Case Study 8A
Philosophy as Prosocial Education*
Maughn Gregory
* Parts of this chapter have been adapted from the following publications: Gregory & Laverty, 2009; Gregory, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011a, 2011b.
“It got me more interested with questions about things.”
“I learned to open up my mind.”
“I learned to think farther than what I am being asked.”
“When I read I ask more questions and go into depth.”
“It helped me solve more problems.”
“Now that I learned some new skills, I have an easier time with homework.”
“I look at other people’s point of view more.”
“I used to be very quiet and shy, but not now.”
“I’ve looked at things more deeply and tried to make questions out of them.”
“It changed my life.”
These comments were written by fourth- and fifth-grade students in a suburban public school in northern New Jersey, describing their experience not with a new educational fad, but with one of the most ancient of disciplines: philosophy. The practice of philosophical dialogue between adults and youth is at once ancient—at least as old as Socrates—and something very new: the longest-running initiative in precollege philosophy education is Philosophy for Children (P4C),* begun by Matthew Lipman scarcely forty years ago. A professor of philosophy at Columbia University in the late 1960s, Lipman was disturbed by the inability of rioting students and recalcitrant administrators to resolve their disputes by thoughtful talk. He became convinced that practice in careful thinking and judgment making should begin at an early age, and he began writing his first philosophical novel for children in 1968 (Lipman, 2008). In the early 1970s, Lipman was invited to develop Philosophy for Children at Montclair State College (now University) in New Jersey. There he met professor of education Ann Margaret Sharp, and the two became lifelong collaborators, founding the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC)† in 1974. Since then Lipman, Sharp, and many other university faculty and graduate students have pursued the IAPC’s threefold mission of curriculum development, theoretical and empirical research, and dissemination of the program through courses and workshops.‡ Today the IAPC offers curricula for preschool through high school, publishes the academic journal Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children (est. 1979), and offers numerous venues (in-school, retreat, and online) for professional development in Philosophy for Children. The program has been endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Lipman and Sharp’s initiatives in Philosophy for Children almost immediately attracted the attention of philosophers and educators from around the world, and in 1985 a global organization—the International Council for Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC)—was founded in Denmark. Today the complete IAPC curriculum has been translated into scores of languages and dialects, and some form of Philosophy for Children has been adopted in over fifty countries—many of which have developed their own curricula, research and professional development programs, and university courses. Over the past four decades, a body of philosophical and empirical research on philosophy for, of, and with children and adolescents has built up, amounting to thousands of academic books, articles, and doctoral dissertations, from scores of countries. Precollege philosophy is the topic of dozens of academic conferences or special conference sessions every year, in every part of the world, and is the primary thematic focus of three other academic journals in addition to Thinking,§ as well as a frequent focus of numerous other journals in philosophy and education. Most importantly, children across the United States and around the world today are engaging in philosophical inquiry, in thousands of preschool through high school classrooms, after-school programs, home school groups, girls’ and boys’ clubs, religious and secularist ethics programs, retirement centers, homeless shelters, and street-side gatherings.
In recent years a number of other, different approaches to precollege philosophy education have begun, from picture books about the lives of notable philosophers to high school versions of college-level philosophy survey courses.¶ In fact, the diversity of precollege philosophy programs currently being tried signifies not merely different approaches to, but different conceptions of what it means to teach philosophy to children or to engage children in philosophical practices. One of the most important tenets of the IAPC approach is that children’s experience is just as replete with aesthetic, ethical, and other philosophical dimensions as the experience of adults. Consider how many perennial philosophical issues are typically encountered by children as young as four or five:
I wonder if ghosts are real or unreal.
When Dad tells me to be good, what does he mean?
What makes someone a best friend?
That’s not fair!
Why is time so slow sometimes?
I think my doll is a person, not just a thing.
Is it possible to always tell the truth?
Where did Grandpa go when he died?
Philosophy for Children, therefore, does not attempt to teach children about philosophy—as a canonical set of problems, concepts, arguments, and key figures—but rather to provide them the opportunity, and a method, for making their own philosophical inquiries. The program’s curriculum is a series of novels that depict fictional children discovering and exploring philosophical issues that arise in their daily lives. The novels are written in informal language, without technical terminology, though when characters in the novels encounter a philosophical issue, their deliberations reflect historical philosophical positions so that children reading and discussing the novels are exposed to the history of ideas related to an issue. But these novels are not meant to be studied like textbooks or works of literature. Their function is to draw attention to the philosophical dimensions in children’s experience (at various age levels) and to spark children’s philosophical curiosity. That curiosity can only be satisfied by the children’s own inquiry: reflecting on the philosophical dimensions of their experience, sharing their puzzlement and excitement, probing into the puzzling or problematic aspects of that experience, and learning how to make their own sense of it all—to formulate their own judgments about what is what, how things relate, and how their experiences might become more just, more beautiful, and more meaningful. These objectives place Philosophy for Children in the tradition of philosophical wisdom practices (Gregory & Laverty, 2009; Hadot, 2002) but can fall into jeopardy if the program is focused too narrowly on thinking skills.
The pedagogy developed by Lipman and Sharp operates (with considerable variation in practice) according to a five-stage method (see Lipman, 2003, pp. 101–103):
The immediate goal of each philosophical inquiry is for the students to arrive at one or more “reasonable philosophical judgments regarding the issues and questions they have identified as worth pursuing” (Gregory, 2006, p. 160). The central practice of Philosophy for Children is the community of inquiry, a method of collaborative dialogue that engages young people in clarifying terms, creating and testing hypotheses, giving and evaluating reasons, questioning assumptions, drawing inferences, and other cognitive practices, as well as sharing perspectives, listening attentively, helping others make their point, challenging and building on other people’s ideas, and other social practices.** The facilitator of these dialogues—typically the classroom teacher who has studied and practiced the method—neither leads the children to predetermined answers nor attempts to validate every opinion as equally sound. Instead, she models and prompts excellent cognitive and social dialogue moves,†† helps the students to see the structure of the arguments that emerge in each dialogue, and encourages them to follow the inquiry where it leads, that is, in the direction of the strongest arguments and evidence, including the evidence of their feelings and experiences. In learning the rudiments of rigorous, open-ended, and democratic dialogue, the students come to understand that arriving at judgments that are not only intellectually satisfying but personally meaningful and practically ameliorative will require each person to reconstruct or “self-correct” the ideas and feelings she began with, at least partially. In Jacob Needleman’s words, “The approach to truth is a communal process; no single individual can find it alone or impose it on others” (2003, p. 24).
Though philosophical inquiry is not currently recognized widely as an important activity for schoolchildren in the United States, classroom dialogue has long been recognized as an important pedagogy for helping students to construct sound understandings of content across the disciplines and to develop higher-order thinking and inquiry skills (Burbules, 1993; see also chapter 8 on moral education in this volume). Indeed, theorists of Philosophy for Children have made the improvement of children’s academic skills among the program’s predominant purposes. They have called attention to a variety of cognitive skills and dispositions, including
This kind of intellectual growth has been the most common end in view for schools and parents that become involved in P4C, and the aim most often studied by educational researchers (see Reznitskaya, 2005; Soter et al., 2008; Trickey & Topping, 2004). However, the meaning or value of that aim is often not the same for educators, parents, researchers, P4C theorists and practitioners, and the children who trust us with their time and, typically, with their inner lives. Most narrowly, cognitive skillfulness is sometimes valued as a means to short-term academic success, which itself is valued as a means to long-term socioeconomic success. A growing number of educational psychologists and philosophers are criticizing education that focuses on socioeconomic advancement to the neglect of more humanistic aims—making the most of one’s talents, finding one’s moral bearings, becoming practiced in the virtues, advancing disciplinary knowledge, continuing traditions of cultural excellence, pursuing political justice, and otherwise living meaningfully (Maxwell, 2007; Noddings, 2005; Nussbaum, 2010; Palmer, 1993; Rose, 2009; Sternberg, 1999, 2001, 2003; and these arguments are a focal point of chapter 1 in this volume)—and all the important aims of prosocial education. Of course, preparing students to compete successfully in the job market is a legitimate aim of education, but as Socrates famously argued, a student who is capable of making a good living may not be capable of living well in these other ways. What these contemporary authors argue is not that education for socioeconomic advancement is unimportant, or that it is incompatible with education for personal and public well-being, but that education that focuses exclusively on the former will not automatically achieve the latter.
In Philosophy for Children, the most immediate value of the cognitive and social skills the program promotes is their efficacy in exploring the complex content of philosophical issues, and the program’s value orientation derives from the way it construes philosophy itself: as a yearning or wandering toward truth or meaningfulness, with implications for students’ everyday lives. The program relies on John Dewey’s notion that ethical, aesthetic, political, and many other philosophical categories describe particularly meaningful dimensions of ordinary human experience rather than remote intellectual or esoteric subjects.‡‡ Moreover, these philosophical dimensions constitute part of the meaning of ordinary experience, which is perpetually unfinished. As we become more sensitive to the aesthetic dimension in experience, for instance, what we find are not fixed aesthetic qualities but aesthetic problems and opportunities unique to each situation, and the ways in which we respond to these will help determine the aesthetic outcome.
Ethics is a central focus of P4C, though its emphases on careful thinking, collaborative dialogue, and philosophical inquiry locate it outside of the two predominant approaches to ethics education in the United States. In college and graduate schools, ethics education tends to be so concerned with disciplinary knowledge and rigorous analysis as to be unconcerned with whether or not the students (or faculty) are living ethical lives; while P–12 ethics education (values and character education) is so concerned with shaping students’ ethical beliefs and conduct that it tends to be glaringly unacademic—lacking in historical perspective, philosophical depth, and methods of value inquiry (Gregory, 2009). Historically, there were some programs for P–12 education that aimed at “values transmission,” meaning that the values to be educated are not up for questioning or critique. Among these are behavior modification programs that target high-risk behaviors like sexual activity and substance abuse and employ stimulus-response conditioning (slogans, pledges, shock videos, motivational speeches) to effect good behavior. In slight contrast, programs in character education aim to modify moral beliefs and feelings, in addition to behavior, and embed strictly behavioral aims like “don’t take drugs” in much thicker aims such as becoming responsible, caring, honest, fair, and respectful and developing a strong work ethic (Lickona, Schaps, & Lewis, 2007). It is telling that the kinds of data sometimes used to measure the success of character education programs are statistics like “office referrals, suspensions, detentions, and expulsions” (Brimi, 2009, p. 129), although, to be fair, reporting such statistics is a demand made by federal and state funding agencies. Teaching children a prescribed set of values may help them to make sense of the confusing alternatives they encounter in their lives and in the media, and even to make wise choices regarding them, but it can also weaken their capacity to make sound judgments, especially when such teaching borders on conditioning or programming.
In contrast to the behaviorist approach, the critical thinking approach to ethics education teaches students methods of critical reasoning as the means for reaching moral judgments that are sound, especially in the logical sense. These programs derive from analytic philosophy, with its penchant for defining and tracing out the logical relationships among philosophical concepts, and from developmental psychology, especially the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, in which children’s moral development is closely related to their cognitive development (see Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983; chapter 8 in this volume).
Philosophy for Children employs critical reasoning, but within a broader context of children’s ethical inquiry. Unlike behaviorist programs, it recognizes the need and the capacity of young people to grapple with moral ambiguity and pluralism, to honestly confront their own moral doubts, to criticize conventional norms, and to engage in constructive, open-ended ethical inquiry. Most parents, in fact, want their children to learn to think critically about whatever values or beliefs are presented to them and to have the courage of their own convictions. But personal conviction can only come from a process of honest, uncoerced inquiry. And the tools of inquiry cannot be taught in the abstract; they need to be anchored in issues that really matter to children. Moreover, the collaborative, dialogical practice of a community of inquiry instantiates the ethics of discursive rationality:
Participation in such a community fosters an ability to put one’s ego in perspective [which] not only allows for children to be able to attend to each other’s views, but also their needs (emotional, social, and cognitive) and to learn the importance of being open to alternative possibilities. . . . This ability is an outgrowth of the group work. . . . Classroom communal inquiry can only foster wisdom if the participants can overcome a narcissism that blocks the ability to care for one another’s thoughts and feelings, to seriously take each other’s perspectives into account and to develop the capacity for empathy. (Sharp, 2007, pp. 5, 10–11)
Philosophy for Children grounds children’s ethical inquiry in the ethical qualities that arise in their own experience. By “ethical qualities,” I mean that mercy, justice, solidarity, care, fidelity, and other ethical ideals—as well as anti-ideals like cruelty, avarice, pettiness, and guile—are not just concepts, but felt qualities of experience that can be evaluated on that basis. Indeed, children often feel the distinct ethical qualities of lived situations more keenly than we adults do, but often without understanding the unfinished, problematic nature of those situations, and without understanding their own agency and capacity to inquire into them intelligently and to intervene in ways that will improve both the ethical qualities they experience and the ethical capacities they take into future experiences. As Dewey (1938/1967) argued, trying to respond well to what is problematic in our immediate experience is the only way we can learn to do so more skillfully in the future:
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything. (p. 49)
In aiming beyond education for critical thinking and even ethics education, to education for wisdom, however, Philosophy for Children encounters the kinds of practical and ideological obstacles that beset other initiatives in liberal arts education, including increased standardization of educational interventions and outcomes, economic demands for greater educational efficiency, detractors from leftist and rightist theorists, the diminishing role of teachers as curricular and pedagogical experts, the reduction of pedagogy to information delivery (increasingly carried out by technology), and excessive testing. With regard to evaluation, advocates of the program steer a sometimes precarious course between the Scylla of norm-based testing that threatens to reduce the aims of the program to those most easily and inexpensively tested—for example, skill with informal logic—and the Charybdis of having no reliable way of studying the program’s effectiveness for the aims they value. Along this course, two kinds of evaluation have been recognized as important to the practice of P4C: self-assessment conducted by the students, and external assessment of those communities conducted by teachers and others. Self-assessment is part of the self-corrective practice of the community of philosophical inquiry, which requires that participants conduct a metalevel inquiry (inquiry about the inquiry), paying attention to the quality of the inquiry and judging how to improve it. It is likewise important for facilitators to reflect on their own facilitation skills, and on the students’ reasoning and collaborative skills and philosophical acumen, in order to reconstruct their facilitation techniques and strategies to better accommodate the students’ growth. The IAPC has designed a number of instruments for students and facilitators to self-assess, and it regularly collaborates with teachers and researchers to evaluate the quality of P4C in particular schools.
In addition to this kind of internal evaluation, hundreds of empirical studies—including formal and informal (action research)—have been conducted by external evaluators to measure the effectiveness of P4C for outcomes such as improved thinking skills, reading skills, social skills, and even grades (see, for example, Garcia-Moriyon, 2004; Soter et al., 2008; Trickey & Topping, 2004). While some of this research has provided important insights that have helped to develop the theory and practice of Philosophy for Children, much of it has been conducted for the purpose of satisfying parents, administrators, legislators, community members, teachers, and students that doing philosophy regularly is worth the time and effort it requires—an important purpose, to be sure, but, again, one that can obstruct the wisdom-oriented aims articulated by the program’s advocates. The IAPC has sponsored and collaborated in many of these external evaluation studies in cases where the results tested are amenable to the IAPC’s mission. But two important obstacles to authentic program evaluation remain. The first is that philosophers are not trained in methods of empirical research and so must cross disciplinary boundaries to collaborate with colleagues in the social sciences, who themselves may not be interested in philosophy. The second is that the authentic objectives of philosophy education—like dialogical competence and acumen with philosophical concepts—have been difficult to observe and measure empirically until relatively recently. Most evaluative studies of precollege philosophy education (e.g., Morehouse, 1998; Shipman, 1983) have relied on measurement tools such as standardized vocabulary, reading comprehension, and logic tests that capture only a small range of the outcomes important to philosophy education. However, recent advances in qualitative and quantitative research methods in education, influenced primarily by sociocultural learning theories, make this work increasingly suitable for the evaluation of philosophy education—particularly of classroom dialogue (see Reznitskaya et al., 2008).
These studies are confirming with empirical evidence what philosophers and educational theorists have argued for centuries: that education in critical and creative thinking, dialogical prowess, and conventional values are necessary but not sufficient for children to approach wisdom. For that, they need to inquire into what makes a worthwhile life. In other words, children themselves need to practice philosophy as the search for wisdom. The primary aim of Philosophy for Children is to help children and adolescents—and those of us who live and work with them—wake up to the philosophical dimensions already present in our everyday experience, discern problems and opportunities that arise within these dimensions of experience, and reach sound aesthetic, ethical, logical, and political judgments that might ameliorate our experience by making it more just, more beautiful, more reasonable, and in other ways more meaningful. In this way, P4C construes philosophy as a disciplined practice, not only of grappling with complex intellectual problems, but also of living meaningful lives. As Dewey recommended,
Philosophy is love of wisdom; wisdom being not knowledge but knowledge-plus; knowledge turned to account in the instruction and guidance it may convey in piloting life through the storms and the shoals that beset life-experience as well as into such havens of consummatory experience as enrich our human life from time to time. (2008, p. 389)
The pursuit of reasonable, ameliorative philosophical judgments is inseparable, in P4C, from the practice of the community of philosophical inquiry—a practice that has been studied, experimented with, varied, and elaborated at length since the founding of the IAPC (see, for example, Glaser, 1998; Gregory, 2002, 2006, 2007; Kennedy, 1994, 2004a, 2004b; Lipman, 1981, 1995; Sharp, 1987, 1997, 2007). Perhaps the most important thing that practice makes obvious to those who try it is the relationship between inquiry and community: the ways in which the personal study and practice of living well depends on certain kinds and functions of community and, in turn, the ways in which social and political well-being depends on the cultivation and practice of individual wisdom. Making sense of the world and finding one’s place in it, discovering what is valuable, and deliberating on ways of life that make sense and invite value require social dynamics of mutual curiosity and exchange, along with habits of cooperative inquiry into common questions, including the nature of the common good and the worthwhile life. Also, becoming more precise and nuanced in one’s thinking and speech, more complex in one’s considerations, and more disposed to give up winning an argument for the sake of finding the truth depends on making oneself accountable to a community of trusted peers who will push for clarification, offer rival explanations, help articulate a difficult point, build on one’s idea, and otherwise show one how to self-correct. And apart from its instrumental value in reaching meaningful judgments and becoming a more skillful inquirer, the experience of intellectual and emotional interdependence, of mutual discipline in pursuit of a shared goal, is an intrinsically, that is, qualitatively, valuable experience. P4C is a method of prosocial education because once the yearning for philosophical meaning has been awakened in us, we find that it must be approached collectively as well as individually. As the wisdom literature from many different traditions relates,§§ the philosophical community is not only a means to, but part of that wellbeing or wisdom for which we yearn.
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*The phrase Philosophy for Children was coined by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp in the early 1970s. See www.montclair.edu/iapc (retrieved July 15, 2011). Practitioners around the world today use phrases like Philosophy with Children, Philosophy with Children and Adolescents, Philosophy in Schools, and Philosophy for Young People to refer to their own work; however, in the literature these phrases are also often used to refer to any program that engages children in philosophical dialogue (as opposed, especially, to programs for teaching older children the history of philosophy). Unless otherwise indicated, we use the phrase Philosophy for Children, in the latter sense, to refer not only to the materials and methods developed by Lipman and Sharp, but to similar programs, whether or not originally derived from Lipman and Sharp.
†See www.montclair.edu/iapc (retrieved July 15, 2011).
‡Lipman retired in 2001 but continued working with the IAPC until his death in 2010. Sharp retired in 2009 and likewise continued working with the IAPC and with the global P4C community until her death in 2010.
§Analytic Teaching: The Community of Inquiry Journal (LaCrosse, Wisconsin: Viterbo University, 1981 to present, online at www.viterbo.edu/analytic); Critical and Creative Thinking: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy for Children, renamed Critical and Creative Thinking: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy in Education (Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations, 1993 to present): and Childhood & Philosophy: A Journal of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (2005 to present, online at www.filoeduc.org/childphilo).
¶See http://plato-apa.org (retrieved July 15, 2011).
**Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan (1980) explain: “[Dialogue] . . . generates reflection. Very often, when people engage in dialogue with one another, they are compelled to reflect, to concentrate, to consider alternatives, to listen closely, to give careful attention to definitions and meanings, to recognize previously un-thought-of options, and in general to perform a vast number of mental activities that they might not have engaged in had the conversation never occurred” (p. 22).
††The term “moves” is often used in P4C in analogy to chess. In philosophical dialogue, one doesn’t simply wait for a chance to offer one’s opinion, but studies the development of the dialogue, listening carefully in order to know what kind of move is called for, e.g., asking for clarification, offering an example, or identifying an assumption.
‡‡Dewey writes, for instance, that “the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product . . . issue[s] from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary experience is expressed. . . . A conception of fine art that sets out from its connection with discovered qualities of ordinary experience will be able to indicate the factors and forces that favor the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value” (Dewey, 1934/1989, p. 17).
§§“[A]ncient philosophy was always a philosophy practiced in a group, whether in the case of the Pythagorean communities, Platonic love, Epicurean friendship, or Stoic spiritual direction. Ancient philosophy required a common effort, community of research, mutual assistance, and spiritual support. Above all, philosophers—even, in the last analysis, the Epicureans—never gave up having an effect on their cities, transforming society, and serving their citizens, who frequently accorded them praise . . .” (Hadot, 1995, p. 274).