Philosophy teachers say the inclusion of their subject in the secondary school curriculum from 2029 is a huge step.

It is part of a new subject - Civics, Politics and Philosophy - that will be an option for students in Years 12 and 13.

Meeting at a conference in Wellington on Tuesday, teachers told RNZ they hoped the subject would teach teenagers to reason, evaluate and argue.

Libby Giles from Philosophy Teachers Aotearoa New Zealand (PTANZ) said the subject was formally recognised in 2011, but had no NCEA achievement standards.

That meant teachers had to repurpose standards from subjects including Psychology and Religious Studies, and the result was that very few schools offered the subject.

Giles said that would change with the inclusion of the new subject in the secondary school curriculum and in the qualification replacing NCEA.

"This really actually is a breakthrough," she said.

"There will be assessment and even though it's one third of a subject that's elective, it's still an official place, a home for it."

Giles said combining Philosophy with Civics and Politics would work well.

"It gets beyond the nuts and bolts of Civics and learning about elections and that kind of thing to actually digging into the political thought behind things and the philosophy of law behind how our laws are made," she said.

The draft curriculum included topics as diverse as reasoning, ethics, Confucianism and Kaupapa Māori ethics.

PTANZ secretary Claire Gavin from Epsom Girls' Grammar said she expected students would "do philosophy" rather than learning about it.

"Students need to be practicing and doing philosophy," she said.

"So having the opportunity to grapple with the big human questions that are so important and the philosophy component is going to help them learn how to think, not be taught what to think, but give them time and practicing their creative and critical thinking skills, learn about ethical theories and how to reason well, how to argue, how to do respectful disagreement with each other."

She said the subject was not just for academic students.

"We tend to find it at my kura that students who really want extension and lots of ability to think outside of how they normally think will take it but also a lot of students who actually don't really enjoy so much the reading and writing," she said.

"There's hopefully going to be lots of opportunities for oral discussion and verbalising their thinking because they often have fabulous ideas and they really relish the opportunity to be able to think and say their views and look at other people's views and compare those."

Nik Parkin from Scots College in Wellington said he hoped the curriculum developed philosophy skills, rather than memorising who said what and when.

"You need to learn how to do it. There's no point in knowing when Aristotle was born or anything like that," he said.

Parkin said the subject had a positive effect on other areas of learning and behaviour.

"Philosophy's been shown pretty conclusively around the world to develop not just critical thinking in kids, but empathetic listening, creativity. It also has been shown to boost literacy and numeracy in kids," he said

Teachers at the conference were confident students would be keen to study the subject.

"It's one of our most popular subjects. Students love it," Brent Silby from Christchurch school Ao Tāwhiti Unlimited Discovery said.

"Once they get into it and they learn about some of the cool thought experiments, the discussions we have, the word spreads through the school, and then other students want to have a go as well."

Silby said analysing arguments was one of the most important aspects of philosophy

"We want young people to be able to recognise good arguments and also recognise bad arguments and understand what makes an argument good, what makes an argument bad," he said.

"I don't mean 'he said, she said', I mean proper inductive or deductive arguments that draw a conclusion. I would argue that that's fundamental for philosophy. Once you've got that, then you can springboard into a whole range of different discussions that cover a lot of different subfields within philosophy."

The final version of the curriculum was expected later this year.