"The greatest thing I know is that I know nothing". A beautiful doc on how teaching philosophy calms the angry kids of Belfast

We’re late to this award-winning documentary (which made the Oscars long-list for Best Documentary this year), but we’re delighted to feature it on DA: Young Plato: The Philosophy Boys of Ardoyne. The trailer is above and the blurb is below:

YOUNG PLATO charts the dream of Elvis-loving school headmaster Kevin McArevey – a maverick who is determined to change the fortunes of an inner-city community plagued by urban decay, sectarian aggression, poverty and drugs.

The all-boys primary school in post-conflict Belfast, Northern Ireland, becomes a hot house for thinking and questioning, as the headmaster encourages the children to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of their community, and sends his young wards home each day armed with the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosophers.

The boys challenge their school-friends, parents and neighbors to find alternatives to violence and prejudice, and to challenge the mythologies of war. YOUNG PLATO is full of humour and shines a positive light on contemporary Northern Ireland, offering a model for building a culture of peace in these troubling times.

The school has a “Philosophy Room” wall, with Socrates on the wall: “The greatest thing I know is that I know nothing.” When teaching about calming conflict, Seneca and the Stoics come in handy: “10 ways you can control anger” [link].

This RTE article provides a wider context:

When he was three years old, Kevin McArevey watched his father being taken away by soldiers who burst into their home with dogs and guns. His mother's face was split open by a soldier's rifle butt and she needed seven stitches.

Kevin remembers this day vividly. What helped him choose the path of peace as an adult, Ryan wanted to know? "Education", says Kevin.

Now a school principal, McArevey teaches philosophy to young boys in his school, the boys-only state school Holy Cross. He does it to promote mental health in the classroom, but he's also teaching the boys to process past events in their own community.

Holy Cross Girls School (sister school to Kevin’s school) in Belfast’s Ardoyne made international headlines in the early 2000's for all the wrong reasons. The world watched as the girls were escorted to school by riot police, while screaming adults threw hot tea and balloons filled with urine in their direction. The wider context was eclipsed by the screams of small children.

20 years on, Kevin McArevey is teaching boys whose parents were among the Holy Cross children who lived through the troubles and the children are steeped in their parent’s history, even if they don’t fully understand it. Kevin says that there has to be some way of processing this:

You have to look at the idea of trans-generational trauma, which is a legacy of The Troubles. What that brings is addictive natures such as alcohol, drugs, domestic abuse, gambling. And this is everywhere. As teachers and educators, we have to deal with the outworkings of that, and the outworkings of that are the children. So they’re coming with the baggage and we want to give them opportunities to say: There’s a way out of this. Education is a way out of this.

As a principal, Kevin made the decision to show his boys the news footage of what happened in 2001. He says the children were genuinely shocked and horrified as they had never seen it before. What’s more, it was happening to their own parents as small children:

You have to talk about it. You have to have a conversation about it. What’s going on in the house now? How are parents now with the trauma? How are we coping? It’s very real. It’s very real for the parents. I need the kids to be able to think there’s nothing you can’t talk about, that there’s nothing you can’t have a conversation about; because that’s what philosophy is.

Kevin is convinced that teaching Seneca, Plato and Aristotle to primary school kids will help them navigate their lives in multiple ways, and he’s putting his ideas to the test every day at school: "Promoting mental health and well-being through philosophy. That’s what we’re doing."

The trick is, though, to understand that philosophy is not about reading boring old books and memorizing theories. Kevin says it’s a thing you do, a conversation with yourself and others about things that are important to you: "Philosophy is an activity. It’s not a theory."

More on Young Plato here, where you can buy a streaming of the movie, and there’s a philosophical tool-kit for teachers.