Carlos Fraenkel, a Canadian philosopher with Brazilian roots, writes at length in the Boston Review about the teaching of philosophy to high school students in Brazil. Since 2008 there's been a law there making philosophy instruction madatory at this level:
[T]he 2008 law is above all a political project. In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy's potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil's Social and Political Organization ("to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals," one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).
The official rationale for the 2008 law is that philosophy "is necessary for the exercise of citizenship." The law - the world's largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere - thus represents an experiment in democracy.
Fraenkel reports on practical initiatives associated with this teaching and on a 'lack of qualified personnel' (which might be of interest to philosophy graduates elsewhere, looking to travel and knowing, or willing to learn, Portuguese). To me the oddest feature of what he reports is that there are academic philosophers in Brazil who oppose the teaching of philosophy at school level - philosophy being, for them, 'not a democratic practice or an emancipatory exercise, but a rigorous scholarly discipline'. That strikes me as wrong-headed - a false delineation of alternatives. People can surely be introduced to philosophical problems and ways of thinking about them before becoming acquainted with the rigorous scholarly discipline. It is hard to see what harm it could do them and it might do a lot of good.