This ASU professor's philosophy camp gives high schoolers space to dive into big questions

With school out for the summer, there are all kinds of options for kids to go to camp — there’s sleep-away camp, as well as day camps with activities ranging from sports to cooking to technology to the arts.

But Angela Rodriguez has an option many parents may not have thought of: philosophy camp.

Rodriguez is assistant director for the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University and a PhD student in the philosophy department, studying technology addiction. She’s also the founder of The Dialectic, which started in 2022.

She says kids come from all over the country to the camp hosted at ASU. And when she stopped by the studio, The Show asked how she describes the program.

Full conversation

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I mean, so the way that there's a whole community of people who do what they call philosophy for children. And the way that they describe the kind of environment is that it's a community of inquiry. So really the thing that we're doing is we're getting together to kind of investigate topics, investigate questions, and the kind of highlight is that we don't give them any answers. And so really, it's up to this kind of group of students to decide what they're going to take away from the week that we spend together.

MARK BRODIE: So, you set sort of a topic or an issue that is to be discussed and debated, and you just kind of let them take it from there?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Well, we design activities. We don't give them total free rein. People need a little bit of guidance. But no, most of the things that we try to do are we give them really short things to read to kind of spark thoughts, activities, debates. We've done scavenger hunts, just different kinds of skits, things that they can do just to kind of get the ball rolling.

And then, yeah, we set a topic every year. And then the whole week we are together from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. investigating things related to that topic.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so I want to get to the topic for this year's edition in just a moment. But, I've got to ask because stereotypically, summer camp for kids is you're swimming in the lake and you're playing sports and you're doing arts and crafts and all that kind of stuff. It's not so much philosophy. Is the stereotype I guess maybe wrong to some degree?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: No, I think the stereotype's right. And I should say I'm all on board for people that want to swim in the lake and play sports and do arts. I love doing all of those things.

The reason to kind of run this alternative kind of camp, this philosophy summer camp is for kids that the thing that they really want is something that they haven't been able to experience kind of throughout the rest of the year, which is, you know, at school, it's kind of like, I'm going to give you information, you're going to digest that information, you're going to give that information back to me.

And so, it's really a different kind of environment for them to like be asked to think for themselves and be asked to solve problems and talk to their peers and work through disagreements. And it's I think the kids that are drawn to our camp are a particular sort of person, who are really interested in engaging with the world on kind of a deeper level where you question your assumptions.

MARK BRODIE: I was curious about who who typically attends your camps. It sounds like maybe students who aren't quite getting what they need or want in school and are looking for something maybe a little deeper, is that fair?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, no, I think that that's the right idea is that there's — I grew up in the military, and so there's what they call stupid questions. And so that's not a question about how things are going to go today or how things work in the real world, that's a question that's like somewhere out there in the universe that we're we're not really interested in answering right now.

And so I think a lot of kids have these questions, you know, teenager are naturally curious. Why are we here? What are we supposed to do with our lives? What am I seeing on the news? How am I supposed to digest that information? What am I supposed to do with my friends? They've got like all these questions going on and they don't often have places where they can go to have those conversations.

MARK BRODIE: So, this year's theme is building better communities. What kinds of topics and issues — because that could probably go a lot of different ways — how are you trying to sort of focus the conversation? What are you trying to focus the conversation on this year?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: So, one of our focuses in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics right now is we're talking a lot about civic virtues. So the ways that we can kind of come together during really divisive times and arguably we're in a pretty divisive time right now.

And so one of the focuses for the week is going to be on what we call these civic virtues, which are things like empathy, humility, open-mindedness, civility, giving people the benefit of the doubt. And so, what these practices not only can add to our relationships with other people, but what they can add to our own lives.

We've all had the experience of one day learning that we were wrong about something that we were really sure about. And so, kind of reflecting on those experiences and realizing that, "I might actually be wrong about a lot more things than I think I'm really right about," is one of the ways that we kind of cultivate humility and work with the people around us.

That's one of the things that we'll be talking about this summer is kind of the civic virtues, but also, you know, our information is sorted through algorithms and given to us by people who do not have our best interest at heart. And so how should we interact with the kind of information that's delivered to us and the epistemic bubbles that we're all sorted into, the echo chambers that we're all sorted into?

MARK BRODIE: What is it like hearing high school students talk about some of these issues?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: I am always impressed by how much our students have thought about these issues.

MARK BRODIE: Like before they get to camp?

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Before they get to the camp. Because if you would have 10 years ago run a program like this, most students would have, I would say, a lot less contact with the things that are happening outside of their immediate surroundings.

But now, most high school students, they have this magic box in their pocket that tells them everything that's happening in the world, and there's all this stuff going on on social media and they're they're just in this kind of swamp of information.

And so they've often thought really deeply about these things, even before they get to us. The thing that we provide is a way for them to kind of pick apart those issues into pieces that they can actually wrestle with, instead of these really overwhelming things that are kind of coming at them.

MARK BRODIE: Like things that maybe they can relate to or that are specifically relevant to their lives as part of a larger issue.

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, absolutely. So ... some of the programs that we've run in the past have kind of taken on kind of timely issues. When smartphones were becoming really ubiquitous and we were coming out of the pandemic, we ran a program on technology and its effects on well-being.

And so, all of these students had been stuck at home, alone, in their rooms, on their phones, and they had thought a lot about that relationship, about their relationship with their phones.

When they get to us, that gives us the opportunity to talk about things like who designed your phone? What goals did they have in mind when they designed your phone? What kinds of things are you doing on your phone? What kinds of things could you be doing if you weren't on your phone? What's the opportunity cost here?

And so, we take that kind of big overwhelming issue, which is, "I'm stuck alone in my room on my phone," and break it down into these smaller pieces that we can digest and have conversations about.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Angela Rodriguez, assistant director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at ASU and founder of The Dialectic, which will be taking place at the beginning of June. Angela, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ: Thanks for having me.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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