Best of luck to you in this worthy undertaking! I hope my colleagues will provide suggestions of their own; there are many possibilities. But I'd like to offer a general thought or two, as well as a couple of specific suggestions. Although I have great respect for the scholarly attempt to wrestle with texts by Plato, Locke, Kant and so on, there's a caution to keep in mind. Philosophy is primarilya problem- and question-oriented, and doing it well has more to do with a certain kind of careful thinking than with knowledge of texts by classic authors. A look at a typical philosophy journal bears this out. The articles may refer to the recent literature (though "recent" in philosophy doesn't just mean "last year"), but they often don't mention classic literature at all. I just glanced through the bibliographies of the articles in the Spring 2007 issue of a major philosophy journal. At most 5% of the references were to texts or articles before 1960. The old texts can be valuable, but they...

I'd like to know if my colleagues have any better information than I do. The best I have to offer is a not very reliable guess based on limited information. There is a graph at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/97trends/ea1-6.htm which, when extrapolated, leads to the estimate that perhaps as many as 70% of people in the USA who have a high school diploma will have at least some college education. And what's posted at http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/highschool.htm claims that 85% of adults 25 and over have a high school diploma. This suggests that perhaps about 64% of people in the US will have at least some college education -- a figure that I seem to recall being consistent with something I read elsewhere. But to complete our guesswork, we need an estimate of the percentage of people among those with at least some college education who take a philosophy course. Here I have nothing to offer but instinct. And my guess is that it is no higher than 20% and quite possibly considerably...