As a freshman in high school, I had a great English teacher who also was the Lincoln-Douglas Debate coach, value debate which he coached starting from philosophical principles.
That class was more rigorous and covered more breadth than most of the college courses I ended up taking later on (although I studied engineering so I didn't explore much of the upper-level humanities courses that my college had to offer). We studied excerpts of texts from Viktor Frankl, Kierkegaarde, Locke/Rousseau/Hobbes/Machiavelli, Kant's COPR, Plato's theory of forms and allegory of the cave, and also he did a great job tying these abstract concepts to a variety of concrete expressions, from literature like A Separate Peace to movies like Grand Canyon to artistic movements during the impressionist and post-impressionist periods to lyrics from Pink Floyd. The class was over a decade ago and I have forgotten much, but every now and then I encounter some difficulties that flash me back to something I learned at the stage and I am still grateful.
Philosophy saved my life. I can appreciate the article's talk about the benefits of rationality and well-reasoned debate, but for me the benefits are not limited to just politics and pure logic. When I was going through a particularly tough period after someone in my family began experiencing mental illness, I began a long period defined by a set of trial-by-fire experiences of the true meanings of failure and helplessness. In dire situations, understanding of the abstract concepts, perspectives, and analytical toolsets that philosophy can explore and define -- particularly for overthinking, overintellectualizing types like me -- can have life or death consequences. I'll paraphrase a Camus quote about how there is only one real philosophical problem, and that's suicide. Choosing existentialism over essentialism, and choosing to define myself in terms of my choices, experiences, and control over my attitude with a Nietzchean amor fati perspective, versus letting my self-worth be subject to victimizing essentialist definitions from the external, was an epiphany that continues to help to overcome a lot of hardship with a positive and constructive attitude.
As for the author's discussion on a greater societal understanding of philosophy as a potential cure for the political climate, I'm basically in agreement. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I'd be happy to live in a society with an understanding of the ontological imperative as why we should not torture, or Bentham's panopticon and the chilling effects of surveillance, or a society that recognizes some of the nastier consequences of essentialism and objectivism when internalized and accepted as cultural mores -- Plato's theory of forms has its uses if you're talking about an ideal chair or an ideal car, but not so much when you start talking about the ideal female body or the ideal corporate worker. Certainly there is no fast-track to utopia around the corner, as a lot of these cynical comments are quick to gripe about, but for anyone on here interested in the benefits of philosophy and clicked this link curious of what they missed out on in school, I'll pass on a few brief philosophy articles I've encountered in the last few months:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Deontology Brain Pickings: Kierkegaard on the Individual vs. the Crowd, Why We Conform, and the Power of the Minority Great Problems: The Rent-seeking Economy The Unexotic Underclass