In this article, I argue that philosophy must be taught mandatorily in primary education, in light of considerations about epistemic injustice. I maintain that denying primary school students access to philosophical education wrongs them as epistemic agents, by limiting their opportunities to develop intellectual resources required for justified reasoning about norms of belief, action and emotion. I hold that such limitations constitute a direct form of epistemic injustice in a broad sense, understood as damage to epistemically significant capacities. Moreover, I claim that these limitations increase vulnerability to narrower forms of epistemic injustice, including at least testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, by holding back the cultivation of cognitive virtues and critical thinking dispositions that function as safeguards against prejudicial, discriminatory and irrational belief-formation processes. I conclude that since epistemic injustice inflicts significant harm on individuals as epistemic subjects, educational policymakers ought to prevent it where possible and, thus, establish philosophy as a core component of primary school curriculum.
This collective writing was catalysed by a request from our Faculty Research Office for the School of Education to provide a list of journals that publish 'quality research' in education. Tasked with compiling this list, the first author invited all academic staff to name up to three journal titles that they considered fitted this description. The list was already well over 50 titles long, based on responses from fewer than half of the academic staff of the School, when emails of protest interrupted the process. Colleagues queried the value and validity of such a list, and its possible use in future redundancy rounds. In addition to halting the compilation of the list, the first author called a meeting to hear and discuss these concerns, and initiated the process of writing this article-positive ways to respond to what had become a fraught situation that threatened collegial harmony. This collective writing highlights forms of educational research that exceed traditional pseudo-scientific methods based on empirical data. We argue it is crucial that our universities understand the breadth of forms of educational research, in order to honour the potential for education to contribute to future human flourishing.
