Resources that fit

Units and bundles for this topic

Sartre and the Priority of Existence is the place to start. The Existentialism Bundle brings all four units together for $49.90, and Upper Secondary Complete adds the Habermas, music, media and psychology units for whole-course planning.

The teaching problem

Why existentialism works in Grades 11–12, and how the units fit

Seventeen-year-olds are making the decisions existentialism talks about: courses, careers, who to listen to and what to do when the advice runs out. That is the strength of the topic and also the risk, because students easily hear "you are free" as "anything is possible". The units are written against that misreading. In the first one, a student's family has already chosen her profession and a classmate says she is no different from a pair of scissors designed for cutting. In the last, one person has three training offers and another only one because of money. Students have to hold freedom and situation together from the first lesson.

The four units form a deliberate arc. Sartre and the Priority of Existence sets up existence, essence, project and facticity through Existentialism Is a Humanism. Anguish, Abandonment and Despair adds Sartre's vocabulary for acting without guarantees, and bad faith as self-deception about freedom or situation. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus then widens the frame: de Beauvoir ties one person's freedom to the freedom of others, and Camus describes the absurd as a tension between the demand for meaning and a world that gives no final answer. Sartre and Neuroscience is the outlier, a systematic comparison with the Libet paradigm and the readiness potential rather than a historical debate.

What runs through all four is a single question: how can people act responsibly without an ultimate guarantee of meaning, value or success? The teacher guides return to it constantly, and the practice assessments are built on it. A career guide claims "You are completely free" and blames anyone who fails. A team leader says "I only followed instructions" after a project collapses. A headline announces "Brain scan ends the debate: nobody is responsible". A university group promises complete self-realization while demanding unpaid work. Each one is an argument students can reconstruct, analyze with precise concepts and judge, rather than a quotation to admire.

A sequence that works

A suggested order through the existentialism units

This order moves from Sartre's core thesis to its consequences, then to other thinkers and finally to the science.

1. Sartre and the Priority of ExistenceBegin with the manufactured object example: scissors versus a family's career plan. Students write the argument as premises and a conclusion, then work through Lea and Omar, a copied assignment, and two competing readings of Sartre. The concept page fixes existence, essence, project and facticity for the rest of the strand.
2. Anguish, Abandonment and DespairA student representative wishes for a rule that would decide for her. Jonas picks an adviser he knows will agree, then says he had no choice. A campaign group wants certainty before it starts. Students learn Sartre's three terms as structures of responsible action, then test bad faith on two social-role cases.
3. Sartre, de Beauvoir and CamusCompare three thinkers through shared questions rather than biographies. De Beauvoir is treated as an independent thinker on concrete and reciprocal freedom. Camus is not folded into Sartre. Students analyze a company offering training only late in the evening and a person asking whether endless work without completion is worthless.
4. Sartre and NeuroscienceBring in free will and the brain. Students separate determinism, predictability and coercion, reconstruct the Libet timeline with teaching values, and examine the 2012 accumulator model by Schurger, Sitt and Dehaene. The closing comparison asks which empirical findings would genuinely matter to an account of responsible agency.
5. Cross-unit assessmentFinish with one practice assessment that draws on the whole strand. The university group from the de Beauvoir and Camus unit works well: it promises complete self-realization, requires unpaid work at fixed times and treats criticism as a lack of commitment. Some members want to leave, others want to change the conditions.

Where it goes wrong

Misconceptions to plan for

Discussion norms

Keeping personal choices in the room without making it personal

Existentialism invites students to talk about their own lives, and some of the cases sit close to home: family career expectations, caring for a relative, money limiting training options. The units handle this by keeping every case fictional and specific. Lea and Omar are invented, the training offers are invented, and students analyze them rather than disclosing their own situations. The guides ask teachers to allow voluntary contributions and analytical distance. The second unit also states that Sartre's philosophical use of anguish does not replace psychological or medical accounts of individual distress, which is worth saying out loud before the lesson starts.

A second norm matters just as much: criticism must be fair. The fourth section of the Sartre unit asks how responsibility can be understood without blaming disadvantaged people for every limitation, and the bad faith unit asks how the concept can avoid becoming a blanket accusation. Both questions model the habit you want. Before students call someone's excuse bad faith, they need precise evidence and an alternative interpretation, and the guide notes that outside observation alone cannot establish self-deception with certainty. That rule keeps debate sharp without turning it on classmates.

Cross-curricular

Linking existentialism with psychology and science

Sartre and Neuroscience makes the strand useful beyond the philosophy classroom. Students work with a teaching timeline (averaged signal onset at −550 ms, reported intention at −200 ms, movement at 0 ms), clearly labeled as not original data, and ask what extra premise turns that sequence into "the decision was already made". They then sketch three fluctuating signal traces aligned at a threshold and see why an average can look smoother than any single trial. This is solid practice in reading a study for what it measured, and it pairs well with a psychology or biology course covering EEG or research methods.

The unit is careful in both directions. It does not claim the accumulator model proves free will, and it does not let students dismiss neural evidence. Position C in the final case, that responsibility requires evaluating reasons even when this is physically realized, is classed as compatible with compatibilism but not simply attributed to Sartre. For teachers who also cover free will in psychology, the bundle's other units give the existentialist background, and the Habermas units in Upper Secondary Complete continue the thread on justification and public reasoning. Students who move between these courses meet the same marking scheme each time.

Questions teachers ask

Frequently asked questions