How Philosophy for Children Improves Me as a Philosopher

We live in urgent times, and thoughtlessness seems to prevail. “We need to do philosophy in the world,” C. Thi Nguyen wrote this past summer in his “Manifesto for Public Philosophy.” “We need to join the fight. The soul of humanity is at stake.” Much has been offered by way of argument, field-based research, and exhortation in favor of philosophy’s public engagement. I am grateful for this work upon which I often rely to make a case for my own practice. 

But I want to take a different angle and argue not for what philosophy can give to the world, but for what engagement with the world can give philosophy. In particular, I wish to focus on philosophy in k-12 settings—specifically Philosophy for Children (P4C), an approach  revamped and brought to the American context by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp in the 1970s. P4C is now a global movement that is well established in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Italy, United Kingdom, South Korea, Israel, Australia, and gaining ground in the United States. I collaborate with local school teachers who invite me and my students for weekly philosophy sessions in their classrooms. Each session lasts 45-60 minutes and we normally visit each classroom for eight weeks each semester.

A session of philosophy with children goes something like this: Children read out loud a short story or thought experiment (to take an actual example, the story of Gyges’ ring of invisibility from Plato’s Republic), children and undergraduate students generate questions and choose which one to discuss (Do invisible people need clothing?), children engage in philosophical dialogue with our facilitation, and we conclude by reaching some type of provisional agreement on the question. (Children went on to discuss why we even need clothing and decided that they are optional except for signaling status.) Before leaving the classroom, we ask children to evaluate the shared inquiry of the session. (They liked it and felt a bit daring pursuing that inquiry.)

Why should I as a professional philosopher engage in this activity? Simply put, because I have become a better philosopher by doing it.

Becoming a Better Thinker

Planning and facilitating philosophical sessions with children puts me in touch with some dimensions of philosophical dialogue that I might otherwise overlook. The pedagogy of the community of inquiry fosters critical, caring, and creative thinking. Through this work, I have learned to follow the threads of thinking and pay attention to the structure of the arguments made; to monitor relational aspects such as taking turns, listening, giving, and receiving feedback; and to recognize and point out the new, creative ideas generated by the group. I have developed a keen sense for the philosophical quality of thinking in a group of young students that I apply in my own college classroom.

Why teach philosophy to children? The P4C community has long argued that children can indeed philosophize and that it is unfair, epistemically and pedagogically, not to acknowledge this fact. In his essay “Are Children Philosophical?” philosopher Gareth Matthews argues that adults and children bring different gifts to the table: The adult may possess a stronger hold of the language and perhaps of the concepts; the child offers philosophical naiveté, or perplexity. (See the forthcoming Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher edited by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty.) How is naiveté a gift and not a deficit? Why should we not only accept, but actively seek out this gift?

Naiveté is a frank and unaffected outlook expressed by the new and the innocent. It is conveyed as an uninhibited and wholehearted preference for what is close and immediate. English inherited the word from French, which received it from the Latin nativus, the verbal adjective from the verb nascor (I am born). Curiously, this qualifier was received in English in the feminine declension, and it came to indicate not only qualities of innocence and genuineness, but also of lack of sophistication, gullibility, and even foolishness. Aside from the obvious gendered layers in the concept’s reception, naiveté proves, as Matthews suggests, to be beneficial to philosophical progress, because it frees the joint inquiry from preoccupations with conformity and with theoretical preconceptions. Naiveté also appears to offer a powerful immunization against the impulse to perform “being smart” that corrupts some public exchanges.

If we adults can let go of our defensiveness in guarding the boundaries of philosophical practice, we can enjoy the benefits of a more open, inquisitive, and creative philosophical inquiry with children. We can renew our capacity to be perplexed, to wonder, and to accept incompleteness.

As academic philosophers we should not neglect the nascent intuitions found in dialogues with children. In some ways, I feel that the same claim can be made about dialogues with non-academic philosophers. Both professional philosophy and public philosophy are valuable, and each gains from dialogue with the other. For instance, Gareth Matthews used transcriptions of children’s dialogues and stories as part of philosophical texts for use in academic philosophy. It is our task as professional philosophers to trace, contextualize, and employ children’s philosophical contributions for scholarly philosophical conversation. Philosophy that invites and welcomes dialogues with children and others can point us toward a more spacious and embracing understanding of philosophy itself.

Becoming a Better Teacher

I have also become a better teacher by integrating philosophy in schools into my teaching. I invite some interested students to join me when I go to the k-12 classroom. This invitation seems to work well with philosophy majors, some of whom start considering teaching as a career after this experience. I also formally incorporate philosophy in schools in the “Philosophy of Education” course I teach, which fulfils a humanities requirement for the general education curriculum. I adopt P4C pedagogy with ample twists and freedom, and the curriculum is planned in collaboration with the classroom teacher and my students. Some of the teachers I collaborate with have a personal interest in philosophy, majored or minored in college, or attended a Summer Institute for Teachers offered in 2018 with support from the Whiting Foundation and from the Fulton School of Liberal Arts at Salisbury University. Students then write a final report about their experience.

Many of the students who participate gain a better understanding of what it means to do philosophy. Specifically, they come to appreciate the dialogical aspect of thinking, the openness of the process, the discovery of children as inquiry partners, and the pleasantness of the experience. They also come to abandon the expectation that knowledge is about mastery; they learn to create conditions for fruitful, shared philosophical inquiry, and they develop respect and care for children’s intellectual freedom.

Beyond an appreciation of the complexity and dynamism of philosophical thinking, students also experience a bit of discomfort and uneasiness. When they, as invited strangers, enter a second-grade classroom or a public reading room, they worry about not belonging, being uncertain, and encountering the unplanned. But they move from feeling out of place to experiencing a sense of belonging: They are part of the joint inquiry, and they share questions, ideas, jokes, and silences with the group of children they philosophize with. (Plus, children give them hugs, which is always a bonus.) This movement of belonging and not belonging, of within and without, promotes a deeper, more capacious understanding of the discipline itself. Students come to see marginality and divergence as an asset to philosophizing.

Becoming a Better Writer

Teaching makes us better writers because the concern with clarity, with getting one’s point across, with avoiding simplification if it betrays multi-layered and deep-seated questions, transfers well to writing. Writing itself, in truth, could be seen as a pedagogical undertaking. Similarly, philosophizing with children helps me strive for a type of lucid responsiveness that, practiced regularly in community with children and students, may carry over to my writing.

But I also would want to see it inform my writing in a more direct, palpable way. Not only by way of style or disposition, but as actual content, and not as a theorizing on pedagogy, but as integrating actual experiences with children and students in my writing. Perhaps there is an ineffable literary capacity that scholars such as Gareth Matthews, Alison Gopnik, and David Hansen possess. Perhaps there are other bright examples or suggestions that readers of this blog want to share with me. 

Becoming Better

I feel that teaching philosophy with children has made me better than what I would be without it. I have found in this practice a way to grow and refine myself, not by becoming better than others, but by cultivating myself as a thinker, teacher, and writer. A very distinctive feature of humanistic study is that it is a dialectical activity: Engagement in the activity clarifies the goals and internal goods of the activity, while creating a space for continuous improvement. One is never done becoming a better friend, a better lover, or a better reader. Similarly, one is never done becoming a better philosopher. Practicing public facing philosophy, in the form I described or in other forms that are gaining ground, provides us with unique chances to cultivate ourselves. I encourage colleagues to explore public-facing practices in philosophy as a way to nurture and tend to their own philosophical soul, and perhaps, by doing so, also tend a bit to the soul of humanity.

Photo: The fifth grade class from Pinehurst Elementary visits the Salisbury University philosophy department to celebrate World Philosophy Day with undergraduate students in November 2019. (Photo by Patti Filutze)

Cristina Cammarano

Cristina Cammarano is an assistant professor of philosophy at Salisbury University. She likes to think about the public dimensions of philosophy, the philosophical education of teachers, and the experience of migrants in multicultural societies. She is a Whiting Public Engagement Fellow and leads a program of Philosophy in Schools. Before coming to the United States for doctoral studies in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, she taught high-school philosophy and history for five years in Milan, Italy.