However, if philosophy is to serve as an antidote to the resigned acceptance of injustice, a philosophical education must embrace the constructive imagination. We fail if all we teach students is to be critical. We need to enable our students to conceive of a different and better way for things to be. One of the most powerful defenders of social justice in the twentieth century, Martin Luther King Jr, held up hope in the form of a dream. He imagined a possibility that was different than the reality he experienced and held it up as a beacon. Philosophy at its best enables students to find their beacon.

There are only enough ‘fish’ (paper fish) in the ‘lake’ (a bag I pass around) to allow for most families to take just two fish, if there are to be two fish left in the lake in the end. During the first round of this exercise, students inevitably take so many fish that there are none left in the lake. Students then discuss what has happened and what they ought to do differently in the next round. Some students have strong intuitions that everybody should take an equal amount, while others insist that all that matters is that in the end there are enough fish left to repopulate the lake. Not only is this exercise pedagogically engaging, but it leads students to develop proposals and to evaluate them critically. When successful, students use what they learned in this exercise to begin developing a sense of what they think would be a fair way of distributing resources and to critique the political and social institutions under which they live.

But in many cases these challenges are the result of your actions, the actions of others, social and political institutions, or a combination of all of these. Therefore, the first step in this kind of philosophical education is to shake students out of a complacent and uncritical acceptance of the world as it is.

This requires that it be both critical and imaginative. In order to do this, a philosophical education should go beyond showing students how to be critical thinkers: it must also teach students to imagine how the world could be different than it is and, in so doing, to consider better ways for them and the world to be.

o this question is pragmatic – philosophy teaches you to think and write logically and clearly. This, we tell our students, will be of use to them no matter what path they pursue. We advertise philosophy, then, as a broadly useful means to a variety of ends. There is a lot of truth to this dispassionate answer, but it is also rather disappointing. It sells philosophy short. A different sort of answer dives into profundity – philosophy aims to discover fundamental truths.