How in-school philosophy can combat extremism: BBC.

BBC News | 8th November 2017

Since 2011, Bjorn Ihler, one of the survivors of Norway’s Utoya island massacre, has dedicated his life to combatting the kind of extremism that motivated its perpetrator, Anders Brevik.

Through the ‘Extremely Together’ initiative, Ihler now campaigns for the teaching of critical thinking and philosophy in schools.

“Students need to learn to analyse the information they receive, and to understand that there are many ways to interpret information, rather than see the world as black and white.”

Ihler also recalls how the advice of his former philosophy teacher helped him in the aftermath of the attack.

“I was all over the place, I couldn’t make sense of anything, so I decided to call my old high school philosophy teacher,” he says. “He had taught me that people can see the world in different ways. If Breivik had had him as a teacher, I think things could have been very different.”

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