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)

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

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

Getting students to teach each other is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are not expert teachers, formally qualified in appropriate pedagogies for teaching the assigned material. On the other hand, they should actually be the most expert people in the room when it comes to effective teaching. After all, they sit through six lessons a day, five days a week, and experience, first-hand, what does and doesn’t work in the classroom.

The theory behind getting them to teach each other is the idea that if you properly understand something, you should be able to explain it to a child. So therefore to teach the other children in their class, the students themselves need to know the material they have been assigned to teach inside and out. They need to know how best to break down its complexities and where the likely misconceptions and confusions will be. If the student lessons don’t go well, so the idea goes, then it becomes clear that they do not understand the material. Hence it is a win/win: either the lesson is a success and everybody learns something new, or it is a disaster, and we all learn that there is more work to do before moving on.

As an anarchist educator, getting students to teach their own lessons is also an opportunity to give students some autonomy and power in the classroom to do things for themselves. To learn independence and take control. Reminding them that my own power is mere illusion and, most importantly, that they do not need a teacher to give them new knowledge. The knowledge is there for the taking if they break free of the learned helplessness of the teacher/student model and recognise their own resourcefulness and ability to research and make discoveries.

Sadly, giving students the reigns to teach leaves many of the class uneasy. They doubt the quality of information they receive from their peers and usually await confirmation from me, preferring the familiar hierarchy. Likewise, some of the student-teachers worry that they only reason I am making them teach each other is because I am lazy and just want to give myself a few lessons off. They treat the activity with suspicion and doubt their own ability to pull it off.

Even more sadly is how quickly the opportunity for something radical and different to be done in the classroom is missed for mere replication. I tell students they can deliver the material in whatever way they think will be most effective. drawing on their experiences as students. What works best? What never works? What could be better than any lesson they’ve previously had that they now have the chance to try? But frequently the lessons take the form of lectures with very basic quizzes at the end to check for understanding, or they involve activities which are fun but teach very little. Big questions are asked, but they forget to care about the answers they are given. I give them the power to reward and sanction their students, hoping they will use that power responsibly, and see quickly how power corrupts. Friends’ names fill the board in the reward column and old grudges are reawakened by the names quickly doomed for sanction.

In a current course I am teaching however, all this is a lesson in itself. Soon we will be covering Philosophy of Education as a topic and these lessons I have assigned for my students to teach on a completely different topic (Philosophy of Art) are serving a dual purpose. While four groups are responsible to teach four different theories of art to their peers across four different lessons, the lessons they produce are also case studies for analysis later: what makes a “good” lesson in school? Why is the lesson you plan not always they lesson you teach? What does it mean to “learn” and how do you know when it is happening?

This is the second batch of lessons this particular cohort have produced since September. Their last set, on theories around Self, proved to be an assortment of car-crashes. But each car crash provided new food for thought and this time around each group was determined to keep their car on the road.

Interestingly, the “car crash” lessons were all hugely important topics for the eventual assessment task the students had to complete at the end of the unit. Poor though the lessons were, the students all did very well in the final assessment. Once they realised I was not going to mop up the mess and teach them the same stuff again “properly”, and we had done a lengthy post-mortem on what went wrong with the lessons, they realised it was their own responsibility to learn what their teachers had failed to teach them. And learn it they did. Quite independently.

More interestingly, the reason the lessons were “car crashes” is because in each case the student teachers failed to properly think about the most effective way of delivering their complicated ideas and checking for student understanding. Dry lectures were given, with little thoughtful discrimination made between what was necessary and relevant and what was not from the resources they had been assigned. Key ideas were skipped in places and tangents brought to the foreground. Elsewhere contrasting ideas were presented as if they were all arguing for the same thing. It was clear the student teachers had not spent the requisite time to understand the ideas they were charged with teaching before planning how to teach it. In fact, groups split up tasks before knowing what their subject matter was all about, and then proceeded to learn the information they would teach in this disconnected way: one student “doing the bit of the lesson evaluating the argument” and therefore not bothering to read the actual argument itself first. That was, after all, another student’s job.

The reason this was interesting is because in round 2, none of these recent lessons have made the same mistakes. Each group ensured they knew their material well and planned well-chosen activities to introduce the ideas to their classes. However, this time a new set of problems emerged: putting the beautifully planned and well-considered lesson into practice. Lesson after lesson my students learnt what every trainee teacher discovers in their first weeks on the job: things take more or less time in reality than you anticipate in the planning, and human beings — with their weird and wonderful autonomous minds and choices — ask questions, get stuck, or mess around in ways you cannot possibly predict.

Teaching is an activity which requires constant reaction and adaptation. We can plan as much as possible, but need to also be responsive to what is actually going on in the room. You might be really proud of that interactive quiz you made online, and it may have taken a long time to produce the resource, but if students are slower to grasp the initial concepts than you had planned for, is it actually a useful or necessary activity worth wasting precious minutes for as they get out their devices and log on to school WiFi? Are you making them do the task because it is useful, or because of the sunk costs fallacy: you put so much work into it you can’t imagine not using it?

Teaching is also an activity in which your own actions in the room can affect the room itself! You might be the person who takes the conversation on its tangent or antagonises a student into misbehaviour. The plan might be perfect, but your response in the moment to something said as a result of that plan might throw a grenade into the mix and blow up everything that comes after.

Lesson after lesson, student teachers encountered these difficulties. The lessons they had planned this second time were not car crashes, but occasionally at times the roads became treacherous and they might have lost a wing mirror or clipped the curb. Occasionally a responsible driver had the wheel grabbed recklessly by another member of their group and had to fight hard to steer the vehicle back on course. A few tyres popped along the way. But most got to their destinations, or at least near enough for their class to walk the rest of the way by themselves.

Most important, however, was the reflection afterwards. As I said, I give the students the power to reward and sanction their classes. I never question the rewards given, but when a sanction is given I ask the student teacher the following question: does the student deserve the sanction because of something they did, or did they do what they did because you, as the teacher, failed to do something before it got to that point to stop them? If you had behaved differently, would your student have behaved in the same way?

The question made the student-teachers realise their own role in managing the behaviour in their classroom and in all cases they ultimately decided that the sanction was unnecessary; they shared blame for the incident with the offending student. It was a mutual mistake and unfair to blame the student entirely.

Most rewarding for me in all this has been the realisation across the two sets of lessons from my students of the work that goes into a lesson.

“I didn’t realise how hard teaching was, sir!” Said one student.

“It always seemed so easy before.” Said another. “But I see now how wrong I was.”

And my favourite feedback of all: “I can see now how difficult it must be to teach someone like me, sir.” Said seriously by a student who struggles with their own impulse control after finding the lesson they had spent hours of homework preparing for repeatedly interrupted and undermined by a fellow student with similar issues. “I just wanted to scream at him the whole time to just shut up. How do you manage not to just explode?”

It made me consider how little the art of teaching is understood by most of us, despite the vast majority of us spending years of our life being educated in schools. How hard can it be? You’re an expert in your subject and you pass that information on to kids in the most interesting way possible, right? Those who can, they do something else. Teaching is for those who can’t do anything else.

When we look at the teaching retention crisis in the UK there are a whole bunch of factors. Poor financial compensation for the number of hours actually worked each week and squeezed budgets making so many roles in schools more and more exploitative. Threats to pensions and diminishing benefits. But the least talked about factor is the simple fact that the job itself — being a teacher — is taken for granted by all of us. For we have all sat, bored, in classrooms and wondered why this person was droning on when we could be somewhere else. We have all had to teach ourselves something our professional teacher failed to teach us. And the good teachers we experience — well they make it look easy. Effortless. So easy that surely anyone could do it?

The idea that teaching is a skilled profession demanding a wide-range of high level capabilities intellectually, emotionally, and administratively is just something seldom discussed with the students who are the profession’s only hope to be the teachers of tomorrow. Certainly something very few of them get to experience firsthand.

And — for the anarchist within me, and the critic of the current education system — the systemic barriers to success in the classroom for all and structural questions around what the best way to learn even is (and does it even need to involve schools and teachers in the first place?) can only really be broached once you have experienced firsthand the obstacles and disconnects between teaching as an ideal and teaching in practice. If the first time it is experienced is in your first months and tears of teacher training, then it’s little wonder so many tap out on the profession.

I also love doing these activities with my students because it is a reminder that the ostensible lesson taught inside a classroom can be an abject failure, but this does not necessarily mean that no learning has taken place. While four consecutive lessons on Philosophy of Self were car crashes, and four later lessons on Philosophy of Art were only marginally successful, all eight sessions in the classroom were outstanding lessons in the Philosophy of Education, hopefully reminding my students that education is always about far more than meeting the arbitrary learning objectives of a particular fifty minute period in a classroom.

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. 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

Skills atrophy is the term used for the slow loss, or diminishment, of previously existing skills due to continued outsourcing of those skills to automation or AI.

For example — once upon a time I might write notes on a book I am reading for research, to organise my thoughts and highlight key ideas. Perhaps I scribble down questions and objections too. If, however, I instead plug the book title into AI and ask it to produce the same sort of thing, and I keep on doing this, eventually I might lose the personal skill of condensing ideas appropriately for myself. I grow dependent on the technology to do it for me for so long that the muscle of my previous skills wither and die.

That’s the idea, and it’s pretty well accepted as a significant issue arising from growing dependency on AI, especially in young people who perhaps haven’t yet even developed the original skills to be atrophied. But, of course, there are varying views about how much we should worry. After all — history has a litany of obsolete skills it can show us that have happily atrophied and died off because they are simply no longer needed as things have advanced. Maybe certain cognitive skills can be offloaded onto our technology so we can better use our minds for higher things? Consider, for example, how much we really need to use mental arithmetic in the age of calculators?

But as eyes turn worriedly towards the future, and how the impact of new technology might affect certain generations, I’d like to call our attention to quite an old technology that I believe has already had a significant impact on children, leading to a hidden skills atrophy, or even the lack of the development of those skills at all. I offer for your perusal the impact of the humble link.

This week my school took a year group to The National Holocaust Museum in Nottinghamshire and something happened that, though minor compared to Nazi atrocities, was almost as chilling as the many harrowing tales of suffering we heard from the powerful testimony of our Holocaust survivor. The Museum has a fabulous exhibition downstairs, detailing the history of antisemitism, the lead up to the Holocaust, what happened, and the legacy of the Nazi’s attempted genocide. And as our students — 13 to 14 years old — entered the exhibit I saw them racing through the different rooms, glancing briefly at images and objects, and completely ignoring the copious amount of text displayed next to them.

“Why is this here?” one student asked. “What’s this?” asked another. And I waited a beat before asking them why they hadn’t read the information right next to the image or object which caused their confusion, where what it was, or why it was there, was clearly explained.

They had no answer. It simply hadn’t occurred to them to read it. To search out connected information to the more immediate object in front of them. To make that link that the nearby writing might be related to the thing it was next to.

The cognitive failure displayed was not the first time I had been disappointed in students’ ability to move logically from A to B. I have always been surprised by how little my students know about me, for example. After all, I am not a very private person, as anyone who reads Philosophy Unleashed will know. I talk frequently about my own personal opinions on a range of issues, have even written an entire memoir about my life, and released scores of songs detailing all manner of personal points of view about the world. I blog, I have been interviewed many times for podcasts and websites. It’s all out there to be found. But so few of them do. It’s one of the things we are warned about as teachers — to ensure we are not searchable online — but is something I am unable to do if I still want people to be able to find and buy my music and writing (which I do). Yet in my entire career it is only the very rare occasion that a student seems to have bothered to do the search. And when they have, it has been extremely cursory.

My first year of teaching after training, I remember being impressed that my sixth form class had managed to find a copy of my old band’s last album online. They even purchased it and brought the CD in for me to sign. Their savvy sourcing and curious digging had led to success. Embarrassed, I signed the disc, and assumed things like this might happen a lot over the years. I worried about my searchability — especially as some of my older punk lyrics are not exactly “school friendly”. But, nearly twenty years on, and they remain the only group to have done that.

That said, when my book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, came out in 2023, I noticed kids around the new school I was working in saying the phrase to me a lot, suggesting they had heard about it somehow. Some were even singing the song of the same name that I had written and used in promotional videos to help plug the book. Oh god — I thought. Now it’s happening. They’d found the videos on YouTube — “I’ve subscribed to your channel sir!” — and one thing would lead to another…

…Except it didn’t. I started to notice that the “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher” kids didn’t seem to realise that the song they were singing was about a book I had written. Even though the video with the song had text advertising the impending publication of the book, and another saw me unboxing my first copies of it, the connection from A to B didn’t seem to be happening. Nor did they seem to twig that I had written other songs too. Nearly one hundred of them. All easily available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music. None of these students had been curious enough to actually buy the book and find out more about me than they saw in the brief promotional videos they’d found. All they knew was that, for some bizarre reason, I’d written a song and fancied myself as an “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher”. Hahaha. None had done the deep dive that was so easily at their fingertips and that, frankly, I am 100% sure I would have done as a teenager if I found out a way of knowing more about my teachers. (I am speaking as a person who went to watch my French teacher perform in an amateur dramatic production of The Odd Couple the moment I found out he was in it, and once tried to track down (pre-internet) my Headteacher’s PhD thesis.)

The experience began to make me reflect on similar absences of curiosity or connection making in my students over the years. In lessons — where more and more over the years students seem to ask questions about things for which the answers are literally in front of them, in worksheets or on the whiteboard; or where it seems to be getting rarer for students to make connections for themselves to previous topics, or different subjects within the school, without you spelling it out to them explicitly — and in their own lives, as their cultural tastes seem guided more by algorithms than personal choices and media is consumed without context or history.

My whole life has been about making those sorts of inquisitive leaps. Why am I a philosophy teacher today? Because when I was a kid I found punk rock. Green Day. And Green Day covered songs by Operation Ivy and were on Lookout! Records, so I explored other Lookout! Bands and Op Ivy, who became Rancid, which led me to Epitaph Records and Bad Religion. My search for all things punk led to me watching this special “punk” episode of Alternative Nation on MTV, which is where I first saw Dead Kennedys. That led to exploring the Dead Kennedys back catalogue, plus other bands on their singer’s label, Alternative Tentacles (such as NoMeansNo, my all-time favourite band). Exploring Dead Kennedys led to a political awakening as I wanted to understand their lyrics, so started paying attention to the news and reading books about politics. All of it made me start asking questions, especially about religion. That curiosity extended to finding out which of my teachers were religious and bothering them with questions which, at some point, they described as “philosophical”. My friend, equally curious, discovered our local sixth form taught a course called “philosophy”, so we decided to sign up. The rest is history.

Maybe myself and my friends were unique cases, but I don’t think so. What I do know, however, is that we lived in a time primarily before the internet. And when the internet arrived in those years we were studying philosophy in the sixth form, it remained slow and clunky. We had to really think about what we wanted to use it for. Hyperlinks existed, but each click took a long time to load. Click too many and you would overload your primitive computer’s poor little brain.

Cut to today. Links open in an instant. Everything is online and, wherever one thing connects to another, a link will show you how. Just click from link to link and fall into a rabbit hole of information you may never come back from.

But the links are doing all the cognitive work — not you. You no longer have to think things such as: this is like X, I need to check out X. Instead, the connection to X is handed to you without effort.

And then there are the algorithms. If you liked X we think you’ll like Y. The old cognitive labour of making those discoveries yourself through trial, error and reflection has been taken out of your hands and the computer does it for you. Watch a movie and before the credits even roll there are five more movies you might like being suggested without having to leave your chair. Listen to a song and the shuffle feature will give you a new artist to try without you lifting a finger. Our social media feeds shove things into our attention their algorithms think we might like and, often, they are right, so we no longer have to go hunt them out.

We accept all this as normal. It has become the way of the world very quickly since those clunky dial-up modem days of the early 1990s internet. And very little is discussed about the impact of now living in a world where cognitive connecting is done for you. But we know that skills atrophy is a real thing, and if making cognitive links from A to B is a skill (which we know it is, a higher order intellectual skill), and that skill has largely been outsourced to our computers (or, in the classroom, to teachers doing everything for you, including providing scaffolds and essay structures so you don’t have to think about how to order and organise your own thoughts to write an essay), then we shouldn’t be surprised to find young people not properly developing the basic cognitive abilities needed to be intellectually curious and make their own connections and discoveries. Why search for something to read about the subject you’re interested in when a reading list will be provided? Why hunt for things that go beyond what is taught in the classroom when a pre-planned extension task will be set? And why waste energy trying to see for ourselves what might be connected to the current focus of our attention when the computer will do it all for us?

People don’t even choose their partner for themselves these days — they are happy for an app to whittle down the possibilities and reduce personal connection to a series of photographs and bios to passively swipe either right or left on.

My suspicion is that, in a world where connections we used to have to work for ourselves have been repeatedly handed to us for so long (and without any resistance) by pre-loaded links and algorithms, adults raised in the previous paradigm will have seen a serious skills atrophy in their cognitive abilities to make such links for themselves, and children, who have never needed to develop those initial skills to atrophy, will be raised with a serious deficit in such skills. They may well never atrophy because they are not even there to begin with.

Again — whether this is a problem or not is for you to decide. Are these skills we might be losing important ones, or is it OK that we are making them obsolete and outsourcing this particular cognitive capacity to our machines?

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

But what interested me as a philosopher about the subsequent furore around Davidson’s impossible to control outburst, was not the BBC’s shameful choice to keep the N-word in the show, but their choice to edit any of what Davidson said at all.

If you have seen I Swear, the movie Davidson’s life story inspired (and for which Robert Aramayo won best actor at the BAFTAs that night), then you will know the entire point of the movie is how difficult life is for those with Tourette’s to find acceptance in a world that is so uninformed about, and unforgiving of, the verbal and physical tics the syndrome makes them have.  The worst possible things — racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. — will pop out of the mouth of a person with Tourette’s completely involuntarily, as will physical tics, strange noises, and movements which might amount to violence (an errant swing of a fist).  What the movie reminds us, as with all “disabilities”, is that what “disables” the sufferer is more about the world around them than the symptoms themselves.  Davidson’s issues portrayed in the movie are only issues when the people around him don’t understand or accept what his brain makes him do involuntarily.  If, for example, they take offence at something he says.

When a person intentionally chooses to call you by a racist slur, being offended and upset makes a lot of sense.  When they call it you because they cannot control the words their brain makes their mouth form, you can still feel upset and hurt at simply hearing this awful thing directed at you, but offence is the wrong response.  This is not someone unknowingly saying something insensitive and still choosing the wrong words, this is someone not choosing at all.  They are simply not responsible.  Part of the syndrome’s difficulty is that it makes you say the absolute worst thing at the absolute worst time.

So what I Swear reminds us, and what makes it such a heart-warming story, is that it is in all of our power to make the lives of Tourette’s sufferers’ easier through understanding and learning to to over-react to the things they say and do uncontrollably.  Once you turn a blind ear to the outbursts and focus instead on only what the person is choosing to say or do, Tourette’s stops being a “disability” and simply becomes a character quirk.

The problem, however, is that the condition is rare enough that most of us don’t come into contact with people who have it.  So when someone says or does something that seems hurtful and insensitive, our first thought is seldom “perhaps they have Tourette’s?”  It is usually an instinctive upset and outrage.

At the BAFTAs, therefore, in conjunction with this wonderful movie about Tourette’s, the BBC, and BAFTA organisers, had the opportunity to sensitively highlight exactly this.  Have the host explicitly remind us upfront that Davidson is there, will say and do things uncontrollably, and that in the spirit of the movie and the activism he has spent his whole life trying to do, it will not be edited and the audience are kindly asked to try to ignore it as best they can and be accepting.  A completely unedited version of the night, with all the interruptions and outbursts would help to normalise to the audience what having someone with Tourette’s around is like.  The unfortunate N-word moment would still be broadcast, but it would have context, and Jordan and Lindo would not be so taken off guard.  If the message to everyone is, expect outrageous and horrible things to be said, then, when they are said, there is a built-in understanding and charity.

How the BBC dealt with John Davidson’s attendance at the BAFTAs last week is definitely morally questionable and offensive, but not because they let the racial slur slip past the censors when other insults were cut.  It was offensive and immoral because by censoring anything Davidson said it continued to contribute to a climate of outrage and ignorance around Tourette’s when it could have been, instead, a catalyst for change.

If you haven’t seen the wonderful, I Swear, I suggest you do.  (Sinners too!  That movie is marvellous in a completely different way).

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

Anyway…on with this week’s post…

Neuroscientist, Dean Burnett, made a very astute point earlier this week following the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. On his Facebook page he noted:

“Not the key point, but all the ‘Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’ coverage shows how quickly and easily the entire UK media complex can switch to someone’s new name/title, even after using their old one for decades, when it’s an incredibly pampered white male deviant.

So, you know, it’s not *that* hard...”

Dean’s a funny guy. A writer of witty popular science books and a former stand up comic. Back in university, he actually taught me improv and directed the first improv show I was in. His post was funny, and honest about this not being the “key point” of the arrest, but, like all good comedy, in his joke there was a powerful truth. It is the same truth we saw during the pandemic when sudden and far-reaching changes in areas once thought impossible occurred almost overnight. The obstacles to change are almost always in our willingness to try. They are seldom as insurmountable as we are told they are, and the people telling us change is impossible almost always tend to be those people with some sort of interest in things staying the same.

A person transitions from a male name to a female one, or a daily social practice we once thought we could not live without is deemed too dangerous to continue in the face of a deadly virus — if the will is there to adapt to the changes proposed to us then the change is quickly embraced as a “new normal”. (Just ask any UK teacher who now marks GCSEs once given lettered grades with a number, one to nine). As soon as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles, because the full force of the law was behind the new edict the entire British media jumped in line without question and references to a “Prince” Andrew vanished almost immediately. When, instead, well-funded think tanks, politicians, or powerful lobby groups make it more financially lucrative to ridicule and question proposed changes then the alternative occurs. Stagnation and obstacles. Resistance to change depends on who is proposing the change. The powerful, or the marginalised? It is almost never about objective reality.

I was thinking about this as I read this weekend about the seeming decline in vegetarian and vegan options across UK restaurants and fast food outlets. According to the news, the boom in plant-based alternatives to meat earlier this decade has now bust and people in the food industry have moved on to the latest nutritional fad: high protein diets. Mainly chicken. Animal rights be damned.

It’s not that the vegan/veggie options are disappearing entirely off the menu, but they are becoming fewer. One writer described it as merely an equilibrium being finally met after an initial over-correction towards plant-based. Wanting to assure all consumers were being catered for, food outlets packed their menus with so many new plant-based options it simply wasn’t financially viable for them. They have now kept the dishes that made them money, but got rid of the offers that people weren’t buying.

As a vegetarian since 1998, I had noticed firsthand this sudden rise in veggie options across the country and, more recently, its decline. New favourites I had started ordering from different places were suddenly unavailable on menus. A trip to New York last year left my wife and I surprised that so few places there catered for vegetarians beyond a single, ill-considered dish. It hadn’t used to be like that. Compared to the UK it felt so backwards. But then the UK started following suit.

What has this got to do with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Dean Burnett’s post? We’ll get there. But first I want to recount an argument I used to have with animal rights activists when I was younger. We were protesting our fourth McDonalds in as many weeks and I raised the question of whether our boycott of the chain and standing outside with our leaflets was maybe less effective a strategy for improving animal rights than it would be to simply encourage moreconsuming of McDonalds’ vegetarian products? If we made it economically viable for McDonalds to sell less meat and more plants then surely they would? The chain weren’t murdering animals because they wanted to be cruel. They wanted to make money and, currently, meat was their means to that money. If selling veggie burgers could be just as lucrative (or even more lucrative) then they would likely pivot to vegetables instead.

The activists disagreed. They hated the idea of giving McDonalds their money even more than they hated the continuing massacre of animals their refusal to engage in the logics of capitalism sustained. Better to feel morally pure than, perhaps, achieve the more moral outcome. The age old battle between deontology and consequentialism. But I think the recent diminishment of plant-based options in the UK food industry exposes something about the logics of capitalism I had forgotten about at the time: a morally neutral economic market only cares what makes them money, and so even if activists poured all their money into making a compelling economic argument for McDonalds to kill fewer animals and sell more veggie burgers, they would only do so for as long as it made them profit. Without a global change in thinking about our diets, and the rights of non-human animals, eventually the novelty market would run out and the company would be back to selling what it had always sold. Capitalism simply doesn’t care about anything loftier than the bottom line. The rise in plant-based diets in the UK was never about animals, or even the powerful environmental arguments against eating meat. It was about personal health and, rightly, recent reactions against ultra-processed foods made consumers realise it was probably healthier for them to be eating “natural” food, like chicken, than processed fake meat alternatives.

Which, finally, brings us back to name changes and neuroscientists. Dean’s post. Change happens whenever we choose to embrace change. When I was first boycotting McDonalds and choosing not to eat meat back in 1998 it seemed impossible that vegetarians like me would ever be catered for in every restaurant in the country. More impossible still that vegans would ever be! Yet, when the decision was made to cash in on the growing boom in plant-based diets that “impossible” change was made real all over the country. Now that the economic motive is no longer there, and people are choosing not to bother again, the change is slipping. Showing that change — even radical change — is simply a matter of effort. Change is always possible if we will it to be. When someone tells you change is too difficult, they are only ever really saying that they can’t be bothered to try.

From now on, therefore, I want you to scrutinise those who say some change you think would make a better world cannot be achieved. Is what they’re saying true, factually? Is it actually impossible? Or is it simply difficult and they are unwilling? And if so, why are they unwilling? What do they gain from things staying as they are and what do they lose from things changing?

The more we recognise how much of the way we do things in the world is the result of human choice rather than unavoidable circumstances, and that some different choices could make a different world, the sooner we might start making such choices and dismantling the impoverished way things are for something better.

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

I’ve defended Noam Chomsky a lot in my time.

I’ve been reading his work since the mid 1990s, and any time I publicly stated any appreciation for his work there would always be someone quickly there to tell me how he turned a blind eye to a genocide here, or an atrocity there, in his research. I’d take the objection on board and then painstakingly explain his wider philosophy of American imperialism and media hegemony — the propaganda model and the manufacturing of consent — and argue back that sometimes accurate information about such things may be difficult to acquire, but that his larger argument seems to remain unscathed even if a specific example or two faltered.

Sometimes the objection to his work was subjective: an individual’s disbelief at his refusal to go along with a traditional narrative of a particular event. His denial of a “genocide” or “atrocity” as genocide or atrocity more a refusal to go along with US propaganda about it than a sign of anything more sinister. Chomsky’s lifelong critique of American foreign policy and capitalist elites wasn’t faultless, but there were a few stale canards out there against his work, raised time and time again, that were widespread acts of intentional propaganda to try and deny the overall soundness of his argument rather than critiques that held any force. Overall, Chomsky’s work has documented decade after decade how America consistently acts in the interests of a small number of powerful people and corporations, at the expense of the wider global population, and how the media has played a continuous role in enabling those acts and keeping the domestic population largely uninformed.

What made his work so compelling for me, was that this worldview wasn’t some wild Conspiracy Theory nonsense about shadowy organisations controlling the global agenda. It was the meticulous laying out of evidence in support of an organic, rational and entirely self-perpetuating accidental conspiracy taking place willingly and in plain sight. Of norms and ideological frameworks that simply ran themselves as those who towed the ideological line tended to rise up the ranks and succeed in the world, and those who asked too many questions, or presented a competing narrative, tended not to. People, therefore, learned to self-censor for their own personal success rather than needing to be forcibly censored. Dominant narratives prevailed and shaped the next chapter of history. And as economic prosperity coincided with ideological compliance, the choice for self-censorship was financially rewarding too. It paid to not think too deeply or ask too many questions about America’s geo-political intentions in the world.

For me then, despite occasional question marks around some of his examples and omissions, and a recognition that (unlike most philosophers) the man never seemed to acknowledge any possible mistakes in his work, change his mind, or admit that he was ever wrong about anything, Noam Chomsky seemed always to be one of the good guys. Out there fighting the good fight and speaking truth to power despite so many attempts to slander his name, ridicule his work, and dismiss him as a crank.

Even those negative aspects of Chomsky I just mentioned — the lack of any public self-reflection or self-criticism of his own work (I once was given the opportunity to interview Chomsky online for UK punk ‘zine, Fracture, in the early 2000s, and when he didn’t return any answers to my questions I suspected it was because one I had asked was whether there was anything he felt he had ever been wrong about or changed his mind on) — were explained by the political weight of his critique. In a country with a history of COINTELPRO and many documented cases of attempted character assassination of any leading figure on the left, Chomsky was perhaps wise to be cautious. Within the propaganda model, complex and nuanced thinking would always lose out to more black or white assurances. Were Chomsky to ever publicly acknowledge some fault in his own thinking, that “Chomsky admits he was wrong” would no doubt be the only fact standing, crowding out all conversation around the many things he was actually right about and shrouding his entire intellectual project in a cloud of doubt. I therefore accepted on some level that the specific target of this particular public intellectual’s critique made it difficult for honest reflection as his work was always entering the world pre-dismissed by the mainstream discourse and carrying the burden of needing to be bullet-proof just to even be listened to.

But in recent months, as you probably already know, Chomsky’s name and image has come up repeatedly in some of the newly released Epstein files. After years of instinctively defending Chomsky from cynical smears to his character, my initial reaction was to seek some less damning explanation for his apparent friendship with a monster. Perhaps, for example, he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes, or ended up in Epstein’s orbit by mistake? But the more I read, the more my instinct for defending Noam Chomsky seemed to have finally run out of ground. While, of course, there have been far worse offenders exposed in these files (and many more likely protected by the redacted and incomplete nature of the drip-feed releases), and the fact of Chomsky relationship with Epstein has been loudly shouted about with clear political motivation, Chomsky’s undeniable involvement with the billionaire sex offender has been heartbreaking to discover and leaves one with serious questions.

On the one hand, philosophers have long argued the importance of distinguishing the person from their argument. Well known ad hominem fallacies and appeals to authority have been dismissed as irrelevant to an argument itself, and it can remain theoretically true that Chomsky turns out to have questionable moral character yet his arguments remain robust. Consider, as comparison, the well-documented racism of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Hume and Locke. Awful though it is, we can despite the men but still appreciate (at least some of) their ideas. In more recent years I have recommended famous modern thinkers to my students or shared some of their excellent philosophical work only for a curious Google from someone in the classroom to reveal terrible accusations of abuse or impropriety. Again, their ideas and arguments remained relevant even if the person making them had now lost our respect.

On the other hand though, sometimes the actions of the thinker, or their vile personal opinions, become reflected in their work. A recognition of a particular prejudice or moral failing could have legitimate impact on their arguments. For example, when Hume argues against the existence of miracles because they have only ever been reported in “ignorant and barbarous nations”, the xenophobic basis of such a dismissal undermines it. Once we accept a level of education and intelligence is possible in the countries of the Bible’s origin that Hume’s racism disallows, we have to find other reasons to dismiss the testimony of those there claiming to have witnessed a miracle.

Some of what Chomsky is reported as having said, for example, can be charitably dismissed by those familiar with his work. Readers of Chomsky will be familiar with his droll writing style and frequent use of dry humour when discussing terrible events and awful people. Hearing that Chomsky is reported to have said maintaining “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein was a “most valuable experience”, we can hear echoes of similar sentiments from Chomsky’s written work when cynically condemning the things he has learned from reading, say, the business press or a particularly biased historical record. Indeed, some of the purported correspondence literally has Chomsky claiming Epstein taught him “about the intricacies of the global financial system” far more than “the business press and professional journals” could. Sentences which could be damning Epstein more than praising him, depending on context.

However, it is clear from the released documents that Chomsky seemed to consider Epstein to be a “friend”. While it is not impossible to find a villain appealing, or stay friends with someone we believe has done terrible things, it does feel strange to think that such an eminent and vocal critic of American capitalism and powerful elites became friends with a figure who seems the very personification of all that Chomsky vilifies in his writing. Of course, Chomsky famously engaged with the things he opposed. Most of his written work details the lengthy engagements he had with books, journals and newspapers he took great issue with but appeared to read voraciously. To praise Epstein’s “extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals” and deem him a “regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation” could be more of Chomsky’s trademark cynical wit describing a fascinating source, fascinating precisely because Epstein exposed his worldview to Chomsky “without a trace of pretentiousness”. A similar reason might explain Chomsky seemingly using Epstein to also get in direct personal contact with people like Steve Bannon.

Likewise, also being charitable, it is absolutely true that Chomsky had many years of personal experience of attempts to slander and defame him, and therefore if he believed Epstein was being similarly smeared in 2019 — whether a friend or foe of Chomsky’s (Chomsky historically defended all manner of arguable reprobates he didn’t politically align with when it came to freedom of speech or anti-smear issues) — it would make sense, if the two were in contact, that Epstein might solicit Chomsky’s advice on how to deal with such a thing. If Chomsky really believed Epstein, his friend, was a victim of a smear campaign then it would explain both him describing “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public” and the advice he is supposed to have offered, advice he has taken himself many times when being accused of things he has not done: “the best way to proceed is to ignore it”.

Even the very worst soundbite from the released files — Chomsky saying he was “fantasising about the Caribbean island” Epstein owned, and where children were sexually abused — can be charitably explained away if we imagine a man who did not know about, or believe, such things about Epstein (despite him being already convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor at the time of their exchanges), and was simply enamoured at the idea of a possible tropical vacation in his future. A vacation which, according to Chomsky’s wife, he never took.

However… Should we be so charitable? And if we aren’t charitable, does Chomsky’s friendship with Epstein, taken at face value, mean that Chomsky’s philosophical arguments about American power and the media should be somehow reevaluated?

Although nothing released so far seems to implicate Chomsky personally in any of the sexual abuse Epstein was involved in, and there is no reason to assume there will be, an argument against being charitable to our interpretation of what has been released so far is that it does show Chomsky repeatedly schmoozing with the very worst example of the sort of amoral billionaire monster his life’s work seems to oppose. Doing so long after Epstein had already been convicted of sexual crimes against minors once and doing so seemingly completely uncritically despite an existing public record against the man. Although Chomsky’s wife, Valeria, apologised last week for their “grave mistake” in being “careless” about not thoroughly researching Epstein’s background before befriending him, and admitted “it was deeply disturbing for both of us to realise we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts”, it does make one ask the question: if Chomsky failed to research Epstein all that thoroughly, what else in his academic work might be equally glazed over so that it fit the conclusion he wanted? And if Chomsky was not aware that the billionaire who, in the words of his wife, “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively” might be doing this “as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for”, then how secure is Chomsky’s claim to understand the hidden ways in which power works across society to achieve the ends of a minority of elites?

Ultimately, Epstein was a blindspot for Chomsky. One he seems to have enjoyed the company of and advantages of being friends with. An example of the way power can corrupt imperceptibly and insidiously by offering certain benefits in return for compliance and support, and the threat of their removal if too many questions are asked.

Finding out Noam Chomsky was friends with Jeffrey Epstein is like finding out that the DIY punk band you’ve always admired for their ethical integrity were secretly funded by Sony all along. The songs might sound the same, but something about them feels different now.

But is the story of an old man, in the latter decades of his life, married to a second wife and trying to sort out the finances of his estate being seduced by a wealthy and influential snake sufficient to undo Chomsky’s lifetime of philosophical work and political activism? Especially at a point in Chomsky’s life where, at 97 years old, he has been bed-bound and unable to communicate at all, let alone defend himself, since a stroke he suffered in 2024? Is it really a sign of something important or merely another example of Epstein’s exploitation? Another self-serving scam, this time targeting the elderly and vulnerable instead of those vulnerable and young?

If Chomsky’s persistent thesis since first criticising the war in Vietnam in the 1960s has been that powerful elites will use their power to hide their crimes against humanity and justify their egregious acts in the language of moral righteousness and necessity, then the case of his latter day friendship with Epstein could be seen as yet another example of just that. A rich and powerful man getting away with terrible crimes because his wealth allowed him protection from an enabling and complicit media, with Chomsky himself being used this time as part of Epstein’s own “propaganda model”, offering (without coercion) his own liberal credentials in support of his friend to bolster Epstein’s false narrative that he had done nothing wrong?

Or, less charitably, Chomsky the celebrity had, at this stage in his life and career, reached the position himself of becoming one of the powerful elites. And did so, as per his own thesis, by turning a blind eye to any discrepancies and moral inconsistencies in those around him from whom he personally benefitted so that he could continue enjoying his privileges, regardless of the potential human cost.

Even if that unthinkable latter scenario were the true one, it seems that on either interpretation of Chomsky’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein it serves, while certainly throwing doubt on the moral character of the philosopher himself, to add only further supporting evidence to the validity of Chomsky’s philosophical argument about the nefarious and self-serving nature of power in America.

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

Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there.

Money is an imposed fiction designed to organise and control the use and exchange of those pre-existing resources, and to motivate people into using them to achieve certain ends. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And imposed economic scarcity and the created need to “earn” a living has led to a cavalcade of necessities which have spawned all sorts of products and ideas. But other motivations are possible. And much of what we humans produce serves only the purpose of profiting someone rather than providing anything of any real value into the world. If we got rid of money we would lose those unnecessary and useless things perhaps. Meanwhile, those wonderful things which do have value and serve a purpose other than paying the bills for someone else, could still be created. Not for pay and profit, but for their use and enjoyment.

It was with this thought in mind I asked my junior Philosophy Club this week to imagine a world where the internet was invented without any profit motive. A world without money that was still motivated to invent computer technology because of its many useful applications. If the internet were invented in such a world, how might it differ from today?

I asked it because it occurred to me that most of the negativity around the internet boils down to the economic model of capitalism which infects it. Spurious influencers begging us to “like and subscribe” so that they can earn an income from their vacuous content. AI slop creeping into feeds so that tech companies can learn what we like and sell it back to us. Social media which mines our personal data and sells it to advertisers. Advertising in general, which generates the revenue most “content creators” get paid by and incentivises quantity over quality. Even competing companies offering variations on the same theme and vying desperately in the attention market for their piece of the pie.

Why are tech companies hesitant or immobile when it comes to stopping hate-speech, violent pornography, or online bullying and misinformation? Because they fear losing customers. Because controversy and scandal creates views and generates cash. The most outrageous, the most awful, the most viral thing gets the most clicks, so what incentive is there to take it down, even if it ruins someone’s life? Two days after starting up the new Philosophy Unleashed Substack, for example, The Guardian revealed how Substack profit from Nazi and other far-right newsletters being sent out on their platform. Which, under capitalism, of course they do!

Even the simple phishing email or online scam that one is vulnerable to when online stems from a profit motive in a world where we need money to live and money is in short supply. Such scammers use the internet to target their victims, but would have no need for their scams if all things they needed were available without a fee. In a world without money, where everything is available for free, what need would there be to scam people out of their already happily empty bank accounts?

Together my students and I imagined an internet used only to connect people. To play games together designed for excellent gameplay and stories, not merely as a means to get you to buy more and more upgrades and updates. To share information which no-one had a financial incentive any more to distort or dispute. To share art and funny things without the intent to get anything out of it. Not clogging up the feed with a billion similar nothings all seeking to get your click, but things that are genuinely funny or interesting. A place to keep in touch with those we love and like, and, yes, maybe even to connect with new people out there with similar interests. But not a minefield of bots trying to trick you into connection to serve some other financial purpose for the bot-masters.

There would still, of course, be some dangers. Just as there remain dangers in real life. The existence of the internet in such a world reminds us that money is not the only motivation, and crimes motivated by things other than money could still be carried out online, just as they currently are. But it remained the case that in today’s real world those sorts of crimes are made worse by the possibilities for financial gain some perpetrators find in them. For instance, someone seeking to trick someone online into meeting them in real life for some terrible act of abuse might still occur (just as such abuse happens offline too), but there at least would not be the sorts of professionalised human traffickers and organised gangs seeking to turn such abuse into a profitable business that we currently have with the internet as it was made under capitalism. Likewise, I am sure that awful far-right hate would continue to spew in an internet made in a world without money. At least to some extent. Such is the cost of free speech. But at least we would lose the hate-speech financially incentivised by social media demagogues or well-funded think-tanks who build empires of bile not because of ideological commitment to a terrible cause but because it lines their pockets every time their hate-speech is shared.

Gone too would be the economic circumstances in which such rhetoric and hatred rise. It becomes hard to falsely blame economic inequality on immigrants, asylum seekers and any other “other” the far-right likes to target when there is no longer an economy! No longer anything people don’t have. No longer anything “they” can be accused of “taking” from you. One suspects, in an internet made in a world without money, any far-right chatter which might still live on to infect online spaces will be confined to easily ignorable faraway corners, along with other cranks and crazies the majority of the world are happy to ignore.

We imagined the phone in our hands as a powerful tool for communication, sharing and hope, rather than a demanding lump of temptations we were all addicted to to serve the financial needs of other people. Something we could use to create and collaborate with instead of passively scroll on for someone else’s profits.

When you think about the fact that, in 2026, most of us keep in touch with friends and family using some sort of platform that accompanies our connection to loved ones with advertising, it is quite a chilling thought. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, as I did, I couldn’t imagine having phone-calls to the same people repeatedly interrupted by commercial messages, or letters we wrote to each other bundled with ads we had to trawl through before we got to the next paragraph. Yet today, this daily financially-motivated commercial violation into such private spheres of life is the norm.

If we took away money right now, everything that exists would still exist. Those natural resources from which things are made would not disappear, and those artificial creations of human ingenuity which combine existing resources into brand new things not available by nature alone could still be produced if the motivation was there. Imagine how much better the internet would be in such a world. Imagine, then, how much better many other things might be which are currently corrupted by that same insidious profit-motive lurking beneath the surface of so many norms and decisions, distorting our everyday life just so that someone else can pay their bills. Bills that we have collectively invented, with the shared fiction of “money”. A fiction it is entirely within our power to end right now with the simple act of disbelief and rejection of this imposed fantasy. A disbelief in money, fuelled by a far stronger belief that a much better world is possible without it.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PHILOSOPHY UNLEASHED SUBSTACK HERE

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