A Level Philosophy - opinions?

[lainiekazan]

Ds is currently choosing A Levels and has picked Eng Lit, History, (prob) Music and then is struggling to pick no. 4.

He is currently considering Philosophy. Is it considered a decent A Level? He wants to do well, and for that reason has spurned French (v. sad that kids choose not to study something for fear of not getting an A, but that's another thread...) and also Maths, which is he good but not brilliant at. He is also afraid of doing Latin for fear of candidates who have been doing it from age 9 at school, and he is self-taught.

Anyone any inside knowledge?

DD doing it with history and English at A2, regarded as a good mix, especially if going on to study humanities, clearly the history, literature and philosophies of humanities provide interesting and complementary perspectives. I know several with that combination who have gone on to good unis including Oxbridge. My DD has included some sentences in her personal statement on what she has gained in insight into art and literature from her study of Philosophy at A level. What does he want to study at uni? I suppose some would not snobbishly regard it as on a par with the academic subjects that they studied at school are more traditional A levels but as far as RG are concerned whilst it is not a facilitating subject, because you can go on to study Philosophy at uni without it, it is not a soft subject either. In any case with two facilitating subjects you would be leaving your son's options open.

They do say a lot of students find the leap between GCSE and AS level hard and DD did find it quite prescriptive, not as open to debate and opinion as she expected but she is very much enjoying the A2syllabus .

Thanks for that. So it's not a facilitating subject? Looks moderately hard, though, certainly much harder than Classical Civilisation et al.