosophy either?

I know what my answer would be.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

At this point in the story I usually say “and I haven’t eaten meat since.” But last April that stopped being true after an ordering snafu in a Brooklyn bar led to my wife accidentally ordering us a real avocado, bacon and tomato sandwich instead of the one with fake bacon in it. We didn’t notice the difference, as fake vegetarian bacon these days is pretty good, but did notice that the “meat” looked pretty realistic for tempeh. It turned out that was because it wasn’t tempeh.

I remember waking up the next morning and discovering that we had eaten real meat and being surprised that there had been no negative impact from doing so for the first time in twenty-seven years. My stomach had digested it without issue and, if anything, it explained the buzz of energy I’d had all evening the night before. I felt bad morally for the death of the pig that I had accidentally contributed to, and that was the end of it. A wrinkle in the story about quitting eating meat in the summer of 1998 and never eating it again.

But it was a pretty big wrinkle.

Being vegetarian is something that I have long grappled with despite the decades-long commitment. The moral argument is undeniable: to cause the suffering and murder of non-human animals for human consumption when eating animal flesh and animal products is not necessary for human survival just cannot be justified. And yet, when you say goodbye to meat you do say goodbye to other things. For one thing, you separate yourself from others in your community and culture who do not agree with you about the moral issue. You lose the easy way in which food is shared and discussed because of the constant background question — is it vegetarian — which puts up some barriers, especially if travelling to different countries and trying to experience their culture and hospitality. This might not be a huge thing compared to the murder of living animals, but it is not nothing.

More troubling is the moral inconsistency of vegetarianism. Because I wasn’t a vegan and yet, by the same argument, should have been. After all, animal lives were routinely being lost because of the dairy and egg industries and I was complicit every time, yet found myself too lazy to remove all animal products out of my diet completely. And then there were the insects, who I had no compunction about killing if they invaded my home, or who I shed no tears for destroying the habitats of to produce my plant-based meals. Like the morally inconsistent carnivore who thinks it is ok to eat a cow but not a cat because they have a pet cat at home, my vegetarianism similarly picked and chose which non-human lives I valued and which I didn’t. (When my own cat got fleas a long time ago, I didn’t think twice, for example, about exterminating the whole lot of them with a deadly spray and shampoo prescribed to me by our vet).

I’d already made peace with those inconsistencies with the idea that none of us can be morally perfect and also live a full and engaged life in a world already so systemically corrupt, but it was better to be as morally good as we could be. So if I could kill fewer animals, even if I didn’t save them all, that felt like the right thing to do.

For me, the key in the moral argument was around the word “necessary”. To cause the suffering and murder of non-human animals for human consumption when eating animal flesh and animal products is not necessary for human survival just cannot be justified, but implied within that argument is the idea that if it were necessary, it could be.

At college I had a friend who went vegan for about a year. Then he got very sick. His mother, a nurse, cured him by insisting that he eat a yoghurt. It turned out that was stuff in dairy that his body needed. He’s still a vegetarian today, but stopped being a vegan when he realised that, for him, harming the animals to get dairy was actually necessary.

In my own vegetarianism I had always said that while I didn’t eat animals where I could avoid it, if I were lost in the desert and starving to death and the only thing I could do to survive was kill and eat an animal, I would.

So in April this year, when I was diagnosed with a fatty liver after having some pains and discomfort over the last sixteen months, and I read up on recommended dietary changes, it was hard to ignore how frequently the word “fish” kept coming up. Oily fish. Good for a lot of things, not just fatty liver. A lot of benefits my body had been denied for nearly thirty years of being a vegetarian, even with my ever-present bottles of vitamin pills and supplements.

Fish — the one meat that, to my mind, none of the plant-based alternatives had ever managed to crack. A flavour I had long yearned for in my mouth and the only thing from my meat-eating days I ever really missed. Sometimes, when feeding the cat, I would catch a whiff of some salmon or mackerel I was scooping into his bowl and almost — almost— be tempted to take a bite.

It had always struck me as another one of my great moral inconsistencies that since owning my first cat in 2005, despite being a vegetarian I spent a lot of money each week on meat and fish for my cat.

Recently, for some strange reason, I’d hard sardines on my mind. Those little tinned fillets that you could smush onto toast or some crackers. One of the first self-sufficient snacks I was able to make myself as a kid. I had literal pangs of desire for sardines that made no sense to me. But when I looked at all this stuff about oily fish and their properties I thought of my sister when she had been pregnant with my niece. Her pregnancy cravings. She had always said that the body craves what it needs — salt, sugar, fats — usually the bizarre cravings of a pregnancy were due to a deficiency or something the growing foetus needed. Trust the body. It knows.

These ideas were playing around in my head when, nearly a year to the day my wife had mis-ordered that real bacon sandwich in Brooklyn, I decided to listen to my body. Driving home from work, I stopped off at a supermarket and bought a tin of sardines. I came home, made some toast, and opened the tin, intrigued to see if the smell would disgust me. Instead, my stomach growled, as did my cat who, smelling the fish from upstairs, came running into the kitchen and wanted to make himself known if there was any going spare.

Tentatively, I scooped the sardines from the tin and crushed them onto the toast. I saw bones, something that looked like the fish’s entire spine, and was surprised as I crushed them all in that this very clear evidence of the thing on my plate being an animal didn’t put me off. But somehow it didn’t. It was gross and it was honest.

I didn’t add any pepper or a squeeze of lemon because I didn’t want to mask the taste with any accompaniments. I lifted the toast to my mouth, waiting for my gag reflex to kick in and something stop me from tasting it, but instead my mouth filled with eager saliva and, before I knew it, I was eating the fish.

I ate most of the tin, giving half of the final fillet to the cat. And I felt no guilt, only curiosity. Would it make me sick? Would it make me better?

Well it didn’t make me sick, and more to the point the next day I found that gnawing pain that had been bothering me on and off for so long was gone. I felt energetic.

When I told my wife (sent her pictures of me eating the sardines actually), she was excited. Although I’d dragged her along into vegetarianism when we got together and she developed the same sort of ethical views as I had about killing animals for food, she’d also missed fish now for nearly two decades. The next tin of sardines we shared together as she decided to tentatively dip her own toe back into fishy waters. In our next grocery shop, we bought some mackerel to have with salad and potatoes. The following week, some salmon and tuna fish. My liver has been feeling better. We both have more energy than we’ve had in years. I still don’t feel bad about it.

Of course, eating fish again begs the question why not other animals? Is this the end of my vegetarianism completely?

Maybe.

I would already no longer consider myself a vegetarian anymore as I always got annoyed by people claiming to be vegetarian “but I still eat fish”. These pescatarians, I reasoned, weren’t vegetarians, they were just picky eaters.

But there is a question mark now over my commitment to any of my abstinence from meat. After all, if I’ve made peace with murdering fish for their nutritional benefits, why not other animals?

And I guess the reason I’m not yet going all-in on being a carnivore is the same reason I never went fully vegan yet stayed a vegetarian: if we can’t do no harm, doing less harm still seems like the right thing to do.

I don’t see the same health benefits coming from other meats, and have long been used to plant-based alternatives to things like chicken, beef and pork. When we ate those bacon sandwiches in Brooklyn last year, part of what was so disappointing was discovering that they tasted just the same as the fake stuff. All these years we had thought we were missing out, and we weren’t.

Fish was different. The minute the sardine, the mackerel, the salmon, the tuna, went into my mouth, I tasted flavours that had been missing from my diet for years and the health benefits of fish were not only felt by my body, but are well-documented.

I’m not entirely ruling out a return to other meats in future, but right now it still doesn’t seem necessary in the way that eating fish was.

It has taken me over a month to come out publicly with the fact that I eat fish now mainly because I was trying to find some brilliant philosophical way of justifying it. It turned out there really is no good justification. It isn’t morally good that I eat fish now, but it is just another moral wrong that I find to be necessary to survive in this world, like engaging daily in capitalism, buying products I know have been produced through exploitation, driving a petrol car as the planet dies around us, using other fossil fuels to heat my house and run too many devices. It is a moral wrong I have come to accept and don’t feel judgemental about. And one which, perhaps, allows me also as a bonus to engage a bit more freely in both my own culture (fish and chips is back on the menu!) and others (my biggest regret after travelling to Vietnam and Cambodia was that I didn’t eat fish and wasn’t able to fully embrace the cuisine).

We all make moral compromises in our life, and nearly thirty years without eating fish, and still not eating any other animals except for that one bacon sandwich seems better than nothing.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

The theory stems from the same flawed thinking of the “broken windows” theory of criminology. Fix the first broken window and the area won’t descend into a slum was the idea. In practice it led to oppressive, “zero tolerance” policing which created more crime, not less. But ideas such as this sound nice because they suggest a quick and easy fix to more deep-rooted problems. Larger crimes don’t happen because a broken window has not been repaired (the first broken window, after all, might be a crime of vandalism which logically predates the possibility of fixing the window to prevent it), and children don’t misbehave in schools because they are wearing trainers instead of school shoes.

Because education is a feeding ground for exploitative “consultants” always looking for some new proprietary fad to sell and teachers love a good buzzword or phrase they can buy into for some CPD or INSET, what once was, more honestly, called “behaviour modification” in schools when I was a student is often called “behaviour for learning” these days. Unlike sweating the small stuff though, this re-branding of everyday school practices has a good idea at its heart. It acknowledges that if schools want to have legitimate authority in their requests for student compliance, they must not demand compliance of certain rules merely for the sake of it, but rather because there is a reason we are all in a school — to learn — and some behaviours are detrimental to the achievement of that purpose, hence they need to be enforced. It is an idea which, unusually for schools, actually nods towards trying to justify itself to the students it is intended for rather than simply assert it as something to be done because we say so. We are not asking you to do A and not B arbitrarily, but because A helps with your learning and B does not.

Indeed, the problem of “sweating the small stuff” is exposed when we reframe behavioural expectations in terms of “behaviour for learning”, as I saw firsthand in a recent discussion about this at work. As staff were asked to list behaviours we thought were essential for learning it became apparent that many behaviours staff are well-trained in demanding had no business being on the list. After all, students can clearly learn with an untucked shirt, an undone tie, wearing a jacket indoors and in comfy trainers instead of smart school shoes. We know this because many countries around the world do not enforce a school uniform, university learning does not take place in the restrictive limits of a uniform, and the vast majority of everyday learning each of us will do throughout our lives happens out of uniform at home or in our spare time.

A reason I like the idea of “behaviour for learning” as a justifying principle for school behavioural expectations is that, if taken seriously, it suggests teachers should be demanding less behavioural compliance from their students, not more. If forced to justify our demands on a principle of them being necessary for students to learn, anything we demand which does not contribute to that end can be dismissed as irrelevant and unjustified.

Students can’t learn if they don’t listen to the teacher and to each other. They can’t learn if they don’t attempt the tasks assigned to help them. But they absolutely can learn if they are not compliant in specific and totally arbitrary uniform rules. They absolutely can learn if they chat a little while getting on with their work (silence is not always necessary). They can learn if they are eating food, or even chewing gum, while working.

I suggested to my colleagues that if we really want to focus on “behaviour for learning”, instead of “sweating the small stuff” we should return to the principle of the subverted phrase’s original form and not sweat the small stuff. We should only enforce rules we can all justify on the basis of their necessity for learning. Anything that goes beyond that minimalist remit should be jettisoned.

There was immediate pushback. For example, I was told, students do learn less when out of uniform. We see it every charity non-uniform day. But I argued that such disruptive behaviours are likely not caused by the lack of uniform, but by that lack of uniform being a novelty. If we want to avoid such outbursts in future, one possible way could be to eliminate uniform entirely. In the meantime, even if there are more disruptive behaviours on non-uniform days or when people are not complying with uniform rules, it should remain the disruptive behaviours we address, not the clothes they happen to be wearing at the time.

If students chat in the corridors as they move from lesson to lesson — who cares so long as they get to the next class on time? If they don’t, then it is not the chatting to their friends we should be sanctioning, but the time management. They should be told off for being late, not for being social. And even then, if they are late but have not missed anything significant, do they need to be told off at all? After all, I am frequently late quite intentionally to the cinema, because I have no interest in being a captive audience for a bunch of pointless commercials before the movie actually starts. But I am never late for the theatre because I know that curtain-up means curtain-up: the show is starting at the time on the ticket and if I am late I will miss it.

I truly believe the era of super-strict teachers thinking consistency is a virtue needs to end and be replaced with a more Aristotelian and fluid approach to school behaviour, based on practical wisdom and guided by the question “does this behaviour actually impact on learning?” Not on neatness, aesthetics, rule-following, or other arbitrary fetishes that frequently guide school behaviour policies, but on learning.

Most importantly this approach provides students with actual justification for compliance instead of just coercively enforcing it. Treating students like human beings who have to be reasoned with and can’t simply be pushed around by some ageist notion of adult authority. We want to take your phones away, ask you to be in this particular room at this particular time, and tell you not to talk right now not just because we can, but because all these things are necessary for you to fulfil the very purpose of your being here. Anything to which we cannot say that is, frankly, none of our concern. Where it doesn’t impact learning, we should allow students the free reign to do things their own way. (Don’t worry — safeguarding is covered by this approach too, as people can’t learn if they are suffering a mental health crisis, being neglected or in a bad domestic situation, or if they are being bullied, hurt, abused, or discriminated against, etc.)

Behaviour in schools is usually seen like a case of competing extremes: either the students are allowed to get away with everything, or they must be super-strict on enforcing any rules they think are important. The middle ground of being insistent rather than consistent, not on inflexible rule-worship but on how best to mutually achieve a well-communicated shared goal that is agreed in dialogue between students and staff, would mean schools no longer wasting time sweating pointless small stuff to tyrannically coerce compliance, and, instead, allowing students to be their authentic and messy selves as much as is possible in compatibility with working together to ensure that everybody learns. An approach which allows students and teachers to learn compromise, flexibility, and how to work towards a greater good for all rather than selfishly thinking only of ourselves.

After all, if it is behaviour for learning we are asking for, we must then ask what it is we want our young people to learn? For me, I’d rather they learnt how we are all individuals inherently tied up collectively in a community of other individuals who need to think about the impacts of our actions on others and treat everybody with respect and dignity than that they learn simply to do what they are told, regardless of its coherency. I would rather that they learn to demand a rationale for anything they are asked to do instead of simply comply unthinkingly or out of threat of being punished. And I would rather we modelled what it is to be a good person than what it is to be “well behaved”.

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Earlier last week, I went to see British comedy legend, Sir Lenny Henry, perform stand up. It is the first time I have ever seen Henry live, but I have adored his comedy since I was a young child. My mother was a journalist and one of my most magical childhood memories was the morning I woke-up (I wasn’t even ten years old yet) and found outside my bedroom door a scrap of her journalist’s notebook containing the autograph of Lenny Henry. Big love, it said, Keep trying!!! Be funny!!! She had met him the night before at some event for the BBC and had not been afraid to ask the big celebrity for his autograph for her comedy-loving son. What’s more, the big celebrity had said yes.

I still have that autograph now, and I have tried to live the advice ever since I received it: Keep trying. Be funny. Those who know me know that improv comedy has always been something I do in the background of any professional philosophy/ teaching/ writing stuff I do to pay the bills. I put my effort into every endeavour I attempt, and I try to be funny wherever I can. In fact, I have been working on a new novel for the last year which takes comedy, and the idea of bringing comedy to one’s everyday life, as one of its central themes.

But none of this is why I am writing now about seeing Lenny Henry.

Another childhood hero of mine intersected with Henry in his famous parody video, “Mad”, his comedy satire of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album was the first music I ever fell in love with and as a child I was obsessed with his dance moves and every new album that came after “Thriller”. My lifelong love of horror probably stems from those hours of listening to “Thriller” and learning the lyrics off by heart before I was even five years old.

But, of course, Jackson’s legacy is one mired in controversy because of allegations of terrible child abuse. My love of his music has never waned, but it’s never quite felt right to listen to it in recent years. For incoherent reasons, never quite made entirely compelling, the possibility of the artist doing awful things in his private life has put a stain on the music he recorded entirely separately. We are not supposed to listen to Michael Jackson anymore.

Except the power of that music, and that performer, keeps preventing a total divorce, and yesterday my wife and I, like many others, went to the cinema to see the new Jackson biopic, Michael. Today, as I write this, I can’t help but listen to Jackson again as I type. The music is just too good.

Once I might have tried to justify it morally, but these days I think I am quite ok with acknowledging that it probably is morally wrong on some level to continue to enjoy the art of a person who might have abused children, but that there are lots of morally wrong things we do to get through the day in life under capitalism. From driving cars that kill the planet, to buying products made through exploitation, to participating in harmful entrenched systems (such as schools): complete moral purity is perhaps not ever the goal. A moral life might simply be the sort of life you’re happy to look in the mirror about, despite its many inevitable compromises and wrongs.

But none of this is why I am writing now about seeing the movie Michael.

Friday morning was a pretty bleak day for those of us terrified about the creeping rise of far-right fascism around the world. Major wins for Reform UK across the country suggesting that the British public have a taste for hate-speech, racism, and bigotry and want to see a lot more of it. As the polls came in, I was musing about my childhood love of Lenny Henry and Michael Jackson, and thinking how lucky I was to have been exposed to (without prejudice) black entertainers. As a white kid growing up in the West Midlands, it would have been easy to have found myself in a family where watching such people on TV or listening on the radio would have been accompanied with casual racist remarks and othering. Having none of that in my house, I was able to just enjoy what I enjoyed and, in doing so, pick up the simple and obvious lesson that skin colour didn’t matter. People were people. And also that people were different and had different experiences and backgrounds and that was ok. Whether it was being of Jamaican heritage like Henry, who incorporated aspects of that into his comedy, or being the kind of guy who kept a chimpanzee as a pet and got photographed with tigers, my young and impressionable mind became open to the idea that humans are diverse, rather than being myopically bound to only knowing people like myself.

It wasn’t just Jackson and Henry, of course. But they are two key figures of my childhood influence. And, as I said at the start, we are deeply impacted by those influences. After all, no-one who voted Reform on Thursday hadn’t seen any of their online targeted ads, their local election leaflets, or, more importantly, the decades of constant background noise in British media that sets the Reform agenda as the dominant narrative of British politics, and Nigel Farage as the figurehead of that movement. After all, the Brexit vote in 2016 was already a consequence of this. Britons voted to leave the European Union based largely on completely made up issues with the EU and fictional problems with free movement of people originating in Farage’s previous pet project, the UK Independence Party. Facts had little to do with the referendum. When you tell a population for years that everything wrong with their lives is the result of being a member of the EU, and tell them everything will get better once we leave, it’s obvious how they will vote.

Once Brexit was over, the “problem with immigration” (that isn’t really a problem) can change target from freely-moving EU members to whoever is left: refugees, asylum seekers. And as the day-to-day news media repeated the right-wing narrative that there was such a problem, the ready answer of hating “undeserving foreigners” who are “taking resources” from “us” became easy for many to digest, especially when far more specific and horrifying versions of that argument were being pumped into their social media feeds each day.

I think a lot about my belief in anarchism. The idea that self rule might be better than rule by external government and that better worlds are possible than the broken one we’ve got. I really do believe it, and have written extensively to justify the idea intellectually. But some days I wonder if my instincts for anarchism come from growing up in a world where the sort of entertainment I consumed gave me that message: anarchic early morning TV shows where the kids ran things and the adults seemed over-powered, alternative comedy breaking all the rules of convention and tearing up the script of acceptability? I always found myself watching the shows on at odd hours — lunchtime or the middle of the night — that felt sort of like they shouldn’t be on the air. Like someone had made a mistake and soon would pull the plug (and often, they did). In my everyday television viewing I saw that the old way of doing things was tired and boring, and that giving people the chance to take over who had previously been held down and silenced led to something wonderful.

Did I really come to anarchism as a sound political idea because of the idea, or because I was predisposed to the notion from what I watched on TV?

Did so many people across the UK vote for Reform because they really think it’s a good idea, or have their ideas been hijacked by the Farage barrage on their phone screens and the inescapable anti-immigration rhetoric that has necessarily been the tone of British politics for at least the last twenty six years?

Could prejudices like those fostered by Reform be defeated by the simple act of representation — showing people the humanity and talent of others not like them at an early age, before any poison drips in from their family, friends, or society?

I don’t know. But I do know that we are not a smart species, and with Thursday’s results in local elections I am seeing further signs of decline and very little to bring any optimism. Which is why, I guess, I am now self-soothing by listening to the excellent music of Michael Jackson and remembering a more innocent time when it felt like we were making progress as a society instead of moving backwards (moonwalking?) into today’s dystopia.

Certainly more children will suffer under the regressive polices of Reform UK than were ever accused of suffering at the alleged hands of the “King of Pop”.

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

Various ideas were offered. To be a sport my students offered that there must be:

• Some clearly defined aim.

• Legitimate competition to achieve that aim.

• Certain rules that need to be followed, creating some restrictions to achieving that aim, with penalties for breaking the rules.

• Official enforcing bodies for those rules at some stage (even a playground kick about follows, for the most part, the rules of football at the top of some hierarchy).

• A raised level of physical effort.

• Scoring of some sort, so that there can be ranking, rewards, and possibly relegations.

• A practice of training for the activity itself.

• Some emotional investment, either from players or spectators.

And while some, drawing on their studies in Philosophy of Art and George Dickie’s “institutional theory”, suggested that sport is whatever “Sportsworld” deems to be a sport, other students quickly noted (as with the “Artsworld” hypothesis) that, to avoid the definition becoming entirely arbitrary, there needed to be some distinct quality of a thing that the Sports/Arts Worlds are recognising when they designate the particular thing as “sport” or “art”. A distinct definition is still needed to make sense of any criteria for inclusion.

(It was also noted that while “art” has built into it a certain level of gatekeeping and elitism, as we usually use the term “art” to designate higher achievements in certain creative activities than others, “sport” is supposed to be open to all. It is coherent to suggest not everyone can be an artist and not every creative output “art”, but seems incoherent to say not everyone can play a sport. Hence the function of a ruling “Artsworld” makes sense, whereas there seems no clear function to a gatekeeping “Sportsworld” here?)

We have still not fully agreed on a definition. However, to show that it still feels like something might be missing, I offered the following as something that meets our definition of a sport yet intuitively feels like it is not a sport: school.

• School has clearly defined aims (qualifications) and specifically defined means to achieve those aims (here in England: through GCSE and A-level examination).

• It is a legitimate competition to achieve those aims, as no one knows the outcomes in advance and even the most diligent preparation and practice might still lead to disaster on match day if the questions aren’t as you had anticipated. Being in a “good” school is no guarantee of success and a “bad” school no guarantee of failure. There are also many stages along the way where you might flounder and flail or make sudden unexpected comebacks (different year groups and challenges at that level of schooling) that create uncertainty and intrigue towards the final outcomes.

• There are certain arbitrary and restrictive rules in school that you have to follow at all times (not just in those examinations, which might be considered the top flight of schooling, but all the way down to grassroots nursery level) and which you can be penalised for breaking in the form of warning systems, detentions, suspensions and exclusions. From uniform (kit) to conduct (play).

• Alongside the official enforcing bodies of the exam boards, schools themselves are inspected by organisations like Ofsted or ISI, as well as having oversight from the Department for Education and boards of governors. The schools are ranked in league tables putting each school in further competition with others and students across the country in competition for the most elite rewards in what philosopher Robert Simon might call a “mutual quest for excellence”.

• Anyone who has ever tried to endure a busy six-period school day knows that school involves a raised level of physical effort. Not only walking around the school site from lesson to lesson (and often doing physical activity in lessons thanks to faddish ideas about kinaesthetic learning that refuse to die!), but even having to play other sports during the school day in PE and Games lessons, or at break time. (One student here disputed that school could be a sport simply because of this fact. “You don’t play other sports while playing one sport” said the boy. “Decathlons” came the swift response.) There are also levels of physical control and restricted movement common to the aesthetics of sport within school, from uniform rules to arcane demands pupils stand and sit at specified times, such as during a school assembly. Access to toilets is also sometimes restricted, with the physical endurance associated there too. Pupils can eat, and sometimes even drink, only when told they can, and only in designated areas.

• Scoring has already been discussed in terms of qualifications and league tables, but within different levels of school as a sport, individual students are scored in a range of assessment tasks across the season (school year), with data-driven reports being sent home and reward and sanction systems also being used to further score individual pupil success.

• Schools excel as practice or training for the actual sport itself with a constantly self-referential regime of tasks aimed at getting students better at schooling, from exam preparation and the manifold ways that bleeds down into pre-examination years, to enforcement of school rules and norms. Outside of a pedagogical approach largely based on the principle of repeated practice, pupils do fire drills, lockdown drills, mock exams, practice essays, practice papers, taster lessons, open days, homework practice, and extra sessions at break or lunchtime.

• One student argued that schools can’t be a sport because people don’t watch it. Beside the fact that many sports take place without spectators, from a game of squash at a sports club to a friendly international match played behind closed doors, we noted that the audience emotionally invested in the sport of school are the families and friends of the competitors. “How are they doing in school?” asks a concerned grandparent. “How was school today?” asks an interested parent. “Have they had their exams yet?” asks a family friend. These are the spectators of the sport of school, emotionally invested in the success or failure of their favourite players. And like supporting a sports team, some seasons are better than others. “My daughter had a tough time in Year 9, but I’m hoping Year 10 will be better” reads a lot like a Red Sox fan looking at the current 2026 season despairingly and hoping for better things in 2027.

• A further element I added, because students had not yet seen Bernard Suits’ definition of a “game”, was the idea of a “lusory attitude”. Although students do not know that language yet, they agreed with the idea that students in school enter the “game” with the proper spirit of play. Even though the rules are arbitrary and the outcome often unfair, they all understand that this is the game and agree willingly to go along with the rules no matter how silly. They’ll put all their books in another room and rely only on their memory to write an essay in timed conditions and accept the outcome even though that might be perhaps the very worst way of producing a quality piece of work simply because that’s the game. Those who don’t enter the right attitude to schooling find themselves eventually expelled from playing.

On every criteria, school seems to fit the bill of being a sport. And whether we wanted it to or not, we struggled to find anything sport needed to have that schooling didn’t other than its general public acceptance as a sport from the “Sportsworld” we had already argued was unnecessary (if the world’s first rugby match took place and Sportsworld didn’t know about it, wouldn’t it still be a sport?)

The idea is an interesting one. And I leave it to you, the reader, to send me your own thoughts and arguments to see if you can prove it wrong. Is school a sport and all our pupils therefore athletes at various levels of competition? Or is it not? And, most importantly, could it be this very fact (school is a sport) that marks the distinction from schooling and education? Is all that is wrong with the school a symptom of it being focused on its sport, rather than the purer goal of educating young people? After all, there is no argument to be made that education is a sport.

Subscribe now

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

It was important, once, we were told, that we learn the lessons of history.

It was important, once, we were told, to remember that evil can only thrive when good people do nothing.

It was important, once, we were told, to not just be a bystander. To remember that oft-repeated poem by pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

For me, I think that has been the saddest thing about the last few years. The apparent slide back into historical ignorance of how our greatest tragedies have unfolded. The apparent apathy there is towards acknowledging just how bad things are getting. The quiet, cynical, way in which we just watch domino after domino fall and continue to say nothing, do nothing, change nothing.

Britain votes for Brexit in 2016, and the very next day a wealth of racist incidents are reported across the country from newly emboldened bigots. The claim is that the Brexit vote had nothing to do with xenophobia and anti-European sentiment, yet for years before it happened our relationship to Europe was blamed for every domestic issue we had (regardless of our membership to the EU’s actual role in the issue) and our understanding of that relationship was corrupted and poisoned. Freedom of movement across the EU was framed as a threat instead of an opportunity. Protections for workers as danger to the economy instead of a basic human right. The idea of a common good trampled by individualist cries of wanting to do things our own way.

When Britain voted to isolate itself from its European neighbours, if we ignore the lies painted on buses which got us there (though they should never be ignored entirely), it was partly on the promise of the amazing trade deals we might get with America once freed from our European arrangements. But then America votes in Donald Trump a few months later. Mr Make America Great Again. Mr America First. His first use of a fascist slogan which, though not unnoticed at the time, didn’t worry people too much because everybody knew Trump was just a protest vote, right? No one would ever seriously vote the “grab them by the pussy” guy in as president of the United States of America, would they?

And when they did, instead of probing the rise of Trump seriously, his election was usually dismissed as a joke gone too far. A case of trolling gone wrong. A contextual phenomenon that created a perfect storm: certain elements of white America venting their frustrations and prejudices after the Obama years. Scared men (and not an insignificant number of women too) troubled either by the idea of the first female president in Hilary Clinton, or at least by the idea of having that particular woman as the first female president. Internet edge-lords who just thought the idea of a reality TV star taking the highest office in the land was funny so they became voluntary grassroots campaigners for him. Discontented and disenfranchised voters sick of business as usual in Washington who found the unguarded and unconventional way that Trump spoke as a politician refreshing instead of offensive. Sweary, unserious, rude, shocking. Trump was a clown, an outsider, and much of the rest of the world watched and laughed wearily until they too were confronted with what America had done to itself — and thus to them — as the outsider clown was sworn in on inauguration day. American carnage indeed.

The mishandling of the covid pandemic and the harmful misinformation president Trump peddled during that deadly time almost makes us forget the fact that in that first term between 2017 and 2021 Trump, who ran on the platform that he would erect a wall between the US and Mexico, tore families apart at the border and locked children in cages. Makes us forget that he played fast and loose with North Korea and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Makes us forget how quickly he eroded the rights of LGBTQ+ people and how he fanned the flames of Islamophobia with his Muslim travel bans. How he undid years of environmental progress. How he refused to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville. How he used violent force to clear peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death just so he could take a photo op outside a church. How he bullied the press and took away freedom of access to anyone who crossed him. How he was impeached twice — once for abuse of power and obstruction of congress, and the second time because he incited an insurrection in the wake of his election loss in 2020.

Needless to say, this new American president, whose name graces the cover as author of a book called The Art of the Deal, did not welcome a desperate, post-Brexit, Britain into a promised fantastic new trading partnership. Our “special relationship” with America on this side of the Atlantic Ocean (and lack of any economic leverage in the fallout from Brexit) meant neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson could speak out against any of their American counterpart’s erratic and norm-destroying actions during that first term as they courted the president for trade. In fact Johnson even tried to copy a thing or too. Most similar between the two was the complete disregard for truth. Trump’s “alternative facts” approach to reality became as much a Downing Street phenomenon as it was in the White House. Whether it was the number of imaginary new hospitals pledged to be built with fictitious money not actually saved from leaving Europe; telling the Queen that parliament needed to be suspended when it did not; or denying the existence of covid-rule-breaking Christmas parties, Trump’s friend, Johnson, made lying the unofficial language of Westminster, just as he had made it a signature part of his previous career in journalism.

When Trump was voted out in 2020, and especially after the ugly scenes of the January 6th insurrection, it felt like maybe the nightmare was coming to an end. A vaccine for covid arrived. The world opened up again. Maybe all would finally be well?

Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine in clear violation of all kinds of international law…and nothing happened. Buses started flying Ukrainian flags and we were all encouraged to visually support Ukraine, but support didn’t translate into taking any firm stand against Russia’s actions. A few hotels took in Ukrainian refugees and a few more blue and yellow flags went up around the country, but it’s now 2026 and Russia remains an occupying force while Ukrainians continue to fight a war against them by themselves, alone and now largely ignored. After all, the following October, in 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, leading to Israel’s disproportionate response against all of Palestine, putting Gaza under siege and causing a humanitarian crisis which is still ongoing. An attempted genocide that has only been rubber-stamped and supported by the UK and US governments. The violence continues today, the death toll rises, daily misery builds, but we live now in a world where such things simply occur without consequence. Just one reel amongst many on Instagram or TikTok. Easy to scroll away from or block out from the feed. Or, if sufficiently outraged, post about and feel like something had been done.

Trump was still gone though, and then the UK voted for “change” in 2024, ousting the Conservatives after fourteen years. However, as we began to see that a new Labour government’s vision of “change” bore little of any substance, we watched also the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden in the US. Incredulous that the lunatic candidate, Trump, who had done so much damage in his first term as President, was back as the Republican candidate despite his two impeachments and election-subverting incitement of an insurrection.

We were sure that America couldn’t possibly make the same mistake twice, this time in full knowledge of who they were voting for…weren’t we?

Since his second inauguration in 2025, Trump has simply continued where he left off. Nothing he has done has been uncharacteristic or unexpected. He has gutted all federal agencies of any sort of liberal policy guidance, killed Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, stripped even more rights for LGBTQ+ people, unfunded any publicly subsidised artistic expression that does not show sufficient deference to him, bullied networks into cancelling shows which have not put him in a positive light, and continued to undo what little environmental progress there has been in a world hurtling evermore perilously close to climate catastrophe. He has mobilised ICE into a cruel private army who have not only ruined lives through deportations and daily acts of terrorism, but have actively killed several American citizens without redress. In his prejudiced bid to eradicate illegal immigrants from the country, Trump has had many other American citizens deported and lengthily detained without just cause. Meanwhile he has given tech oligarchs free reign over US legislation, sent out unhinged AI images of himself as a quasi-religious figure, unilaterally kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and, most recently, bombed Iran, killed thousands, and plunged the global economy into crisis without even a nod to international law.

This is the new normal. The one we do nothing about. As with Ukraine, as with Gaza, an unthinkable war crime has been committed, with more following each day, and it simply becomes another news alert we glance only at the depressing headline about before quickly flicking it away.

Like with the racist-coded flags of St George and the Union Jacks which continue to intimidatingly line British streets eight months since they were first put up by groups with known links to the far-right and just left to quietly terrorise those who they so brazenly target.

The day-to-day background noise of life in 2026.

Because for the last ten years (at least) they have been coming for the Pro-Europeans, for the Mexicans, for the Palestinians, for the Ukrainians, for the people of colour, for the LGBTQ+ community, for the immigrants, for the asylum seekers, for the “woke”, for the Muslims, for the poor, for the vulnerable, for the feminists, for the women, for the pacifists, for the Jews, and, most egregiously, for the truth…and we have not spoken out, time and time again.

We have not stood up and said, sufficiently loudly, that something is seriously wrong.

We have not learned the lessons of history. How the Rwandan genocide did not start with the assassination of president Habyarimana, nor the Nazi holocaust with the first concentration camps, but with the years of background bile and hatred which poisoned one group against the other, slowly, imperceptibly, over time, so that the fuse was already burning brightly long before the final inciting incident occurred and the powder keg erupted.

We have forgotten how the Nuremberg Laws came into place long before Kristallnacht. How dehumanisation is not immediate, but gradual and concerted. How grooming works slowly: eroding the boundaries of what is normal until the abnormal is happening without you even realising what lines have been crossed.

If you see something, say something. Here we all are looking for suspicious discarded luggage on planes and trains and the real ticking time bomb has been displayed in plain view across the daily news each and every day.

What is it that addicts say? That you can’t get help unless you first admit you have a problem? Well I think it is clear that we have a problem. And this one needs a significant intervention before we self-destruct to a point where we can’t get back.

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.

For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com

This week marks the second week of the second annual British Philosophy Fortnight, and a continuation of the theme #PhilosophyMatters. BPF is a period of time, created by the British Philosophical Association, to make, loudly, the public argument for the importance of Philosophy in different areas of life. It is an attempt to celebrate Philosophy’s importance and fight for its continued existence in universities and schools which are increasingly under pressure to reduce curriculum offerings to meet budget-tightened bottom lines. British Philosophy Fortnight has the potential to be a very good thing, and last year I was an active part of the campaign, featuring in this video making the case for the importance of Philosophy in schools.

I say: “Philosophy matters to students because it’s a unique space in the school curriculum where they’re taught to take everything they think they know and see if this received wisdom can stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Including the wisdom they receive in the philosophy classroom itself. In a world where we are increasingly bombarded with truth-claims, and information and misinformation is coming at us without any distinction between the two, when students have the tools to be able to analyse claims for their validity, it’s a vital intellectual self-defence that we should want all young people to have. And that is why #PhilosophyMatters.”

I also wrote this piece for Philosophy Unleashed about it, interrogating the claim “philosophy matters” and asking if it really does, and this other piece looking at examples of Philosophy mattering in my own classroom.

This year I haven’t been as active with the campaign. I’m not sure why? Perhaps it is because posts like the one I wrote last year are not gung-ho enough about the wonders of philosophy to be widely shared and distributed as part of the pro-philosophy spirit of the fortnight? After all, as a philosopher is wont to do, I didn’t simply accept the premise that philosophy did matter, I questioned it. I considered all the ways in which it might not matter too. The harms philosophy might do. This muddies the message somewhat, even if it ultimately comes out in philosophy’s favour. One of the problems of philosophy is that philosophical thinking is nuanced thinking, and not necessarily easily crammed into simplistic slogans and commercial messaging.

I remember in my early years as a teacher I was asked back to the consortium that trained me to talk about my experiences in the job market and how I found the right school for me. I turned up to the talk and shared my thoughts with the group of new teachers, telling them not to settle for exploitation and bullshit. That each school is different and that you might think you hate teaching but if you work in a few different places you might discover that you just hate the one particular school you are stuck in. I told them to shop around and find the right place for them and not get rushed into the wrong place just because there was pressure from the course to be in position by September so that their numbers looked good to inspectors.

I wasn’t invited back.

But that’s Philosophy for you. We say it like we see it and provide the arguments for how we see it in the hopes that someone will argue back and prove us wrong if there is a mistake in our reasoning. All too often, outside of the Philosophy classroom, such counter-arguments aren’t given. We are simply considered a nuisance, called rude for not towing the party line or stepping beyond our station, and the conversation is shut down. The Socratic gadfly is so frequently unwelcome when all people want is an easy life. That’s why people killed Socrates: that tendency to question and think things through instead of just blindly going along with the unexamined life is frustrating to the powers that be that either do not like scrutiny or haven’t the time or inclination to change their plans.

It is also why Philosophy matters so much. If philosophers aren’t going to do it, who will? And if no-one asks those difficult questions, how much damage will be done by people in power with big ideas but very little thinking around those ideas and their impact?

British Philosophy Fortnight is a big idea. Part of my hesitance to get stuck in again this time round is witnessing the impact, or lack thereof, of the last one. Isn’t the very definition of insanity citing the same unattributed quote from the internet time and time again and expecting it to have resonance this time when it didn’t the three hundred other times you used it? Or something like that? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Did BPF save Philosophy last year? Did it even get people talking about Philosophy who weren’t already talking about it? The only places I saw the hashtags being shared were from people and places I already followed as a philosopher. Talking to ourselves about how the thing we do matter doesn’t really help convince others outside of our pre-existing bubble. Though events were attended, were the people attending those who previously thought Philosophy didn’t matter, or people already Philosophy-curious and attending only because these events were better advertised? And more to the point, what happened in the remaining 50 weeks of the year? Where did the events, and the momentum, go?

From my own point of view as a school teacher of Philosophy, working outside of the University Philosophy world, it was disappointing to start the year with a message from the Association of Philosophy Teachers announcing that, due to the failure of lobbying politicians about the ways in which Philosophy matters, it was maybe time to stop focusing on establishing Philosophy’s subject independence from Religious Studies on the school curriculum and, for the time being, continue with Philosophy living, as it currently does in most schools, through the backdoor of Religious Education, permanently entangled with Theology instead of being seen for a valuable discipline in its own right. The very thing the APT was initially set up to try to redress.

It was disappointing because the lobbying was a large part of the BPF2025, with a big launch event at Senate House and discussion with politicians about the importance of Philosophy in Schools. The message from the APT was that, essentially, the #PhilosophyMatters approach has not worked. Given that activists the world over, of varying stripes, have long debated the efficacy of “hashtag activism”, is it any surprise? Has #FreePalestine freed Palestine? Did #BlackLivesMatter end police violence against Black people? Did #MAGA make America great again? Why would #PhilosophyMatters make philosophy matter?

I might be wrong, but I don’t think a hashtag that didn’t work in 2025 will suddenly go viral and have impact in 2026 either.

I love Philosophy. I believe that it matters. I have dedicated my life to evangelising about the value of Philosophy, including writing this blog for the last seven years. I love the idea of a fortnight celebrating Philosophy’s worth. But I am not sure that the way we are doing it is resonating beyond the borders of those already convinced of Philosophy’s importance.

I also question the wisdom of it being a specifically British Philosophy fortnight. Why British? Surely any philosopher worth their salt has already acknowledged the arbitrariness of national borders and boundaries? If we’re making up the terms of our own philosophical celebration, why not do away with such exclusionary language and at least have a Philosophy Fortnight, open to all philosophers around the world? After all, Philosophy departments are closing and philosophical thinking is being attacked all around the globe, not just in Great Britain. Why be so myopic?

Ultimately British Philosophy Fortnight is a marketing exercise. As such, those selling the product — Philosophy — need to ask who their target audience is and what is Philosophy’s USP? Is two weeks of lectures, film screenings, workshops, conferences, and public debates (mostly held at universities) the thing that’s going to change someone’s mind? Will sharing a positive quote from someone already doing Philosophy about why they like it make those not doing it pay attention and take notice? I’m not entirely convinced. And if promoting our discipline through a marketing strategy that seems ill-thought-out and ineffective is the best we can come up with, is that much of a commercial for the value of philosophical thinking?

Author: DaN McKee (He/Him)

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If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com