The high school program dives directly into the kinds of philosophical debates you would encounter at Princeton or other elite universities. It ranges widely over topics as diverse as whether humans have free will and moral responsibility to whether we owe obligations to future generations.

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The middle school program uses familiar situations from school and family life to uncover the foundational intuitions of economics, ethics, and political theory. Students will learn to spot patterns and see how laws, moral codes, and even market systems are often different ways of trying to fix the same problem. Whether its clothing and makeup in school or embryonic gene editing, there may not be an obvious right answer but there is an underlying logic. Middle school students also grapple with belief and authority: Who should we trust? What makes someone an expert? Why do groups sometimes come to believe things that no one would have defended alone?

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The middle school program will be limited to about 25 students in a 1:5 student-teacher ratio. (The high school program is about 50 students in a 1:10 ratio). Concepts covered include: ​​

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Incentives · Trade-offs · Opportunity Cost · Equilibrium · Coordination Problems · Collective Action · Externalities · Moral Hazard · Institutional Design · Moral Reasoning · Signaling · Testimony and Expertise · Probabilistic Reasoning

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A Day at Reason & Rationality Institute 

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8:00 AM — Breakfast and Morning Meeting:  Someone is already replaying a scene from Chicken Run and insisting it was a public goods problem, not a prisoners' dilemma.

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9:00 – 11:00 AM — Morning Seminar: Making Up Your Mind — Experts: When should you trust an expert and when should you push back? From doctors to coaches to the confident kid in class who always has an answer, students work through cases where deference makes sense and cases where it doesn't.

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11:00 AM – 12:30 PM — Lunch

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12:30 – 2:30 PM — Afternoon Seminar: Fairness and the Veil of Ignorance: Is your school's grading system fair? What about the way sports teams are picked at recess? Students use examples from their own lives to discover that fairness is harder to define than it looks and encounter Rawls's veil of ignorance as a tool for thinking about it more clearly.

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2:45 – 4:30 PM — Ropes Course: It turns out that designing a fair team challenge is harder than it sounds. The veil of ignorance gets a workout.

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5:00 PM — Free Time

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6:00 PM — Dinner

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7:30 PM — Fermi Estimation Games: Teams compete to estimate things no one could possibly know. How many piano tuners are in Chicago? How many golf balls fit in this room? The point isn't the answer — it's learning to reason carefully under uncertainty rather than giving up or guessing randomly. Surprisingly fun and surprisingly hard.

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9:30 PM — Wind Down

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Students who come through Reason & Rationality leave more confident speaking in groups, more willing to sit with a difficult question, and more capable of changing their minds without losing their footing. These are habits that show up in classroom participation, teacher recommendations, and the kind of student a young person becomes over the next several years.

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Most students arrive having encountered many subjects but few big ideas. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics gives them a coherent framework for thinking about choices, institutions, and values that has been used for over a century (first innovated by Oxford University) to prepare young people for intellectual and civic life, and that transfers to almost everything they will study afterward. Reason & Rationality teaches PPE through conversations that make it stick, using problems that students actually care about.