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Why?

2011-12-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

The picture book Why, written by Lindsay Camp and illustrated by Tony Ross, is one of those books that illuminates in many ways the whole point of doing philosophy with children. The story is about Lily, who, in response to virtually anything that happens, asks the question, "Why?" Her dad tries to respond to her questioning, but sometimes, "when he was a bit tired or too busy," he'd say only, "It just does, Lily. It just does."

One day a giant spaceship lands and the aliens that emerge from the ship announce that their mission is to destroy the planet. Terrified, no one responds, except Lily, who asks, of course, "Why?" After a series of "why" questions, the aliens realize that they don't know why, and they leave.

Can questions save the planet? Asking "why" all the time can be really irritating, but not asking it can be dangerous.

Happy holidays!

Music or food?

2011-12-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last week fourth grade students at John Muir Elementary and I talked about the story Frederick by Leo Lionni. (I have written about this story in a previous post.) We began talking about why it's important to Frederick to collect words and colors, as opposed to foraging for the food the family will need for the winter. What is important to Frederick about poetry?

One student suggested that to Frederick, "poems are like keys to the universe." "Maybe," the student reflected, "Frederick thinks that he wouldn't survive without poems, the same way his family is worried they won't survive without food."

Several students wanted to know why Frederick couldn't gather food as well as work on his poems, and most wanted to say that if Frederick didn't help collect food he wasn't entitled to an equal share of the food. Others disagreed.

"Okay," I said. "Let's say you were on a desert island with a couple of family members, and you were really worried about having enough food to make it through the winter. All of you went about looking for and storing food, except one of your cousins, who was working on a story that she would be able to tell you when you were holed up for the winter. Would that be okay with you?"

"No," one student said, "because food makes me happier than a story."

"I'd say fine," responded another student. "But she wouldn't be entitled to any of the food."

Most students seemed to agree with this.

"What if your cousin was J.K. Rowling, and was writing a new Harry Potter story?" I asked. "Would that make a difference?"

Many of the students contended that then the contribution of writing a story would be more valuable and perhaps as valuable a contribution as collecting food, although, as one student put it, "You wouldn't know for sure that the story was going to be good, in the way you would know that the food would be."

We discussed the way in which Frederick’s poetry helps the family when they are cold and hungry. I asked the students whether they read much poetry, and most of them said they never did. I told them that I guessed they all knew a lot of poetry, and asked them to recite some of their favorite song lyrics. There were of course immediate responses from many of the students, reciting lyric after lyric. We then talked about what music meant to them and why they liked it. Was it as important as food?

This led to a robust conversation about what you would choose if you had to give up either music or food (but not water) for a couple of days. The students were quite divided about what they could more easily do without, and we talked about the different ways we are nourished in our lives. Are emotional, aesthetic and intellectual forms of nourishment as important as physical nourishment?

Fourth Graders and the Story Double Trouble

2011-11-28T13:50:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting experience recently with the fourth grade students I'm teaching this year at John Muir Elementary. I read them the story "Double Trouble" by Philip Cam. A kind of retelling of the "Ship of Theseus," the story is about a robot whose parts have been replaced, one after another, until he no longer has any of his original parts, and a new robot has been built using all of the old parts. Which one is the "real" Algernon (the robot's name)?

I have used this story for years and it has virtually always inspired a discussion about the standard questions of personal identity and persistence over time. (I wrote about such a conversation last year in this post.) In this session, however, the students took the discussion in an entirely different direction. They voted to start with one of their questions about whether in this story robots were only owned by rich people or whether everyone had robots. This led to the question about whether robots were things, and a couple of students asserted that robots (or at least the ones in the story) were people. How do we know what makes someone a person? The students suggested that having names, or being able to talk and move independently, were possible criteria. Then several students noted that while the robots seemed to have feelings, they were probably programmed to have them, and that this is what made them different from people.

Several of my undergraduate students were present that day, and one commented, "Sometimes I feel things I would like to choose not to feel, but I feel them anyway. Is it possible that I'm programmed?"

One of the most interesting features of the conversation that ensued in that fourth grade classroom was how closely it resembled a similar conversation I had with college students not too long ago. The students went from being sure they were not programmed to speculating about the possibility that, as one child put it, "there are beings out there somewhere who are a lot bigger than us and they are totally controlling what we do."

"That could be," another student responded. "But at the same time, I feel like what goes on inside me is really me, that it can't be controlled by anyone else. Maybe someone could be controlling what I do, but I don't think they could be controlling what I feel."

The discussion went on for over an hour and at the end we talked about how complex these questions were, and how sometimes in philosophy the questions seemed even more puzzling after talking about them than they had originally.

The Lorax

2011-11-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

This morning I talked about Dr. Suess' The Lorax with a class of fourth grade students at John Stanford International School in Seattle. They have been having discussions about environmental issues, and we had a lovely conversation about the destruction of the truffula trees and the loss of Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans and Humming-Fish in the story.

We began by talking about the Once-ler and his decision to chop down truffula trees and build a business of selling thneeds made from truffula tree tufts. Was he responsible for the environmental destruction that ensued as a result of his decisions? Does the fact that he ultimately regrets his actions make him a better person? We talked about the other members of the Once-ler family who worked in the business, and about all the people who bought thneeds. Were they all responsible for the destruction of the truffula trees and surrounding habitat? When we purchase something, are we obligated to ask how it was made? Were the thneeds "useful?" What is the balance between creating things that make human life easier or more enjoyable, and caring for the environment in which we live? What is our responsibility to the environment and to other species affected by human decisions?

Harold and the Purple Crayon

2011-11-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

What can we know about the nature of reality? A wonderful story for motivating conversations about this question is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. First published in 1955, the story begins with Harold deciding, “after thinking it over for some time,” to take a walk in the moonlight. No moon is out, so Harold takes his purple crayon and draws one, and then he draws something to walk on. Harold goes on to draw a forest in which he wanders, a dragon that ends up frightening him, an ocean in which he almost drowns and a boat which saves him, a beach, a lunch to eat, etc.

This story was a favorite of my children when they were younger, and I have read it with children in classrooms from first grade through middle school. It raises such questions as: Is Harold pretending? Is what he draws real? How can what he draws scare him? Is the moon we see more real than Harold’s moon – and, if so, why? Is Harold dreaming? Can we create our own reality?

Anno's Counting Book

2011-10-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

Anno’s Counting Book by Mitsumasa Anno is one of those books that my kids and I looked at constantly when they were in elementary school. Starting with 0 and ending with 12, it’s the most complex and interesting counting book I’ve ever encountered.

The first page is an empty landscape, corresponding to 0. The wordless book adds objects to each consecutive page, corresponding to each number and reflecting the seasons, time of day, and other events in nature and human life. The number of objects in the landscape grows exponentially and symmetrically, and the detailed watercolor illustrations inspire careful examination.

Anno’s Counting Book is a helpful book for developing mathematical understanding of basic and, later, more complex concepts, but what makes it extraordinary is its evocation of the beauty of numbers. It inspires questions about beauty and what makes something beautiful, about whether beauty can tell us anything about truth, and about the relationship between mathematics and aesthetics.

Seeing ish-ly: what makes someone an artist?

2011-10-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

Peter Reynolds' picture book ish tells the story of Ramon, who loves to draw and draws all the time. Then one day his older brother laughs at one of his drawings, and Ramon becomes preoccupied with making his drawings "look right." Finally he decides to stop drawing. His younger sister picks up one of his crumpled drawings and Ramon follows her into her room to retrieve it, where he sees many of his crumpled-up drawings hanging on her walls. She points out a drawing of a vase of flowers, which she declares is one of her favorites. Ramon tells her that the drawing was supposed to be a vase of flowers but he doesn't think it looks like one. "It looks vase-ISH!" she replies.

Looking at the world "ish-ly" opens up for Ramon his own way of seeing and gives him confidence that he can express what he feels and perceives, even if the finished products don't conform to a conventional view of the way things are supposed to look.

What makes someone an artist? How do we judge what is a work of art? What is creativity? Where does artistic expression come from? Is art worth creating even if it is not judged to be very good? I think this book can be used with students from elementary school on to ponder these questions. I'm going to try it this fall with fourth grade students as well as college undergraduates.

I Want To Paint My Bathroom Blue

2011-09-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue by Ruth Krauss (illustrations by Maurice Sendak) tells the story of a young boy who dreams of painting his bathroom blue, kitchen yellow, ceilings green, etc. He imagines what his ideal home would look like, all in the context of being informed by his father that he can't paint his bathroom blue.

The story provokes thinking about the relationship between color and our perceptions and moods, and the role color can play in imagination. What do certain colors allow us to imagine that we couldn't imagine otherwise? Why are colors so important to us? We often identify things by their colors, but are the colors really in the objects, or just in us? Do different colors have different emotional effects on us?

In the story the boy comments that he will "make a house the kind I dream about not the kind I see." He uses colors to construct the world in which he would like to live, noting that he'd have a "house like a rainbow" and someday make an ocean. How does color help him to dream about things he had not actually perceived?

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2011-09-24T09:17:00.001-07:00

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A new school year

2011-09-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

So far it's been a beautiful September here in the Pacific Northwest. School has started, and I'll be back in both an elementary school and a university classroom next week.

I've been working away on my book this summer, and hope to have it finished this year and published in 2012. The past few weeks I've been writing chapter 6, which is about talking about art and beauty with children. At the PLATO Institute in June, there were several provocative presentations on aesthetics with children about which I've been thinking since. In particular, the presentations reminded me of the wide range of questions included in aesthetics and the ways in which many of those questions are profoundly important to human experience.

Aesthetics is often seen as a marginal field in philosophy, both by philosophers and those outside philosophy. (Arthur Danto, prominent philosopher of art, once noted that aesthetics is "about as low on the scale of philosophical undertakings as bugs are in the chain of being.") Questions of aesthetics are often seen as not among the central questions of philosophy (ethics, epistemology, etc.). And it's not just philosophers who hold that attitude. Often when I'm asked to speak about my experiences introducing philosophy to children and I mention aesthetics, people will say things like, "Doesn't that really just come down to personal taste?"

Yet in the classroom, I find that discussions about art and beauty elicit great enthusiasm and interest. Many children express themselves through art - drawing, dance, playing an instrument - and thinking about what makes something art and what makes someone an artist means something to them. Moreover, aesthetic questions go beyond an inquiry about the various art forms, to encompass all of the forms of human experience that involve awareness of beauty, ugliness, elegance, garishness, etc. A walk in the woods, eating a well-prepared meal, `nd shopping for clothes can all be aesthetic experiences. Reflecting about questions such as the nature of beauty and ugliness and the relationship between our aesthetic experiences and our emotions, can bring to light facets of our everyday lives in a way that deepens our experiences and heightens our awareness of their richness.

The Universe and Dr. Einstein

2011-06-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading the short book The Universe and Dr. Einstein, originally written in 1948 by Lincoln Barnett. I first read and was inspired by this book when I was 17. An engrossing account, written for the general public, of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, this is an accessible and effective resource for introducing to high school students some of the philosophical questions raised by Einstein's and other related work in physics.

Einstein wrote in the book's foreword that much popular scientific writing either is too superficial or too inaccessible, but that this work presents the main scientific concepts well and ties them to questions about knowledge. To me the book reads almost like a thriller, describing carefully and with excitement the developments in physics that have resulted in a gulf between our commonsense view of the world, based on our perceptual experiences, and scientific understanding. The book discusses the relationship between developments in cosmology and philosophical problems about the relationship between appearance and reality, the reliability of sense perception, causation, the relationship between the observer and what is observed, and the nature of scientific knowledge. Highly recommended!

This will be my last post for the academic year, as I am again planning to spend much of the summer working on my book, on which I have made substantial progress - hoping to have it finished in 2011. I'll be back to this blog in September!

The Rainbow Fish

2011-05-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is a picture book that parents seem either to love or to hate. It is the story of a fish, described as "the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean," with rainbow-colored, iridescent scales. The other fish call him "Rainbow Fish," and invite him to play with them, but he remains uninterested and aloof. A small blue fish follows him one day, asking for one of his scales, and is rebuffed. The rainbow fish ends up ostracized by all the other fish, and his scales begin to mean less to him with "no one to admire them." Taking the advice of an octopus whose suggestions he seeks, the rainbow fish gives all his scales away, one by one, until he is left with only one. Surrounded by many fish, each with one iridescent scale, the rainbow fish now no longer looked different, and he "at last felt at home among the other fish."

The story raises questions about being different versus one of the crowd, identity and self-worth, selfishness and generosity, the nature of beauty, and the meaning of friendship. Some people read it as promoting the message that we all should be the same, others as advocating for recognition of the value of inner beauty and generosity. To my mind, the story can be read as endorsing several contradictory ideas, which makes it quite philosophically interesting. I have found that it's very appealing to children, and easily sparks conversations about independence and conformity, being unique versus fitting in, and what friendship requires.

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge

2011-05-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Mem Fox's picture book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge is the story of a young boy, Wilfrid Gordon, whose "house was next door to an old people's home and [who] knew all the people who lived there." His favorite person at the home is Miss Nancy, and Wilfrid Gordon's father tells him that, at 96, she has lost her memory.

Wilfrid Gordon sets out to understand what memory is and asks several of the people in the home about it. He then collects some of his things that bring back his own memories and gives them to Miss Nancy, who begins then to recollect some of her own memories.

The story is a lovely one, with appealing, colorful illustrations, and it raises such issues as: What is memory? Are we still ourselves if we lose our memories? Can you lose a memory and then find it again? Can we rely on our memories to give us accurate accounts of the past? What is the role of relationships in memory?

What is most important in life?

2011-05-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I read a chapter of E.B. White's Stuart Littlewith the 4th grade students at John Muir Elementary. The chapter describes Stuart's one-day experience acting as a substitute teacher. One of the first things Stuart asks his students is whether they know what's important. The students in the story give various responses, including "a shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy."

After the reading, I asked the John Muir students to write down five things in their lives that they thought were the most important. We put about 30 of them up on the board, and many of the students' choices seemed to me close to what most people would say, pointing to what we think of as fundamental aspects of life - family, friends, food, health. Their responses also included things like playing video games, seasons, dance, sports, reading, etc. I then asked them what would remain on the list if they knew they only had a month left to live. The students thought seriously about this question and we pared the list down to much fewer items, including family, friends, food, medicine, and dance.

We then talked about what made these things important. The students mentioned having fun, being happy, and receiving comfort as the basis for what is important to them. One student then said that she would spend a lot of time planning her funeral and writing out invitations to the people in her life, because it would matter to her to spend her time doing something that felt productive. Another student commented that she would spend her last days reflecting about her life, thinking about the mistakes she'd made and the positive things she'd done, and kind of making sense of her life for herself. A third student agreed, remarking that he would take these reflections and put them in a journal and put them outside his door for his family to find, lock the door "and then die in a way that would feel peaceful." Several students agreed with this and talked about how important it would be to them to say goodbye to the people they loved and to have their lives feel as if they'd had some purpose. We discussed whether what is important to you changes as you age and get closer to death, and whether death is in some respects the defining feature of life.

I thought about this conversation after it ended. Many of the reflections offered by the children were the kinds of things people often assume ten-year-old children aren't thinking about and/or capable of contemplating. There was a thoughtfulness and seriousness to our conversation that reminded me of how vibrant philosophical thinking can be in children and how important it is to nurture that part of them.

The experience of childhood

2011-04-14T14:56:00.000-07:00

Last week I had a conversation with fourth grade students at John Muir Elementary about the story Albert's Toothache by Barbara Williams, one of my favorite picture books. In the story, Albert, a turtle, complains that he has a toothache. His family points out that he has no teeth, and so he cannot have a toothache. "You never believe me," Albert protests, and he takes to his bed. His parents and siblings lament that Albert is not telling the truth. Finally, his grandmother arrives, and asks Albert, "Where is your toothache?" Albert tells her that it is in his toe, where a gopher bit him.

I read the story to the students and then, as is our practice, we took a minute to reflect before the students articulated the questions the story raised for them. They chose to begin our discussion with the question, "Why did Albert say he had a toothache when the pain was in his foot?"

The students commented that perhaps Albert was confused or misunderstood what a tooth is. One student suggested that what Albert might have meant was that his pain came from the gopher's tooth, so that's why he called it a toothache.

We moved from that question to another student's question, "Why didn't Albert's family believe him, and why was his grandmother the only one who tried to figure out what he meant?" The students observed that the family seemed to have a "story about Albert," in which Albert was the family member who often made things up. One student remarked that often children aren't believed.

"Do you think the family would have reacted differently if it was Albert's mom who was complaining of a toothache?" I asked. Unanimously, the class said yes, it would have been a completely different situation. "Why is that?" I inquired.

"Adults are believed when kids aren't," one student asserted. "People think adults are more trustworthy than kids."

"Are they?" I asked.

"Not always," responded another student. "Adults sometimes lie about things. Like when children are being abused. Adults will lie about it to protect themselves, and often people believe the adults instead of the kids."

"I think," put in a student, "that people think of kids as becoming adults, and so they expect kids to make all kinds of mistakes that they don't think adults will make."

"So is childhood an experience about becoming an adult, or is there more to it than that?" I asked.

"I think," ventured a student who had not yet spoken, "that children are deeper than adults."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that childhood is not just about becoming an adult. It's a time of its own. What happens to kids affects us our whole lives. That's mostly not true for adults. I think what we experience we feel more deeply, and it stays with us."

You Can't Say You Can't Play

2011-03-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading Vivian Paley's book You Can't Say You Can't Play. The book describes Paley's observation of what she calls the "habit of rejection" year after year in her kindergarten class, in which certain children (the "ruling class," as she calls them) decide which children will be accepted and which will be excluded, setting the stage for years of children being rejected and a social hierarchy dominating. Paley, tired of it, posts a sign one morning in her class that reads "You Can't Say You Can't Play."

Many of the children are aghast. "But then what's the whole point of playing?" one child remonstrates. Is it acceptable for the teacher to exercise control over what the children are doing in their private social activities?

Paley's new rule inspires at the school a months-long inquiry about whether this new rule is fair and can work. The kindergarten students accept the new rule relatively quickly, and Paley speculates that this kind of intervention has to take place at very early ages. Working with older elementary students, she observes that the social hierarchies are already firmly in place. The book considers whether this kind of moral issue can and should be legislated. Do the children have the right to choose their companions? Does such a right include an entitlement to reject certain people? Paley weaves a thoughtful examination of the moral and policy issues involved with an engaging description of the children's reactions.

Inception

2011-03-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

The 2010 film Inception is a philosophically provocative film that's been very popular with teenagers. The film is about an "extractor," Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), someone who is able to take ideas out of people's minds when they are dreaming and at their most vulnerable. On the run from the authorities, Cobb is hired by a business magnate to perform "inception," in which an idea is planted in someone's mind instead of extracted from it. This is done by creating a dream world and bringing the subject of the inception into that world, who then fills it with his or her subconscious. Along with a team he has assembled, Cobb creates a multi-layered dream to carry out the contracted inception.

Action-packed, Inception would be a wonderful film to show in a high school or undergraduate philosophy class. It raises many philosophical questions, including:

How do we know that our sensory experiences are real?
How do we distinguish dreams from waking life?
Can ideas cause physical events?
What is the relationship between memory and dreams?
Can we imagine things we haven't experienced?

PLATO and a national movement for philosophy in the schools

2011-03-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

For most of the 15 years that I've been involved in this field, there have been an isolated few of us around the country working to introduce philosophy to pre-college students. But in the last few years, over a dozen new pre-college philosophy programs have begun, and I now hear regularly about additional new efforts taking place. Many of these projects have been initiated by philosophy graduate students, just as we founders of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children started it as grad students in 1996. My hope is that this groundswell of support for bringing philosophy into the lives of young people will result in more and more children and teenagers around the US having access to philosophical thinking and discussions.

This growing movement inspired a group of us to start PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), a national organization affiliated with the American Philosophical Association. PLATO will advocate for pre-college philosophy and provide a point of connection for the education and philosophy communities. We are in the process of developing a more detailed vision and structure for PLATO.

Our inaugural event, the first PLATO Institute, will take place at Columbia University this June. Over 25 speakers from more than 15 colleges and universities will be speaking about both conceptual and practical issues involved in teaching pre-college philosophy. The institute will be organized as a community of philosophical inquiry, in which the focus will be on constructing an ongoing dialogue among the participants. I expect it will be a really energizing and meaningful two days!

Moral Relativism or Mutual Respect?

2011-02-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

I had a lively conversation yesterday with a group of fifth graders about how we can understand, respect and evaluate cultures other than our own. The conversation took off when one student asked, "Why do we have so many different cultures in the world?" The students pointed out the ways in which the diversity of cultures gives rise to conflicts, but also observed that a world without a variety of cultures would be pretty uninteresting.

One student then asserted that we aren't really justified in making judgments about cultures other than our own, because we're not understanding them "from the inside" and so are evaluating their practices without really understanding why the people in that culture are doing what they do. This led to a thoughtful dialogue among the students about when, and if ever, people or groups outside of a culture are justified in criticizing, or intervening in, a cultural practice.

We talked about the different standards for disciplining children around the world. Several students articulated a distinction between coming to another country and practicing, for example, a form of corporal punishment unacceptable here, and doing so in your own country. The students tended to claim that it is one thing to insist that someone from another culture change their practice when they enter a different culture (or country), but that it is another thing to criticize the way people are disciplining their children when they are acting on the basis of a different set of rules and standards within that culture.

Still, some students argued, the way the harsh discipline feels to the children is the same. And can't cultures be mistaken? We talked about the fact that in the US, for example, slavery was an acceptable part of the culture for a long period of time, and we would now want to say that this was wrong, that the institutions that supported that practice were in error. And if it's true that cultures can make mistakes in sanctioning acts that ultimately the culture concludes were wrong, how do we decide when intervention is appropriate?

Several students raised the example of the Nazi regime, asserting that there intervention to stop what the German culture was allowing would have been justified. One student suggested that perhaps the standard should be whether human beings were being harmed in serious ways, and we noted that this standard also led to interpretation problems (What constitutes harm? When is it serious? etc.). We discussed the practice of young people marrying at young ages, 12 or 13, in some cultures, a practice that clearly horrified the children. Yet, we pointed out, inside those cultures, that is an accepted and perhaps welcome practice.

How do we know what it feels like from the inside? Can we? And if we can't, does that mean we never are justified in judging or intervening to stop a cultural practice that seems deeply at odds with the ways our culture believes people should be treated? Are there some moral rules that apply to everyone, no matter where and how they live? The students saw clearly what challenging issues these questions raise.

The Dragon who liked to spit Fire

2011-02-15T16:05:00.000-08:00

This delightful picture book by Judy Varga, written in 1961, tells the story of Darius, a little dragon, and the friendship he develops with young prince Frederic. Can Darius be himself, a dragon who likes nothing more than to spit fire (in many colors), and still be friends with Frederic?

Darius decides to move to Frederic's castle with Frederic. Darius makes this choice because he has been lonely and he wants to be close to Frederic, although he is wary that he will not be able to spit fire at the castle. As Darius tells Frederic, "[L]ife without spitting fire wouldn't be much of a life for a dragon." Frederic tells Darius that he will be able to spit fire when they are alone. Darius is made to feel very at home in the castle, but he finds that he can't ever spit fire, because he and Frederic are never alone.

The story, with its marvelous illustrations, makes me think about friendship, and whether compromises are essential to human relationships. If so, are there compromises that demand too much of us? How would we know? Is Darius being asked to give up something that is too important to him for a friendship to require its absence? Is being a dragon essential to Darius' identity, and is spitting fire necessary for his well-being? I am putting this one on my list to try out with my fourth grade students!

Questions and the Philosophical Self

2011-02-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

For the past month I've been working on the chapter of my book that examines what I'm calling the "philosophical self." This part of us, that is naturally inclined to ponder the deeper questions raised by the strangeness of finding ourselves alive in the world, fails to develop for many (most?) young people because cultivating the philosophical self is not something that is nurtured and supported by most (or any) of the adults in their lives.

I've been thinking this week about the central role of questions, and in particular the acquisition of confidence and skill in asking questions, in the development of the philosophical self. We are not a society that is particularly comfortable with questions. Many adults have grown up absorbing the idea that asking questions serves to broadcast to the world what they don't know, and this has the potential to be somewhat shameful, or at least embarrassing. But philosophy is all about questions. Questions are the key to recognizing the philosophically puzzling aspects of our lives, and to making it possible to examine these puzzles with others.

Mat Lipman, in his book Thinking in Education, emphasized the importance, when having philosophical discussions with children, of ensuring that the questions being discussed emerge from the children. I've realized over years of working with young people how profound an idea this was.

Ultimately, whether we are parents or teachers or other adults talking with children, this enterprise is not about teaching children philosophy, but about doing philosophy with them by engaging them in questions they are already exploring. We initiate philosophical conversations with children not to bestow our philosophical insights on children, but to facilitate the ability of children to inquire themselves about the peculiarity of human existence and the most ordinary experiences of our lives. It is crucial, then, that the conversations begin by eliciting from young people the questions they are interested in discussing.

When I lead a philosophy session in a classroom, often a good part of the session will be spent listing the children's questions and helping them to decide which question to discuss. It can be easy, sometimes, in the goal-driven society in which we live, to see this part of the session as a precursor to the real work, the philosophy discussion itself. But I've come to understand that the time spent helping students to formulate their own questions and ensuring that the discussion starts with those questions is in the end as valuable as the time spent actually talking about philosophical questions.

Mat Lipman died in December 2010 at the age of 87. He was an inspiration to me when I first began thinking about the possibilities of introducing philosophy to children, and as I've thought about him over the past month I've realized how much his work, and especially his commitment to the authenticity of philosophical discussions with children, has guided and helped me over the years.

Frindle

2011-01-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

The young adult novel Frindle by Andrew Clements is the story of a clever fifth grade student, Nick Allen, who decides to invent a new word, and the consequences of what he does and the way he does it. It is a wonderful, engaging novel that captivated all three of my sons in elementary school. The story touches on many philosophical issues, including the nature of language, the meaning of words, the social and political justifications for educating young people, and the nature of creativity. It's a perfect story to read aloud to your children or to a class, or to read along with your reader child(ren), and discuss along the way. An illustrative passage, in which Nick's teacher is speaking to him:

" 'Who says dog means dog? You do, Nicholas. You and me and everyone else in this class and this school and this town and this state and this country. We all agree. . . . But if all of us in this room decided to call that creature something else, and if everyone else did, too, then that's what it would be called, and one day it would be written in the dictionary that way. We decide what goes in that book.' And she pointed at the giant dictionary."

The Big Orange Splot

2011-01-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater is a picture book that tells the story of Mr. Plumbean, who lives on a street where the houses are all the same, painted red with olive-colored roofs and windows with green trim. He and his neighbors all like this, characterizing their street as a "neat street."

One day, a seagull drops a can of bright orange paint on Mr. Plumbean's house, leaving a big orange splot on the house. Everyone on the street sympathizes with Mr. Plumbean, who will have to paint his house again, and that's what Mr. Plumbean plans to do. But, instead, he looks at the house for a long time. Finally, in response to his neighbors' urging, Mr. Plumbean takes out some paint and paints his house. But instead of using the house's original colors, he paints it a rainbow of colors. Over the next couple of days, he adds to his house a clock tower, palm trees, a hammock and an alligator.

Horrified, one by one the neighbors stop in to see Mr. Plumbean to talk with him about their dissatisfaction with what he's done to his home and remind him that all the houses have to be the same for their street to continue to be a "neat street." And, one by one, after each neighbor visits with Mr. Plumbean, sitting under the palm trees, drinking lemonade and talking, each neighbor repaints his or her own house to "fit his dreams."

This is a wonderful story for inspiring conversations about conformity and independence and our obligations to our communities. I talked about this story this fall with my fourth grade students from John Muir Elementary. We had a lively discussion about whether Mr. Plumbean was right to paint his house in a way different from his neighbors, when part of the community agreement was that they would keep their houses looking the same. The students were really curious about what it was that made Mr. Plumbean's decision to paint his house to "fit his dreams" so compelling to his neighbors, so that after spending time with him they all changed their minds about how their street should appear. And what if the neighbors had continued to want all the houses to look the same? The students were strongly supportive of Mr. Plumbean's right to have his house look the way he wanted it to look, even if it offended his neighbors. What if, though, he painted words expressing his hate for an ethnic group? Would that be okay? At what point does his right to make an independent choice give way to his obligations to his neighbors?

The Ugly Duckling

2011-01-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

The classic nineteenth century fairy tale The Ugly Duckling tells the story of a duckling who, when hatched along with his brothers and sisters, is ridiculed and ostracized because they perceive him as ugly. He wanders alone through the fall and winter, and suffers from fear, loneliness, and sadness. In the spring he flies away from the marsh and meets up with a group of swans, and realizes that he too has become a beautiful swan.

The story is familiar to most students and nicely raises philosophical questions about identity and the nature of the self, the meaning of beauty and ugliness, perception, and the experience of solitude. You can read the story with your child or students and ask them questions like whether the "ugly duckling" really was ugly and, if so, what made him ugly? Did he then stop being ugly at the end of the story? What does ugly mean? Would the "ugly duckling" still be ugly if someone thought he was beautiful? How do we decide what is beautiful and what is not? Did the duckling change over the course of the story? Was he still the same duckling? Do our identities change over time? Etc.

Philosophy Talk Show on Pre-College Philosophy

2011-01-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

You can now listen to the Philosophy Talk radio show on pre-college philosophy, taped at the University of Washington in November: http://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter/resourcestalkradio.html

The Thief

2010-11-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner is 1996 novel for young adults, the first of the series The Queen's Thief. The story's main character, Gen, is a thief who boasts about being able to steal anything, ends up in jail, and is recruited to steal a mythic spiritual object by the king. The novel tells the story of Gen and the people who accompany him on this journey to find and take this mysterious object.

This adventure novel is a philosophically rich page turner. It raises questions about loyalty, identity, political and social philosophy, heroism, and the obligation to tell the truth. Gen is a complex character whose identity is multi-layered and whose ethical code is slowly illuminated as the story unfolds. The novel can inspire young people to think and talk about what makes people who they are, whether we can ever really know another person, and what makes actions right or wrong.

Philosophy Talk and Fourth Grade Philosophers

2010-11-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

Recently the fourth grade students at John Muir with whom I've been doing philosophy and I taped a segment for the radio show Philosophy Talk. We talked about personal identity, the mind-body problem, and the nature of happiness.

The students were so impressive! We all had a great time. Here is a recent University of Washington article about the event: http://www.artsci.washington.edu/newsletter/Nov10/PhilosophyTalk.asp

The Cricket in Times Square

2010-11-09T10:56:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite works of children's literature, The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, first published in 1960, is moving, funny and philosophically suggestive. In particular, the book can inspire discussion about a variety of ethical questions.

The story involves Chester, a cricket, who arrives in Times Square in an accidental way from his country home in Connecticut and is befriended by Mario Bellini, whose family owns a newsstand in the Times Square subway station. Chester's relationship with the Bellini family, his musical talent, his friendships with city-savvy Tucker Mouse and Harry the Cat, and his desire to help others are woven into a story that asks questions about happiness, our obligations to the people in our lives, talent and its cultivation, justice, and fairness.

For example, Chester's musical ability becomes a sensation and brings people to the newsstand, which helps the struggling Bellini family and provides pleasure to all of the people who hear Chester's music around the city. Chester, however, is uncomfortable with his growing fame and misses the rural life he knew in Connecticut. He wants to return there. Tucker Mouse, Harry the Cat and Chester have a conversation about whether this would be the right decision for Chester to make, weighing Chester's happiness and his right to choose the course of his life against the possible negative consequences of this choice (the potentially negative effect on the Bellini newsstand, Mario's sadness when Chester leaves, the loss of the opportunity to listen to Chester's music for thousands of listeners, etc.).

Throughout the story, there are several junctures at which Chester and other characters must make moral decisions -- whether to help someone else, tell the truth, abandon a difficult situation -- and the characters' discussions and reflections can motivate interesting discussions with children about these situations. Charmingly illustrated by Garth Williams, the story, in my experience, is completely engaging for children ages 5 to 12, and captivates older readers and listeners as well.

Double Trouble

2010-11-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

On Friday the 4th graders at John Muir and I had a long conversation about personal identity. We also had some visitors from Nova High School, as well as one of the graduate students at UW working with us this year.

We read Philip Cam's story, "Double Trouble," about a robot, Algernon, who, one by one, has all of his parts replaced until none of his original parts are left. The robot company creates a new robot using all of the original parts, and a puzzle ensues. Which of the two robots is the real Algernon?

The students had lots of questions about which robot constitutes the real Algernon, and about the ethics of the company's actions. They voted to begin our conversation with the question about whether the "real" Algernon is the robot who has gradually had his parts replaced, or the one who was created from all of the original parts. We had a really spirited discussion about this topic for over an hour, with students raising many issues about what makes the robot that particular robot (thoughts? memories? the same body?) and whether any of us really maintains the same identity over time. I told them the famous "Ship of Theseus" puzzle, and the students were quite divided over whether the ship that had had all of its planks replaced was still Theseus' ship. And if it wasn't, at what point did it cease to be Theseus' ship? When one plank was replaced? Ten planks? Half of the planks? Three-quarters?

Eventually we ended up in a long discussion about whether, if I exchanged brains with one of the students, I would still be "Dr. Jana" or the student would have become Dr. Jana. Most of the students seemed to conclude that the student would have become Dr. Jana and I would have become the student, but several wanted to say that I would not be Dr. Jana or the student, but would become some third identity, with Dr. Jana's body (minus the brain) and the student's brain, because, as one student put it, "you would still have some physical instincts and ways of moving that were really Dr. Jana's and not [the student's]." What is it, then, that makes us the people we are? The students recognized that this is a really difficult and complex question.

It was a fascinating and really animated discussion, with many of the students in the class participating. The question about what makes us who we are and whether we remain that person despite significant changes seems always to inspire a meaningful and thoughtful conversation.

Happiness at 10

2010-10-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

On Friday I talked about happiness with the fourth grade students with whom I've been working at John Muir Elementary in Seattle. One of the things that's always so interesting to me about discussing philosophy with children is that the conversations frequently parallel in many aspects the discussions I have with college students. They unfold at different levels in terms of language and sophistication, but the issues tend to emerge in very similar ways.

We talked about what's important for happiness, and many of the students expressed the view that central to thinking about what you need for happiness is being aware of what creates unhappiness. That is, many of the children thought that happiness involves avoiding experiences like loneliness, isolation, pain and feelings of meaninglessness.

The students then broached the question, "What exactly is happiness?" In this conversation, they raised many issues about happiness, noting, for example, that you can be happy and unhappy at the same time, that you can have a happy life and still feel unhappy at any particular moment, that happiness seems to be more than a feeling and that, although we talk about feeling happy, happiness is really more like an evaluation of the state of your life. One student suggested that happiness is attainable to everyone, and another pointed out that your attitude toward your life is what's most essential for happiness. We ended by observing that we often talk as though happiness and feeling happy are the same thing, but that upon reflection happiness, though we still might not know precisely how to define or attain it, is more complex and multifaceted than the experience of feeling happy.

Meaning in Education

2010-10-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Since our seminar session at UW last Thursday, I've been thinking about meaning in education. We spent the first part of the session talking about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and enlightenment, the relationship between appearance and reality, knowledge, and human development, and then moved into examining the nature of thinking and thoughts. It was a rich couple of discussions and made me think about my own undergraduate (and secondary) education, and the rare opportunities I experienced for this kind of classroom dialogue.

It is so clear to me that there is a hunger for meaningful, deep conversations about these kinds of questions. Creating a community of philosophical inquiry in a classroom, a space within which fundamental philosophical questions are explored, makes a space for students to gain experience questioning and analyzing their own experiences and perceptions. I believe that the deepest and most authentic kind of learning occurs when students participate in thinking about a subject (and are not just passive recipients of what is being taught), and a new clarity emerges for them personally. Helping them to engage in collaborative inquiry that is aimed at acquiring meaning and deeper understanding enables these kinds of experiences.

Plato with Fourth Graders

2010-10-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

I taught my first couple of elementary school classes in the last week, both with fourth grade students in Seattle. It is always amazing to me the level of philosophical interest and understanding shown by children. Yesterday I had a discussion with about 30 fourth graders about Plato's "Ring of Gyges." In our conversation, the children pointed out the dangers of the ring (thinking you might have more control over it than you do, the risks of it falling into the wrong hands, etc.). They also expressed their sense that you could think now that you know how you would behave if you had an invisibility ring, but really the way you would act if you were actually in this situation could turn out to be quite different than your predictions. We talked about the view that people behave morally only in order to avoid negative consequences if they do not, and the children generally asserted that they often behave in ways that seem morally good not because of the potential consequences if they don't, but because they see themselves as certain kinds of people and being those kinds of people (trustworthy, loyal, kind, helpful, etc.) is important to them.

We also taught our first Philosophy for Children class at the University of Washington this week, and several undergraduates expressed their views that most children do start thinking early in their lives about the larger questions that underlie human existence, but there is typically no vehicle for exploring philosophical questions and along the way that part of many children's selves fails to develop. We talked about how meaningful it can be to talk about questions like the meaning of life, what makes a life worth living, what success means, how we can know what's right and wrong, who we are, etc., and the difference it can make in young people's lives to examine these questions in an ongoing, collective way. We read Jon Muth's story The Three Questions (which I've talked about in an earlier post), and each of the students wrote down the three questions that they think are the most important questions to which they would like answers.

Here are my three:
Why are we here?
Is time just a feature of human minds, and what is the objective relationship (if any) between past, present and future?
What happens when we die?

Philosophical Sensitivity

2010-09-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

The first day of fall and it's a beautiful clear day in northeast Washington State. I am returning to this blog after spending much of the summer working on the book I am writing for parents about ways to inspire philosophical conversations with one's children.

One of the ideas on which I've been spending a lot of time recently is what I'm calling "philosophical sensitivity," by which I mean an awareness of and attentiveness to the philosophical dimension of life. I've been developing this concept as part of my thinking about what it takes to be a competent philosophy teacher and/or to be able to inspire and facilitate philosophical dialogue in general. I thought I'd offer a brief sketch of this concept here and see what people think.

I'm conceiving philosophical sensitivity as a kind of perceptual capacity, in the Aristotelian sense of an ability that can be cultivated through education, experience and interest. There are three aspects to this capacity: the ability to identify a philosophical question, the skills necessary for inspiring a philosophical conversation, and a facility for paying attention to and shaping the progress of a philosophical discussion.

Identifying a philosophical question requires an ability to recognize the more fundamental, deeper issues underlying much of what we think, do and say, as well as skill at uncovering the assumptions embedded in our ordinary views about the world. Philosophers notoriously disagree about what makes a question philosophical. One basic way to identify in at least a rough way when something is not a question of philosophy is to ask if it can be settled by empirical facts. If so, it is not a philosophical question. Philosophical questions examine the meaning of a concept or idea, and aim at helping us understand better what we think we already know. They are generally abstract questions that are not likely to be answered in any final way. I often tell my students to keep asking more and more abstract questions about the subject under examination (for example, friendship: Why is she your friend? What makes someone a friend? What is friendship?); this can often lead you to an interesting philosophical question.

The second aspect of philosophical sensitivity is the ability to inspire or motivate a philosophical conversation. What makes a conversation philosophical? Three things, I think: (1) an examination of an abstract, general question that cannot be answered empirically; (2) arguments given to support the views offered; and (3) a progression or development of either the meaning of the idea(s) being explored or the participants’ understanding of a concept or concepts. To be able to inspire a philosophical conversation, the facilitator must be familiar with at least some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy (in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.), and have two primary abilities, I think: the ability to listen carefully to what is being said (and to recognizing some of the assumptions behind the participants' statements) and the ability to articulate both connections and distinctions between the views offered by the conversation's participants.

The final element of philosophical sensitivity is an awareness of the development of a philosophical conversation. The conversation should ultimately proceed in a forward movement. This doesn’t mean that the discussion won’t loop back and forth, touching several conceptual issues and coming back to earlier questions, rather than developing in a straight line. However, there should be some progress – at the very least, a better understanding of what the participants in the conversation think, greater conceptual clarity, the identification of key assumptions, and/or the construction of an alternative way of understanding the subject. Part of philosophical sensitivity is the ability to help shape the conversation so that it does proceed in a forward movement, by, for example, pointing out unidentified issues, recognizing when the discussion is going in circles and not moving forward in any meaningful way, or recounting the conversation's path and asking for ideas about what's next.

It seems to me that philosophical sensitivity is an essential bedrock skill for being a competent philosophy teacher, or being able to inspire philosophical conversations. One obvious question, of course, is how is philosophical sensitivity cultivated? I'm working on that one!

Why do we go to school?

2010-06-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

In my last class of the school year with the 5th grade public school students with whom I've been doing philosophy this year, we held a "Philosophy Cafe" with juice, cookies and conversation. I'm going to miss this class.

The students had requested last time that we spend some time discussing whether homework is a good thing. We started the discussion more broadly by reading a chapter of Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery that raises questions about the purposes of education generally. I asked the students why they believed they were expected to go to school, and they responded that they thought it was "to learn," "so that we can have a better life," "so that we learn what we need to know in life" and "to get a job." They also mentioned that they want to be in school to spend time with their friends.

I asked the students what a school that they could create would be like.

One student replied, "I think this school is as good as it gets. If you made it any more fun, we wouldn't learn as much. But if it was less fun, we wouldn't want to be here. It's actually perfect because we have fun and it's interesting and we learn a lot."

"Yeah, we're actually really lucky because school is much more interesting than it used to be when my parents went to school. We have time to read and do projects and teachers really try to make it interesting."

"School isn't meant to be joyous and fun. It's meant to teach us what we need to know for life."

"I disagree with that. I think that school does have to be fun, because if kids aren't having fun they don't pay attention and don't learn as much."

We talked for a little while about the connections between having fun and learning, and then the discussion moved into the purpose of homework, about which the students felt quite strongly.

"The purpose of homework is to keep us thinking about what we've learned so that the teachers doesn't have to teach it over and over."

"I agree. It kind of gets everyone to be on the same level, so if you didn't understand something so well in class, the homework helps you learn it better. If one person doesn't do the homework they get behind and it wastes everyone else's time."

"I don't agree with that. I don't think we'd forget what we've learned in one day. I think homework makes learning harder, because you never want to do the homework and you start not wanting to learn at all."

"Homework should be done at school. We have 7½ hours of school every day. We come home and we don't want any more school for the day."

"You know, we actually have a lot less homework than many kids in schools in other countries."

"But it does get in the way. After school you want to do fun stuff with your friends or at home, or play sports, and then you think, 'Oh yeah, I still have to do my homework.' "

"And you're distracted because you want to do fun things. So you sit there and look at the homework and think about what else you could be doing, and so it takes a long time to do the homework, and you have even less time for what you want to do."

"Learning in school is fun because we all do it together. At home it isn't any fun to do work by yourself."

"But I think you learn things in school and then homework is so you can practice what you've learned over and over."

"I don't think that really works. I mean, we don't forget what we've learned in a day. And having to practice it after a long day in school just makes us less interested in learning."

"Well, I think that homework does get in the way of other things you want to do after school, but the idea is that you do sometimes forget what you've learned or you haven't learned it totally, and you look at the homework and you figure out how to do it and then you really learn it. No one likes it every day, and when you're doing it sometimes you hate it, but you know there's a good reason for it."

"Maybe if we didn't have it every day it would be better."

This nice exchange among a dozen students (which involved me almost not at all) then led to an exploration of some practical solutions. Should there be time at the end of the school day (say, the last 20 minutes) for the students to do their homework if they chose? Should it be every other night instead of every night? Should it be handed out in advance for the week so that the students could manage when to do it?

One student noted that he would like to do his homework at recess (if the homework isn't done the class rule is that the students must stay in at recess to do it), but his mom wouldn't let him. Another student responded that he was allowed to do homework whenever he wanted and to figure out how to make it work for himself. The school day was about to end, but we did have a brief interesting discussion about the responsibilities of parents to let their children figure things out for themselves, and how to make good judgments as a parent about when and how to do that.

As I was leaving several girls told me that they wanted to be philosophers when they grew up. A side-benefit of this work, perhaps? More women in philosophy? That would be a great thing!

This will be my last blog post until the fall, to allow me to work on some other writing projects over the summer. Happy summer!

When You Reach Me

2010-06-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

When You Reach Me, a young adult novel that was a winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal, was written by Rebecca Stead. Set in New York City in the late 1970s, it's an engrossing story about a young girl, her relationships with her friends, her single mother and her mother's boyfriend, and a mystery.

Miranda is in the sixth grade when she begins to receive a series of notes that indicate knowledge about Miranda's life that is seemingly impossible for anyone to have. Miranda's attempts to understand why she is receiving these notes and what they mean are beautifully illustrated through Miranda's interior monologues about growing up on the upper west side of Manhattan in 1979 and the trials and joys of sixth grade.

The story raises philosophical questions about the nature of time, the nature of friendship, courage and trust, and the meaning of life and death. It would be a marvelous book to read along with a middle-school-aged child (I read it along with my twelve-year-old son) or to read to a class of upper elementary school students. I couldn't put it down!

Frederick

2010-05-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

Leo Lionni wrote, who died in 1999, wrote and illustrated many classic children's books. I've used several of his books to inspire pre-college philosophy discussions. One that is particularly helpful for introducing questions of political and social philosophy is Frederick, the story of a family of five field mice who are gathering food for the winter.

Everyone is working hard to bring in as much food as they can, except Frederick. Frederick seems to spend his time staring at the meadow and half-asleep, dreaming. When the other mice ask him what he is doing, Frederick replies that he is gathering "sun rays for the cold dark winter days," "colors . . . [f]or winter is gray," and "words . . . [f]or the winter days are long and many, and we'll run out of things to say."

The story makes no mention of the reaction of the other mice to Frederick's behavior and explanations, except at one point to describe as "reproachful" the tone in which they ask him if he is dreaming. Once winter sets in, the five mice hide away in an old stone wall, and have plenty to eat and stories to tell. Lionni describes them as a "happy family." As winter continues, however, there is less food and more cold, and much less chatting among the family members. Then they remember Frederick's fall activities and they ask him about his supplies. Frederick proceeds to describe the rays of the sun and colors, and begins reciting poetry. The family realizes that he is a poet.

The story raises in a wonderfully subtle way questions about what is valuable work in a society. In a family of five, one member failing to gather food means much less food for the family. Is Frederick's work of gathering ideas and words and images as important as gathering food? What are the responsibilities of family members to each other? Is Frederick meeting his responsibilities? If Frederick doesn't gather food but instead spends his time thinking in preparation for giving to his family in a different way, is he entitled to an equal share of the food? Is what Frederick is doing work? What is work? Are some forms of work more important than others?

The story provides an opening to discussing with children questions about the nature of the social contract, the role of the individual in a community, and the relative value of different kinds of contributions to communities. And it's a lovely story with delightful illustrations!

How much philosophy does a pre-college philosophy teacher need to know?

2010-05-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a review article for the journal Teaching Philosophy, writing about five books that have been written in the past few years about pre-college philosophy. In the course of reading these books, it's been interesting to me to observe the range of views about the level of training necessary for a competent pre-college philosophy teacher.

This is a real issue, as most K-12 teachers in the US have had little exposure to philosophy. Some philosophers and educators with experience in pre-college philosophy think that there are only a few rules for conducting philosophical discussions and that even teachers with little background in philosophy can successfully introduce philosophy to their students. Others argue that extensive preparation in how to teach philosophy and a solid familiarity with the history of philosophy is necessary.

I come out somewhere in the middle, I think. I think there is a significant difference between introducing philosophy to elementary school students and teaching a philosophy class for high school juniors or seniors. For teaching younger students, I think that what is essential to leading a philosophy session is a philosophical ear. By a philosophical ear, I mean the ability to recognize when a philosophical issue is being raised (by a student, a story or film, etc.). Certainly, extensive exposure to philosophy texts and discussions is useful to the development of a philosophical ear, but I don't believe that this kind of background is essential. I think that teachers who have had even a little experience with philosophy discussions can, with strong skills in facilitating student discussions and a good curriculum, facilitate philosophy discussions among elementary school-age children.

This is not to say, however, that any teacher can pick up a pre-college philosophy curriculum and lead productive philosophy sessions with children. Many teachers, in my experience, are too much invested in the "teacher as repository of wisdom and students as vessels to be taught" model to be able, without a great deal of training and commitment, to introduce philosophy to their students.

As students get closer to upper-level high school age, I think the requirements for successful philosophy teachers grow, for two reasons. First, in my experience, high school students (and particularly those who have not had any exposure to philosophy in earlier years) are more reticent about engaging in classroom philosophy sessions than are younger children. The philosophy teacher who has had strong preparation for how to teach philosophy and at least some exposure to philosophical texts is more likely to be successful at involving students in high school philosophy discussions. Second, students at this level are capable of analyzing much more complex philosophy questions, and teachers familiar with these questions will be able to facilitate fuller, more sophisticated discussions. I am hoping that, with the growing interest among philosophy departments around the country in high school philosophy classes, there will be greater opportunities for high quality instruction for potential high school philosophy teachers in the future.

What is a child?

2010-05-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article this week by Tamar Schapiro on "What Is a Child?" In a discussion about the possible justifications for what we generally believe are adults' special obligations to children, for "treating someone like a child," Schapiro (looking to Kant) suggests an understanding of the word 'child' as a status concept. The idea is that someone counts as a child when that person lacks the independence necessary (in the ethical realm) for governing himself in accordance with his capacity for reflective choice.

Schapiro suggests that childhood is in some respects analogous to Kant's notion of a state of nature in the political realm, where we need certain normative concepts (like rightful ownership and justice) that are lacking because there is no common political authority in which to ground such concepts. This makes a state of nature inherently unstable and requires that people in that state "pull themselves together" into a unified political state. In a similar way, Schapiro contends, children are like a state of nature in that they need normative principles to be able to make moral choices, but do not yet have a developed will on which to base these principles. An individual becomes an adult when she has "pulled herself together" into a unified reflective agent able to make choices about her desires.

An adult, Schapiro claims, "is one who is in a position to speak in her own voice, the voice of one who stands in a determinate, authoritative relation to the various motivational forces within her." In order to be considered a fully developed agent, one does not have to have worked out principles for any conceivable practical issue but must have a "plan of life." This basic structure, which Schapiro calls character, determines the relation between the pursuit of one's desires and the impulse to relate to others in mutually acceptable ways. Children lack this structure, and so, the argument goes, the distinction between adults and children is one of kind: adults have characters and children do not.

Childhood, therefore, is a "normative predicament" because children need adult help to govern themselves until they develop character, the unified perspective that allows them to exercise effective authority over themselves. Part of the way children develop this, proposes Schapiro, is through play, in which children “try on” selves to develop what is like to speak in their own voices and control their own worlds. As adults, we are obligated to help children escape their predicament by doing what we can to help them "work their way out of childhood."

This is a complex argument for which I am only providing a sketch, but I wonder about it. First, I question the definition of an adult as someone who has constituted herself as a unified reflective agent and can thus speak "in her own voice." It seems to me that the development of this normative structure does not occur in ways consistent with our ordinary judgments about who is a child and who is an adult (which in general depend solely on age). There are people we would characterize as adults (they are over 21) who do not have this kind of developed structure, and there are people we would characterize as children (they are under 17) who do.

Second, while the notion of play as “trying on selves,” has much to offer, it does not apply to many people characterized as children (most people over age 10, for example). Schapiro acknowledges this and notes that we think of adolescents “as people who are characteristically ‘in search of themselves’ . . . [who] carry out this search by identifying themselves in a rather intense but provisional way with peer groups, celebrities . . . and the like.” But being "in search of oneself” and "identifying with peer groups, celebrities, etc." is applicable to many adults as well. Does a person who falls within this description lack a “plan of life?" If so, would we have to hold that they should be "treated like a child?" And doesn't in some respects the process of "trying on selves" and developing a "plan of life" last a lifetime?

Finally, I'm reluctant to characterize childhood as a predicament out of which adults have an obligation to help children find their way. While I don't romanticize childhood as a time of innocent bliss or something, I do think that there is a special quality about the life of children that is positive, that as adults we remember with fondness and even wistfulness (see Proust, for example). For example, in my experience doing philosophy with children, I have observed that children often have particular access to creative ways of understanding the world because of their openness to the mysteriousness of human existence. Likewise, I'm hesitant to grant Schapiro's idea that children are different in kind from adults because they lack character. In my work with children, I have found them reliably capable of reflective deliberation and often quite clear and consistent about the internal principles by which they make choices among their desires. I think that children are often capable of "speaking in their own voices." I am just not convinced that all children lack character, or that all adults have it.

Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children Grant and Summer Workshop

2010-04-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children just received a three-year grant from the Squire Family Foundation! The grant funds a summer workshop for teachers that will take place this June, and also provides money for graduate student involvement in the program, materials and website support, and three years of transportation for UW students to get to and from local schools. We are very excited about the possibilities for the growth of our program that have been created by receiving this grant.

The summer workshop will take place at the University of Washington June 28-29 and is open to teachers and others interested in exploring how introducing philosophy in K-12 classrooms can enrich and enhance student learning. Participants will learn about the history and methods of philosophy for children, and will engage in philosophical discussions on topics such as: “What can we know? What makes something right or wrong? Are we free? What is a mind? How can we define happiness?”

The workshop is free of charge, including 11 clock hours, materials, refreshments, lunch on the second day, and parking. Anyone interested should contact me at info@philosophyforchildren.org by June 1.

New York Times article on doing philosophy with children

2010-04-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

I am living it up in Italy at the moment, but thought I would write this post to note that the New York Times published an article last week about philosophy in elementary school classrooms: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18philosophy-t.html

Developing a philosophical self

2010-04-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

As part of the book I'm working on, I've been thinking a lot about the development of our philosophical selves. In my experience, most children begin to exhibit a "philosophical self" around age 5, when all of the questions that demonstrate "wonder at the world" often start to emerge. This curiosity about and exploration of some of the basic facets of human life -- why we're alive, what it means to be good, what obligations we have to others and why, identity, the nature of reality -- seem to me fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. Yet, for many (most?) people, this development gets cut off at some point between age 5 and graduation from high school.

Recognized as important are the development of children's physical selves, intellectual selves, moral selves, and social and emotional selves, but there is little attention paid to the development of our philosophical selves: the part of us that recognizes and ponders the intense strangeness of the human experience, that thinks deeply about the concepts that underlie our collective understanding of the world. For me what has always been most important about engaging in philosophical discussions with children -- my own, and students in pre-college classrooms -- has been helping children to think more clearly about questions they are already thinking about. I remember my first class in philosophy, which I was lucky enough to have in a public high school, and how thrilling it was to be able to talk about these questions I'd thought about since I was little and that I imagined no one else ever considered very much.

I think that the development of children's philosophical selves is of crucial importance to learning how to evaluate the difficult questions of life thoughtfully and imaginatively. Encouraging children to cultivate their natural inclinations to wonder about life's perennially unsettled questions and to think about these questions carefully and coherently helps them become effective independent thinkers. Our philosophical selves are central, I think, to the uniqueness of human consciousness, to our awareness that we are experiencing whatever we are experiencing. Development of this part of us can profoundly enrich and deepen our lives.

PLATO

2010-04-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

After almost two years of work, the new national organization for pre-college philosophy in the US, PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), has been born! PLATO is a national support, advocacy and resource-sharing organization for teachers, parents, philosophers and others involved in teaching philosophy to pre-college students. Launched by the Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association, PLATO’s goal is to attain a visible, national presence, and to advocate in both the philosophical and educational communities for more pre-college philosophy instruction. Check out the website -- it is full of resources to use for introducing philosophy to young people!

Time, nothingness and imagination

2010-03-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

Another marvelous conversation last week with the 5th grade students with whom I've been working all year. At the beginning of the school year, one of the questions in which the students were interested was, "What is time?" We began this session with that question.

One student suggested that time is the way "we measure how long different units in the day are, so that we know exactly at what point in the day we are."

"Would time would still exist if we weren't around to measure it?" I asked.

"Maybe time is nothing," one student suggested.

"There's no such thing as nothing," responded another student.

"I think that's right," a third student agreed. "I say, 'I have nothing in may hand,' but of course it's not true. There's air in my hand, for example. Everything is something, so there is no such thing as nothing."

"That's right. We just say there's nothing in our hands because that's the only word we can come up with to describe it."

"We think of 'something' as being solid. And air isn't solid, so we think of it as nothing. But it is something."

"If nothing is something, it's not nothing. So if we're asking what nothing is, there can't really be an answer."

We talked about trying to imagine "nothing." We tried to imagine the absence space, and couldn't.

"It's not possible. There's nothing we can refer to."

"When there's a totally new idea like that, like a new color we've never seen, we have no way to think of it. Everything we can think of is based on something we've seen, heard or know about. Our imagination is not based on some magical thing, but on what we've experienced."

"Actually, we wouldn't experience anything without our imaginations."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, everything we do is because of our imaginations. We wouldn't even be able to move without imagination."

"Yeah, humans would probably have died out a long time ago without imagination. We wouldn't have survived if we couldn't imagine how to build things and do all kinds of things."

We talked about the nature of imagination, and one student said that really, then, all we experience in the world is through our minds. So how do we know that anything else exists? I explained a little about Berkeley's view that we are able only to know sensations and ideas. In the course of our conversation, I told the students about Johnson's attempt to refute Berkeley's view by kicking the rock.

"That doesn't prove anything!" one student protested. "All he showed was that he felt that he was kicking a rock, which was all in his mind."

"Everything we experience is because of our thoughts. So whether the rock is there or not, the pain I feel when I kick it is just in my mind."

"Hmmm," a student replied. "Think about the lyrics to 'Row Row Row Your Boat.' What do you think?"

"Is life just a dream?"

"I think that's really scary."

"When I was little, my brother told me that life was just being characters in a book someone else wrote. Maybe we are just characters in a book."

"If we are, I wouldn't want to know about it."

We talked a little about whether it would make any difference, if the world felt exactly the same as it now does to us, if it turned out that we were characters in a book. The conversation ended just before the bell, with us reflecting that our thoughts are the lens through which we experience the world, and that we can control how our experiences feel to us by thinking about them in certain ways.

Hotel Rwanda

2010-03-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hotel Rwanda

As part of the "Moral Philosophy and Genocide" unit I am doing with eighth grade students, last week we watched the film Hotel Rwanda and then discussed it. We talked about the reasons the international community did not intervene in Rwanda, and what obligations the Western countries had to Rwanda during this period. We also discussed the spectrum of moral obligations. At the beginning of the film, Paul Rusesabagina (the hotel manager and main character) contends that "family is all that matters." As the genocide in Rwanda unfolds, however, he develops a deep sense of obligation to neighbors and fellow Rwandans, to the extent that at one point he attempts to send his family out of the country to safety while staying behind with the refugees he is sheltering at the hotel. We talked about whether this was the right decision.

We explored the role of the United Nations as "peacekeepers," and analyzed whether it was right for the UN troops to refuse to fire on the men committing genocide. The students seemed to feel strongly that the UN troops should not have obeyed their orders not to fire, as they would have been able to save more lives had they used their weapons other than in self-defense. Did the larger role of the UN in the country, and in Africa in general, however, require this more restrained role? We analyzed what obligations the UN peacekeepers had toward the Rwandans being attacked and murdered.

We spent a little time talking about whether Paul Rusesabagina was a hero. Most of the students agreed that he was a hero. What makes someone a hero? Someone who puts his or her life at risk for someone else, a student suggested, is certainly a hero.

We'll continue our discussion this week and explore why the people who did not help others during the genocide became bystanders, examining the nature of indifference and its moral status.