The world leans towards philosophy from secondary school without settling it: 55 % yes against 45 % no, and no undecided voters. It is one of the tightest results in the archive.
Gender explains nothing here: men and women split exactly in two, in identical proportions. That is rare enough to note, and it signals that the fault line lies elsewhere.
It is generational, and it is stark. The 25-34s and the 45-54s are unanimously in favour, the 18-24s mostly in favour, while the 55-64s and the over-65s reject the idea outright. The further you get from the classroom, the more you doubt what it can absorb.
This is the busiest thread of this archive period, and above all the most genuinely dialogic: several exchanges answer each other over multiple turns rather than stacking positions. The refusal camp holds two arguments. Priority should go to the basics (spelling, grammar, mathematics, geography), and pupils, already overloaded, do not all have the required maturity; getting them to think, yes, throwing them at Plato or Kant, no.
The supportive camp does not dispute the difficulty, it disputes the conclusion. Its best-received reply turns the objection around: if many pupils lack openness, that is a reason to introduce philosophy, not to withhold it, provided it is done gradually. Another voice identifies a problem of form rather than substance: the subject suffers from prejudice, and is no more abstract than advanced mathematics, which draws far less criticism on that score.
The thread ends on unexpected common ground: make the subject concrete by applying the great theses to everyday examples. Even opponents ask « how would you make it more concrete? », a sign that the disagreement is less about philosophy's usefulness than about how to teach it.