Philosophy and Childhood: Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices

Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices

W. Kohan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137469175
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Kohan offers a transformative, revolutionary, and more radical alternative theory and practice of philosophy for children. He critiques the current state of philosophy for children and demonstrates alternative ways of thinking and practicing philosophy in childhood education.

Part I

Philosophy for Children: Critical Perspectives

1

Some Biographical Remarks and Philosophical Questions within Philosophy for Children

Abstract: This chapter offers a philosophical questioning of the way p4c has traditionally conceptualized philosophy and the educational relationship that it presumes to cultivate between philosophy and children. The main issue discussed in this chapter is the way p4c answers the question: “what is philosophy?”—in particular, the role of questioning in philosophical inquiry and the political senses attributed to philosophy in p4c.

Keywords: education as formation; Matthew Lipman; Philosophy for Children; Plato; thinking; what is philosophy?

Kohan, Walter Omar. Philosophy and Childhood: Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137469175.0005.

I was already in love with philosophy when I fell in love with Philosophy for Children (p4c) in the early 1990s—perhaps similar to Matthew Lipman, the creator of p4c, who fell in love with philosophy in the 1950s and with education in the 1960s. My first wonder then turned into admiration for what seemed to be a radically different conception both of philosophy and of education.

Those initial feelings were deepened as I made personal contact with Matthew Lipman, Ann Sharp and other colleagues in different parts of the world. Entering the world of p4c meant living in a space consecrated to serious educational and philosophical change. They were years of deep dedication, study and practice with Lipman’s paradigm. I worked with children and adults especially from diverse countries in Latin America—mainly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. In 1996 I completed my Ph.D. in p4c at Iberoamericana University in Mexico City, with a thesis mentored by Lipman and Ronald Reed—that warm friend, died a couple of years later. From 1997 to 2002 I have taught in the Faculty of Education of the University of Brasilia, where I coordinated the project “Filosofia na Escola,” to bring the practice of philosophy to public school children and teachers in the Federal District of Brazil. Since 2002 I do a similar work in the State University of Rio de Janeiro, where we develop an analogous project in the city of Duque de Caxias, a suburb of Rio.

Much time, experiences and practices have passed and while still in love with Lipman’s project, I have increasingly felt the need to re-create its themes from other bases. My own practice with children and educators, as well as being in touch with diverse institutions created all around the world to “disseminate” the program, have consolidated in me strong beliefs about the educational possibilities of the practice of philosophy with children and teachers and, at the same time, serious doubts (philosophical, educational, political) regarding the benefits of the application of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) model and, most generally, p4c methodology and theoretical principles—at least in Latin American countries, where I have worked most. As in all forms of philosophical love, the questions, the critique, the differences, cannot be absent, and, in my case, quite the contrary, they have deepened over the years. In this brief introductory chapter, I will try to expose some of those doubts and present my basis for them as well.

1.1Philosophical questions

I consider Lipman’s project, p4c, to be potentially revolutionary—not only for philosophy and education, but for childhood as well—both theoretically and practically. Although different thinkers in different times have pointed out children’s philosophical potential, no one before Lipman has attributed such a primary place for them in the world of philosophical ideas concerning education. Characteristic of someone deeply shaped by the pragmatist philosophical and educational tradition, Lipman not only speculated about these ideas, but also created a methodology that turned them into a reality. The expansion of his program into so many countries today is a sign of the strength of his ideas and his practices.

As pretended by Lipman, I consider p4c a philosophical adventure and as such I offer to it the highest honor a philosopher can receive, which is to debate the assumptions and implications of his thought and practice. Unfortunately p4c has provoked more apologies and attacks than critical attention. Paradoxically, both who defend and attack it, either by considering p4c a salvation for education or a non-philosophical pedagogy, with that gesture group themselves outside philosophy. Far from these two positions, I will outline some of my queries. Because of the deepness of the issues involved, I will just present them acknowledging that they call for greater development elsewhere.

1.2Can philosophy be taught? If so, how should it be taught?

This first question might recall Kant’s classic dichotomy concerning the impossibility of learning philosophy. Let’s remember it: it is impossible to learn philosophy as an accomplished discipline, only to philosophize can be learned (Critique of Pure Reason, B 865–9). Even though the dichotomy can be overcome considering that practice always calls for theory and that it is not possible to exercise philosophical thinking without philosophy as theory taking place in some way, it would still be important to question whether the learning of philosophy—the experience of philosophizing—can actually be taught in institutions such as schools.

Lipman just presupposes an affirmative answer to this question, without even considering it. Let us accept, for the moment, this position: let’s consider as if philosophy—the experience of it—could be taught in Lipman’s terms: to teach philosophy to children is to reconstruct the history of philosophy in such a why as to provoke children’s philosophizing through it. New questions emerge: How should we teach philosophy to provoke children’s philosophizing? Is there a best—more useful, true, effective—form of doing so? Can this question be solved through pedagogical, technical or scientific means? Lipman seems to respond to all of these questions affirmatively. His answer is obvious: his program, p4c, is that best form. Moreover, it is the only attempt that has reconstructed philosophy in its integrity and complexity so that children could really experience it in communities of philosophical inquiry. By doing this, he considers that the community of philosophical inquiry contributes and approximates the conditions of “an ideal speech situation,” where “formal properties of discourse” would give the key elements to decide on the excellence in argumentation (Lipman, 2001: 414). Under this form, a kind of Hegelianism (through Dewey’s influence) appears in this reconstruction of the history of philosophy: philosophy seems to have reached its realized form as a teachable discipline in p4c. In other words, p4c represents a culminating didactic resource, overcoming all previous ones to bring Philosophy for Children.

Let’s examine this pretension. What sort of philosophy does p4c introduce to the young? How does Lipman respond to the question “What is philosophy?” Lipman considers philosophy as a form of thinking. In his first writings, such as Philosophy in the Classroom (1980), Philosophy Goes to School (1988) and the first edition of Thinking of Education (1991) only two forms of thinking are considered: critical and creative. Progressively, he acknowledges a third dimension, caring, thoroughly explored in the second edition of Thinking in Education (Lipman, 2003). Lipman also considers philosophy as distributed thinking and, no less important, as a form of self-corrective questioning, logical and dialogical inquiry (ibid.: 408–9). All these formulations have extraordinary dimensions. Just as an example of a more thorough task, here I am only going to problematize the role assigned by Lipman to questioning.

I could not agree more with Lipman about the importance of questioning as the “leading edge of [philosophical] inquiry” (ibid.: 410–1). Philosophy arises from a question, and lives in the questions that develop from, modify and renovate that initial question. Just as philosophy would be little without its questions, a philosophical experience that didn’t exercise them would be an impoverished one. Nevertheless, we find that Lipman’s emphasis on questioning appears to be reduced in its possibilities in at least three senses: in its scope, in its conception and in the form in which it is exercised. Let me try to present why.

Again, what is the meaning of questioning in philosophy? It is through questions that philosophical inquiry moves to expand the problematic dimension of our being in the world. In philosophy alone, of all the disciplines, do our questions turn into self-questioning, into placing ourselves—our own subjectivity, both individual and social—into question. We don’t ask philosophical questions to seek information, even knowledge or anything external to us, even though we can gain any of these; rather, we are committed in the question within the question. We wonder. We put ourselves into questions. We let questions go through our thinking and life. It is for this reason that in philosophy it is impossible to ask for another—to ask someone else’s question, to just repeat anyone else’s question. The one who repeats the question of another one is not questioning anything, strictly speaking, much less is he or she self-questioning; he or she is merely reproducing someone else’s inquietude. Therefore it is important that children and teachers question and self-question, so that they can find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the arbitrary in the natural, the complex in the simple, the contingent in the obvious. Collective philosophical inquiry always expands the field of the problematic in us, to us, within us. If, as Lipman says, the inquiry “seeks to render a problematic situation no longer problematic” (ibid.: 412), then it stops being philosophical. The major characteristic of living a philosophical life is its capacity to put itself into question, in posing problems to its life, not in solving its problems. In philosophy we do not really question to know more about whatever but, mainly, to stop knowing—to know a little less, to just know we do not know, to put it in Socratic terms. I do not mean that in philosophy we ask just for the sake of asking, nor that no questions could be answered or no answers could be affirmed. Much less, that answers do not count at all. Of course they do and through philosophical inquiry much attention is given to examine alternative answers to a problem. But philosophical thinking means primarily thinking through questions that are posed directly to our own life or thinking, or to different values, concepts and knowledge affirmed in other fields—such as politics, art, religion, science—that inform our own life and thinking. It questions the unquestioned assumptions, thus revises its conditions and opens them to alternative possibilities.

Traditionally philosophy has been rooted in wonder or, as Jaspers (1959) put it, in three feelings: wonder, doubt and commotion, and the consciousness of being lost by human beings. Even though I acknowledge these possibilities I prefer to add a fourth one: dissatisfaction, which I think is specifically significant in an economic, social and political environment such as Latin America. In this sense, dissatisfaction that provokes philosophical questioning in this context has two main characteristics: first, it springs from a state of things that urges and calls for problematization, and second, it never conforms. Philosophical questions can be answered in many different ways, but no answer can mitigate the intensity of the dissatisfaction that sustains them. It is in this intensity that the problems and concepts of philosophy emerge. I don’t believe that philosophy can be found, as Lipman (2001: 406) has suggested in a body of abstract, complex, general and ill-defined ideas. Questions lead to problems. Not every question contains a problem but a philosophical problem emerges and is expressed in the form of a question. Problems and concepts in philosophy are as historical as the people who produce them. Although we have many words in common with the Greeks, the medieval and other philosophical traditions, and even though we can be sharing the form of some questions, the meanings of those words and questions that arise of them change substantially over time, so that different situated philosophical problems emerge.

Let’s take an example. Although we still consider truth as a philosophical problem, the Greek philosophers asked what truth is in an absolute way, tying to find out something like its essence, nature or character. Today we are not as interested in what truth is as in how it works, how it is produced, legitimated and transmitted through diverse contemporary social devices (as diverse of those of the classic Greeks) assuming its not absolute character. Greek philosophers gave different answers to what truth is while now we seem to be more interested in problematizing the effect of any social dispositive to produce truth. For the Greeks the nature of truth was a question in itself. For the Greeks truth was discovered while for us it is produced, invented, something that would appear, at the very least, banal or danger to Plato or Aristotle or even relativists such as Protagoras. Thus the problems of philosophy can be neither universalized nor anticipated, much less foreseen.

From this example, we can question to what extent a history of philosophy (a history of the questions, concepts and problems of philosophy) reconstructed à la Lipman—which, by the way, doesn’t cover developments over the past thirty years, much less significant previous ones—is such an interesting way to encourage children’s philosophical questions. In other words, what sorts of questions, and what further development of those questions, would such a reconstruction favor if not the abstract, general and fundamental questions, the common, central and controversial questions that p4c considers the questions of all time philosophy? Is this the most interesting way to help children to find their questions and problems and put their own thinking and life into question?

Furthermore, we can question Lipman’s (2001: 410) novels and manuals as they are proposed to be models of philosophical inquiry. In fact nothing seems less philosophical than the so-called philosophical manual—no matter how many questions and how few answers it contains—because a manual by definition constitutes a kind of answer to how philosophy ought to be taught, and how questions should be asked. The idea of a manual presupposes that at least in some sense philosophy can be transmitted, taught didactically. In this way, it injures the very dimension of philosophical experience (open, problematic, non-transferable) that it instructs us in. In its presentation through manuals, philosophical questioning appears as being external to its practitioners. I wonder whether the manuals don’t create an external relationship, not only to the practicing philosophical subjects it addresses (children and educators), but to their own questions as well.

1.3Why teach philosophy? What are the relationships among philosophy, education and politics?

At least, since Plato’s The Republic, the aim of education is to make of what it is to what it ought to be. Education is thus placed as the way to turn an unfair pólis into a fair one. Since then, the education of children has been a privileged tool in the political utopias of our historical past. We do this with the best of intentions, of course. As Lipman says, “these are our children and we want only good things to happen to them” (2001: 411).

With all his anti-Platonism inherited from John Dewey, Lipman seems to accept this scheme without question. He wants education to insure that children will be “good people” (ibid.). It is for this reason that he introduces philosophy into their education—as a tool used to promote the formation of more critical, reasonable, democratic, tolerant, judicious people (Lipman, 2001). He considers the teaching of philosophy to be a key to education for democracy. He would probably accept that there would be no need to teach philosophy if it didn’t lead us there or if we were already at such a place. The teaching of philosophy is grounded and given meaning, for Lipman, in a socio-political logic—not a philosophical one. He intends to educate children in philosophy in order to consolidate the democratic utopian dream.

It is amazing how the way of linking the relationship between philosophy, education and politics is so close to a traditional form in a program, such as Philosophy for Children, that presents itself as so different from “traditional philosophy.” Although it changes the final political aim of education to that of deliberative democracy, the pillars of traditional education remain: the goals of the enterprise are defined by an architecture external to philosophy itself, a logic previous and external to those involved in the educational process itself—children and teachers. It still considers education as what might bring as from what it is to what ought to be. Sure, it ruminates philosophy in a very different way, from knowledge to communal inquiry, and it changes the political goal of education from the aristocratic polis to the deliberative democracy, but the logic of the relationship between philosophy, education and politics does not change so much: an educational philosophy will enable to achieve the deserved political order.

In this sense p4c would not appear to offer much of a revolutionary philosophical and educational alternative to current institutions and structures if inspired by the Platonic Model. If we consider philosophy as a form of really transformative thinking it should not have any fixed arrivin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Philosophy for Children: Critical Perspectives
• Part II  Philosophy in Children: Affirmative Practices
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index