THEAETETUS: Well, do you see what we're looking for?
VISITOR: I think I see a large, difficult type of ignorance marked off from the others and overshadowing all of them.
THEAETETUS: What's it like?
VISITOR: Not knowing, but thinking that you know. That's what probably causes all the mistakes we make when we think.
THEAETETUS: That's true.
VISITOR: And furthermore it's the only kind of ignorance that's called lack of learning.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
VISITOR: Well then, what should we call the part of teaching that gets rid of it?
THEAETETUS: The other part consists in the teaching of crafts, I think, but here in Athens we call this one education.
VISITOR: And just about all other Greeks do too, Theaetetus. But we still have to think about whether education is indivisible or has divisions that are worth mentioning.
THEAETETUS: We do have to think about that.
VISITOR: I think it can be cut somehow.
THEAETETUS: How?
VISITOR: One part of the kind of teaching that's done in words is a rough road, and the other part is smoother.
THEATETUS: What do you mean by these two parts?
VISITOR: One of them is our forefathers' time-honored method of scolding or gently encouraging. They used to employ it especially on their sons, and many still use it on them nowadays when they do something wrong. Admonition would be the right thing to call all of this.
THEAETETUS: Yes.
VISITOR: As for the other part, some people seem to have an argument to give to themselves that lack of learning is always involuntary, and that if someone thinks he's wise, he'll never be willing to learn anything about what he thinks he's clever at. These people think that though admonition is a lot of work, it doesn't do much good.
THEAETETUS: They're right about that.
VISITOR: So they set out to get rid of the belief in one's own wisdom in another way.
THEAETETUS: How?
VISITOR: They cross-examine someone when he thinks he's saying something though he's saying nothing. Then, since his opinions will vary inconsistently, these people will easily scrutinize them. They collect his opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same subjects in relation to the same thing and in the same respects. The people who are being examined see this, get angry at themselves, and become calmer toward others. They lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way, and no loss is pleasanter to hear or has a more lasting effect on them. Doctors who work on the body think it can't benefit from any food that's offered to it until what's interfering with it from inside is removed. The people who cleanse the soul, my young friend, likewise think the soul, too, won't get any advantage from any learning that's offered to it until someone shames it by refuting it, removes the opinions that interfere with learning, and exhibits it cleansed, believing that it knows only those things that it does know, and nothing more.
- Plato, The Sophist 229b - 230d (tr. Nicholas P. White)
Well, I'm glad that's over.
On Wednesday, I accepted an offer of almost full funding from the UC Irvine philosophy department. By "almost" I mean that I was waitlisted for funding and the spot I got was actually a California resident spot, so what would have been my stipend is being used to pay for the out of state tuition. This only affects the first year, since it only takes a year to establish residency in California.
When I was applying and waiting anxiously and so forth, I wasn't able to find many resources online that were helpful, so I thought that I would post what I have learned over the last year for the benefit of everyone else who is looking for this sort of information. First, I'm going to give the strong and weak points of my application so there will be some context, and then I'll say what happened in terms of results and when.
| School | PG Ranking | Initial Result | Final Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rutgers University | 2 | Rejected via conventional mail March 12 | ||
| Princeton University | 3 | Rejected via e-mail March 5 | ||
| Stanford University | 6 | Vague responses to repeated email inquiries; finally got unofficial rejection in response to an email on April 8; official rejection via postal mail today (April 18) | Approximately 180 applicants for 8 spots | |
| Harvard University | 7 | Rejected in response to email inquiry March 5 | Approximately 240 applicants. They didn't say how many spots there were, but they list 52 current graduate students (if I can count) on their web-site, so probably about 10 spots. | |
| UCLA | 7 | Rejected via email February 22 | ||
| UC Berkeley | 12 | Wait-listed via email March 17 | I told them I was very interested in their program but probably couldn't come because Lauren had been rejected by their physics department. I did not hear from them again after this. | |
| University of Southern California | 16 | Wait-listed via email February 27 | Rejected via email April 13 | I don't know how many students applied, but the word I got (through unofficial channels) is that they made 9 offers and all 9 offers were accepted. I was the first of two students on the wait list. |
| Yale University | 16 | Rejected via email February 25 | In a cover letter to my writing sample (I used the version of this paper which was reduced to meet the 10,000 word limit for Religious Studies), I asked that it be brought to the particular attention of Kenneth Winkler, since it criticizes an assertion he makes in his book Berkeley: An Interpretation. This gambit evidently did not pay off. | |
| UC Irvine | 20 | Accepted via email January 30; told that the graduate chair would be "working on putting together a financial offer for" me. | Offered partial funding via phone on April 15 (see below) | |
| UC Davis | 35 | Accepted with full funding via email February 22; received funding details via email February 28 | Turned them down because their physics department isn't any good | |
| Boston University | 50 | Wait-listed (position 7 or so) in response to email inquiry on March 12 | See below | Over 200 applicants for 6 spots |
Lauren and I thought we were doing pretty good when we both got in to UC Irvine before the end of January. There was a period of relief. Irvine and Davis both paid for me to visit them in March (note: when you do this, you will be expected to pay for your airfare out of pocket and it can take several weeks to be reimbursed), and I liked both departments. Lauren got in to a wide variety of physics programs and spent a lot of time flying hither and yon. At some of these places, she mentioned that we were getting married, and that she wouldn't be able to come unless I got in there or somewhere nearby, and in several cases the physics department wrote to the philosophy department, but it doesn't seem to have done much good so late in the admissions process. I wonder if it would have been better to mention the "two body" issue up front. The reason we didn't is that we had been advised by professors at Penn that there is still a lot of discrimination against women in physics and it is much worse for married women. Accordingly, we decided not to bring this up until after Lauren was accepted.
When I visited UC Irvine, we were told that, due to the UC system budget crisis, there was not yet funding available. Six letters were in the process of being sent out. I was confident that I was one of them. When I didn't hear anything I wrote to the graduate chair and was told that I in fact offered position 17. Meanwhile, I was in contact with USC where I was in position 1 on the waitlist for admission with funding. When Lauren visited Davis it became clear that this wasn't going to work for us, so I was counting on USC. Boston U got thrown into the mix as well, which wouldn't have been a particularly great option, comparatively speaking, were it not for the fact that Lauren got in to Harvard.
You are ordinarily expected to make a decision on which school you will attend by April 15. Come the middle of April, I was still sitting on wait lists. This was the point at which the process became really stressful. Lauren managed to get extensions from the three schools she was serious considering, depending on where I got in, until the 17th. On the 13th I was rather shocked to be rejected by USC. I emailed UCI and Boston again, a little bit panicked. I started looking at technical jobs in the Boston area, and evaluating the possibility of reapplying after a year. I got conflicting advice from Penn professors on reapplying. When UCI and Boston didn't get back to me I called them on the 14th. By this point I had learned that there were only two or three people ahead of me at UCI and that, in the past, when other departments hadn't filled all of their spots at UCI the funding had sometimes gone to the philosophy department, so I was guardedly optimistic again. I had heard on March 31 that 2 of the 6 spots at Boston were already filled. When I called I learned that that number was now up to 4, but couldn't get an exact number on how many people were ahead of me. I was told that one of the two people who had an offer outstanding had been "unresponsive" as they were trying to get a hold of him, so the process might continue through the 16th.
I called both places again shortly after noon (east coast time) on the 15th. No news. Finally, shortly after 10AM California time (1:00PM here on the east coast) the graduate chair for UCI called me and said that he had an offer of almost full funding for me, and described the details. He said he needed an answer immediately. I said I needed to talk to Lauren and to Boston University. When I pressed for time, he told me that he had classes to teach that would occupy him from 11AM to 5PM, and before that point he had to either start the paperwork for me or call the next person on the wait list, so I would have to get back to him within 30 minutes. I'm not making this up. Fortunately, Lauren wasn't in class, and I had her financial offer from UCLA (which is where she is going) handy, and we had already investigated commutes and such pretty thoroughly, so I was able to get a hold of Lauren on the phone, and we decided that if Boston did not have a fully-funded offer for me I would accept this one (we weren't sure what we were going to do if they did have an offer). I called Boston, and everything was still up in the air, so I accepted at Irvine.
An interesting note: on the 14th, Lauren wrote to UCI's physics department telling them that she wouldn't be coming because (among other factors) I still had not received any funding. Very shortly after I received my funding offer, the physics department contacted her to ask if she would be able to come now that I had funding. The physics department was recruiting her fairly aggressively; it is not clear whether this had anything to do with the resolution to my funding situation.
This post has been mostly narrative, because my experience is mostly all I have to draw on in terms of advice on the process. In retrospect, here is what I would do differently:
It all worked out alright for me in the end, by the grace of God (there were a lot of people praying). Best of luck to everyone else!
I am increasingly of the belief that one of the biggest problems - and the root of many other problems - with contemporary Evangelicalism is what I call "hyper-Reformation theology." I don't mean hyper-Calvinism. I use the term "Reformation theology" to refer to five points which are far more fundamental to the Reformation that the points of Calvinism: namely, the five solas. By the term "hyper-Reformation theology," I mean a collection of exaggerated caricatures of these essential doctrines which are currently popular among Evangelicals. The most visible of these is "hyper-sola scriptura", which I have discussed before, but there are similar positions for each of the others: "sola fide" and "sola gratia" become an excuse for antinomianism; "solus Christus" and "soli deo gloria" mean we shouldn't ever mention any dead saints, and Mary the mother of Christ is not to be mentioned except at Christmas. Now, I deliberately state these absurdly, but I really think that these sorts of caricatures are behind a lot of the problems in contemporary Evangelicalism, and I know that, for my part, it was not until recently that I had any real idea of how to finish the sentences ("scripture alone ... what?"). Now Johnny-Dee is pointing to a very interesting article by J.P. Moreland on "hyper-sola scriptura" which he provocatively calls "Evangelical over-commitment to the Bible." I don't agree with everything he says, but I think he appreciates the nature of the problem and the fact that it can be addressed without rejecting inerrancy or "sola scriptura," properly understood. He also has some interesting reflections on how we got here, which have to do with the sociology of education.
An op-ed in today's New York Times bemoans the fact that none of the leading presidential candidates read Latin. (Well, Giuliani apparently studied it briefly in his Catholic high school.) In all of US history, there have only been 9 presidents who have not studied Latin. Apparently James Garfield even taught both Greek and Latin at the college level before becoming president. Even George W. Bush has a moderately extensive background in Latin. This marks a shift not only in our education system, but in our political system: whereas it was once the case that many (at the beginning of US history, all) of our politicians had broad educational backgrounds and professional experiences, today most are career politicians with narrow training. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rudy Giuliani (who the author of the article considers to be the front-runners) all majored in political science in college, and are effectively career politicians.
On the other hand, I think it is now safe to say that Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are at least second tier candidates, since they placed first and third, respectively, in the Virginia GOP retreat straw poll (Fred Thompson came in second; the rest of the list, in order, was Giuliani, Romney, McCain, Hunter, Tancredo), and neither of them is a career politician: Paul was a physician, and Huckabee a pastor. Both of these fields involve a lot of knowledge outside the scope of political science, which I regard as a good thing, as long as its combined with political knowledge. I don't know, however, if either of them speaks Latin. (Huckabee, as a Protestant pastor, probably had a year each of Greek and Hebrew, but no Latin, in seminary.)
A Latin translation of the Op-Ed is also available.
Douglas Groothuis, a philosophy professor at Denver Seminary has some interesting thoughts on Christianity, philosophy, and education in his article A Christian Philosophy of Education on his blog, The Constructive Curmudgeon. An excerpt:
the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a philosopher are a strong and lived-out inclination to pursue truth about philosophical matters through the rigorous use of human reasoning, and the ability to do so with some intellectual facility. By “philosophical matters” I mean the enduring questions of life’s meaning, purpose, and value as they relate to all the major divisions of philosophy (primarily ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics). Not all Christians can be philosophers, but all should think philosophically (i.e., critically and carefully) about their own worldview and how it relates to the intellectual challenges they face from other worldviews.
Syndicated columnist and ABC news reported John Stossel has an editorial at TownHall.com (HT: WorldMagBlog) on the benefits of introducting free market competition to the primary/secondary education system through a voucher-type system. Most of the points he makes are obvious - as economists say, idealized free markets lead to Pareto-optimal states, and competition brings a system that much closer to the idealized free market - but the article is nevertheless worth a read. In short, under the competitive system "Bad schools will close and better schools will open. And the better schools won't all be the same." Stossel points out that no one can predict exactly what will happen in a free market, but we do know that the best ideas win out. He also gives some helpful real world examples of things that have already been tried. Check it out.
In the comments to this post on recent attempts to insert intelligent design into public high schools as philosophy, Ed Darrell and I have been having a discussion about more general questions of public education. I thought it would be a good idea to write a piece about my general view of this subject here, since the discussion is looking like its about to get quite long and detailed.
As I see it, there are two issues here: the government's use of tax money to fund education, and the government's exercise of power over how education is done. Furthermore, there are two facets to each of these issues: the legal question (does the US Constitution grant the government this authority?) and the theoretical issue (should the government have this authority?). This makes a total of four topics for discussion. First, however, let's look at a more general question about taxation and the moral justification of government.
Mr. Darrell recently commented, "Paying taxes to education [of] children is not confiscation. Government by consent of the governed is not despotism. Democracy is not dictatorship." Now, there is a sense in which all of this is true. That is, there is a real difference between having your money stolen and used for private purposes for the benefit of the thief, and paying taxes to government which are used for the general benefit of society. There is a real difference between a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" and a despot who holds power by force. There is a real difference between power being vested in the people, and power being vested in a single man.
However, I believe there is also another sense in which these distinctions are not so pronounced as people generally think. If we choose not to pay for the education of others, we are thrown in prison. In this sense, this type of taxation IS properly described as confiscation; the government applies coercive force to get our money and give it to someone else. "Government by the consent of the governed" is a misnomer: many years ago, the people of this country willingly established our government, but people today are not permitted to "opt out." If someone attempts to remove himself from the social contract (as people, in fact, have), the government applies coercive force to them. I, personally, were I offered the choice, would choose the US government as it is presently constituted over anarchy (although I see much room for improvement in the present government). However, the fact that I would give you money if asked gives you no right to steal it without asking. My rights are violated simply because I have no opportunity to make the choice of whether to give it to you or not. Not ALL of the governed consent. Absolute democracy has been called "the tyranny of the majority," and it might as well be called "dictatorship of the majority." This is why we have a constitutionally limited republic instead. Only those constitutional limitations ensure that our democracy is better than dictatorship. Democracy can, in fact, be worse than dictatorship, because the mob has no direction. It is entirely unpredictable and sways back and forth depending on the mood of the moment. Dictators tend to at least pursue definite ends (although, of course, this can make them worse rather than better, if those ends are evil), rather than to act completely at random. It is the constitutional limitations of our republic, protecting unpopular opinions and limiting what the majority may dictate, that ensures the superiority of our form of government over ditatorship.
Back to the issue at hand. Public education is obviously a good thing. That is, it is good for just anyone to be able to go get an education, and not only the rich. But in this country when we speak of "public education" we don't just mean education available to anyone, we mean socialized education. There are other ways of implementing public education that don't invovle government control, as for instance scholarships offered by private universities and independent charities. These have existed on the primary and secondary education levels as well. However, they have never been good enough to make education truly public, as the socialized system has. I believe that they could be good enough in a culture that placed enough value on education that many many people gave to these charities, but they never have been. As such, I want to make clear that, despite the discussion below, I wouldn't want to suddenly abolish the current system. However, I do think that it is deeply flawed, both in areas of legality and in areas of political morality. Let us discuss the issue at each level off government at which it might be addressed, in turn.
First, the federal government. The federal government has only the authority explicitly granted to it by the Constitution (as the 9th and 10th amendments make clear). The Preamble to the Constitution does not give the government an unlimited power to, for instance, "promote the general welfare." Rather, it merely states that the founders believed that by organizing the government in the way they do in the main body of the Constitution they could "promote the general welfare" and acheive the other ends listed in the Preamble. The subtext, it seems to me, is that if they have failed in these ends, they invite us either to use the amendment process, or to get rid of the Constitution and start over. The Preamble is merely a statement of purpose. Nor does the federal government have unlimited power to make laws which it deems "necessary and proper" - if this were the case, Art. I Sect. 8 of the Constitution would be unnecessary. Rather, Art. I Sect. 8 Para. 18 says that the legislature may "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof." (emphasis added.) That is, it may make the laws that need to be made in order to make effective use of the powers given to the federal government elsewhere in the Constitution. In a recent marijuana case, Justice Scalia, who has a very conservative (not in the sense of Republican, but in the sense of restricted) reading of this section in general, ruled, for instance, that prohibiting the transport of marijuana across state lines was part of regulating "interstate commerce," and that, because the government could not easily do this without prohibiting marijuana altogether, prohibition of marijuana was "necessary and proper" to "regulation of interstate commerce." But the necessary and proper clause doesn't just say the the government can do whatever it deems necessary and proper. It must be necessary and proper to the exercise of some authority the government has elsewhere.
Now, there is no mention of education in Art. I Sect. 8. I therefore conclude that, on the legal issue, the federal government has no power to give money to education or to regulate it in any way, except of course for regulations on interstate commerce, which may cover "distance learning" programs where the student and the university are in different states, or boarding schools paid for by parents living in another state, or similar circumstances.
Now, how about the moral issue? One person is forced to pay taxes to finance another's education. I see no moral justification for this whatsoever. Sure, I ought to be willing to voluntarily assist with the education of others, but this doesn't justify the government in forcing me. Furthermore, education, especially at the primary level, necessarily involves some degree of indoctrination, and government control of how children are indoctrinated is a serious violation of the rights of parents, especially when the governnment requires children to attend school. Since the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, the federal government does exert a degree of control over primary and secondary school curriculum, and this is a bad thing.
On to the state level. The 10th Amendment makes it clear that the state governments have powers which the federal government does not. As such, it may be the case that a state is legally justified in running a public education system, depending on how its constitution is written. Nothing in the Federal Constitution seems to prohibit this, as long as it cannot be construed as depriving anyone of liberty, which would make it run afoul of the 14th Amendment.
As for the moral issue, I don't see how it is any different on the state level than the federal level, so I must continue to, in principle if not in practice, oppose (socialized) public education, even if it takes place entirely at the state level.
Finally, what if education was handled on the city level? This, I think, would be a great improvement. In fact, most control over education is on this level, and much of it is funded by property tax levys. If a person doesn't like living in a city, there are many states, especially in the western US, that have large areas that are not governed by any city council. This gives the "implicit social contract" argument real application in this situation.
Suppose public education was controlled and funded entirely on the city level. Here I believe that, because of the extra strength granted to the "social contract" argument by the possibility of "opting out," the system could have moral justification. If you don't like what one city does, there are many cities and there are areas that are not in a city. Furthermore, cities could choose whether or not to admit people who do not live in the city and do not pay property taxes. Some cities who were feeling charitable would no doubt admit everyone. Others might not admit outsiders, or might charge them tuition. This would also create better free market competition between schools, since every one could do essentially whatever it wanted. They would all want to have better placement records in colleges and jobs, and parents would want their children in the best one. Schools would be free to innovate in order to acheive this end. This, I believe, would be much better than what currently exists certainly morally, and possibly also practically.
Brian Leiter, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas Austin, points to an LA Times article about a lawsuit against a California public school district over an attempt to introduce an elective course entitled "philosophy of design." The suit charges that the course is about promoting a particular religion, rather than looking at the issue in the sort of balanced way a permissible "comparative relgion" course would. Now, if the charge is true and the course teaches only one viewpoint and seeks to convince students of that viewpoint, then it is a bad philosophy class (the constitutional issue is, of course, also somewhat important, but I tend to ignore it since the federal deparment of education is unconstitutional anyway). However, evaluating the course is not my primary interest. What I'm interested in are Leiter's comments. He says,
Of course, there are real philosophical issues about naturalism and intelligent design, but they have nothing to do with the proposed course in California, and, indeed, they are far too hard for high school students. ( ... It would be a marvel if there were high school students prepared to sort through the issues about substance dualism, antirealism about material objects, and the theory of perception that are implicated in genuine philosophical discussion of the issue.)
Are high school students prepared to handle these issues? Can they be taught on that level without doing more harm than good? The thing about philosophy, in my view, is that, at least historically, the questions have been more important than the answers. This is certainly true pedagogically (consider the "Socratic" method). Furthermore, the questions philosophers consider are the questions that any deep thinker will eventually get to, with or without actually studying philosophy. If you start from any observation and ask "why" enough times, eventually you will get to philosophy.
Nevetheless, there is a strong temptation toward elitism in philosophy, and it is very understandable. For instance, I can personally attest that the more I study philosophy the more I become irritated with people who refuse to think. Also, because of the universal availability of the questions, there are a lot of people out there who want to call themselves philosophers but have had no schooling, and this is something of an affront to someone who spends 8 to 10 years studying to become a philosopher (I guess I belong to the former group, since I call myself a philosopher after not even 3 full years of school, but I'm working toward that latter). However, I hold that this usage of language is legitimate. A "philosopher" is just that - a lover of wisdom. The term was used by Socrates/Plato to contrast with the sophists who claimed to actually have wisdom. The philosopher claims only to love and pursue it. Now, some people have pursued it farther than others, and they want a little credit, and they deserve more than a little, but does that mean that no one else is competent to think about philosophical issues? No! In many cases, the same evidence is available to all of us, so it would in fact be a logical fallacy to believe something just because some philosopher says it; everyone has to think about it for himself.
Now, back to the issue at hand: Leiter asserts that it is highly unlikely that any high school student could grapple adequately with the issues involved. Do they need to grapple adequately? Is it not of pedagogical value just to have them start thinking about it, and wanting more information? Intelligent design might even become an entry for a general introduction to philosophy since it has bearing on issues of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language (via questions of whether religious texts are consistent with evolution), and so forth.
Leiter lists three issues as examples of things that intelligent design is related to, and I say that they are all things that high school students could benefit by asking questions in relation to. This is not to say that everyone is equally good at answering this question, or that there is no priveleged place for professional philosophers, it is merely to say that high school students could benefit from being trained to ask the right kind of questions, and to start looking at a few possible answers, and anyone willing to put in the work is capable of accomplishing at least this much under a competent teacher (or perhaps just with a good book on the subject).
The first issue is "substance dualism." This view is also known as Cartesian dualism. It is the view that there are two completely different types of substance in the universe: the physical and the spiritual (or mental). That is, the physical world is one type of substance, and minds or souls are another. This is a question everyone is capable of understanding. When you ask "do I have a soul?" you implicitly ask the question of substance dualism. Descartes' Meditations are not difficult to read; motivated high school students with good teachers could easily get through it. That is not to say that there are not difficult problems in the text that have been debated by philosophers for centuries, and that people have devoted many years of scholarship to solving, but the basic outlines of Descartes' thoughts are within the reach of any thinking person. So is the question of substance dualism. Now, the contemporary philosophical literature on the subject is much more difficult, but that does not mean that high school students can't "sort through issues about substance dualism." They won't do it as well as professional philosophers, but then they don't understand Newtonian mechanics as well as professional physicists, but no one thinks they shouldn't be taught Newtonian mechanics. In fact, in many high school physics or chemistry classes the very most basic principles of quantum mechanics and relativity are at least mentioned in a qualitative sort of way, and these are extremely difficult issues! But that doesn't mean high school students can't start trying to wrap their minds around ideas like superpositions or wave-particle dualism or "warped" space. Likewise, high school students are equipped to start asking questions about substance dualism, if they are sufficiently motivated and well taught.
Leiter's second issue is "anti-realism about material objects." What he means, I think, is basically the same idea as "representation dualism" (there are a lot of "dualisms"). This is a concept which I personally believe (a) to have been pioneered by a favorite of mine, Parmenides, and (b) to be the really foundational question that makes it possible to start doing metaphysics as something distinct from physics. Representation dualism claims that the world we see (the representation) is not identical with the "ontological ground-floor," as it were, of the universe. That is, if the world we see is real at all there exists something that is more real. If one takes the description of the universe from, e.g., particle physics to be fundamental, one is already endorsing representation dualism, because the particles are not the things that we are aware of experiencing in every day life. In fact they are not even similar. This issue really isn't that hard to start inquiring about either, as you can see.
Finally, he mentions "theory of perception." Now, I don't even want to begin to discuss theory of perception, because there are so many issues and I'm not sure which ones count as "basic," but clearly we all know what perception is, what it means to perceive, and we are all equipped to at least start asking questions.
I hold that asking these questions is greatly beneficial to intellectual development, even if one doesn't arrive at a good or satisfactory answer. However, there is the issue of whether the students can apply these issues to intelligent design. I think the answer is yes. Going from "are there non-physical substances?" to "is there a God?" is not hard. Seeing the difficulty of interaction between substances, particularly unlike substances, is also not hard (but solving the difficulty is; that's what makes i a "difficulty"!). Asking questions like, "if the world has a Creator, what kind of being is it?" is also not hard (but, again, answering them is). Asking whether the world we see is the fundamental reality, and understanding the arguments of Berkeley and Hume that it can't be, is not hard. Answering that question is. Asking all these questions, and making first halting attempts to at least understand what the possible range of answers is is of great benefit to one's intellectual development. If the class was taught well, I don't understand how anything other than excessive academic elitism could motivate an educator in the field of philosophy to oppose it.
Now, Leiter does go on to charge that "this course is obviously just masquerading as philosophy in order to present crackpot theories as though they had scientific support or standing," and perhaps he is right. Perhaps the course doesn't exist for the purpose of an examination of the philosophical issues surrounding intelligent design. Perhaps, instead, the "philosophy" label is merely an excuse to push religious indoctrination into public schools. If he has good reason to believe that this is the case (and, as I said, I haven't investigated this issue), then Leiter is quite justified in his opposition to the course. As I said, IF it is taught well, there is no good reason to oppose it. However, given the degree of knowledge about philosophy found in most public school teachers (and most people, in general), and given the (lack of) availability of good textbooks, it may be highly unlikely that the class will be good. I merely hold that Leiter greatly overestimates the amount of difficulty there is in bringing difficult philosophical issues to high school students.