Jana Mohr Lone is the director of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center devoted to scholarship and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood. Since 1996, her work has centered around the conviction that we ought both to challenge our beliefs about children’s limited capacities and enlarge our understanding of the meaning of philosophy and who is qualified to engage in it. She has authored several books on the topic, including her most recent Seen and Not Heard: Why Children’s Voices Matter which explores what children’s perspectives can contribute to philosophical thought.
What is your work about?
I spend a great deal of my time talking with children about their philosophical questions and ideas. Many young children are wide open to life’s philosophical mysteries, thinking about questions such as why there is hatred in the world, the nature of time, whether dreams are real, why we die, and why we exist.
Yet most people do not think of children as philosophically capable, largely because we discount and dismiss their abilities to engage in serious thinking. Even though our homes and schools have become more child-centered than in the past, I think that children’s thoughts and insights continue to be patronized or ignored simply due to age. We react to children’s big questions or expressions of philosophical thoughts by remarking on how cute or amusing they are (‘Kids say the darndest things’) or by dismissing them (‘She doesn’t understand what she’s saying’), not by taking them seriously.
Adults often assume, before children utter a word, that what they have to say must be of little importance because they are children. This is an example of epistemic injustice – being automatically judged as an inferior knower, even before you say anything. The literature in the field has just begun to address age, but for children, epistemic injustice is commonplace.
I’ve observed that children do have a great deal to say about serious topics. They bring particular strengths to philosophy: a fearlessness about thinking creatively, without worrying that they will make a mistake or sound silly, and a willingness to share their thoughts openly. And philosophy benefits from children’s fresh and unencumbered points of view. Examining philosophical problems requires embracing new ways of thinking, developing imaginative examples, and a facility for playing with ideas. Children have notably robust abilities in these areas. Welcoming them as part of the philosophical community brings important and unique perspectives into our collective conversations.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
The impetus for writing Seen and Not Heard came from my growing recognition of how much I’ve learned from children in my 25 years of talking with them about their philosophical questions and ideas. In The Philosophical Child (2012), I wrote about the value for young people of engaging in philosophical inquiry and suggested ways that parents, grandparents, and other adults can inspire philosophical exchanges with the children in their lives. Seen and Not Heard was motivated by my desire to demonstrate the ways that children can expand our philosophical universe by portraying how children’s original, perceptive observations and ideas have enlarged my thinking about many of the philosophical questions we have explored together.
For example, over the years I’ve noticed that children’s thoughts regarding friendship are particularly insightful. This is because, I think, friendship is so central in their lives. Especially once they begin school, learning how to develop and sustain friendships is one of childhood’s principal tasks. Most philosophers and most psychological and sociological research consider a relationship a friendship only if it is reciprocal, if each person defines the other as a friend. But a conversation about friendship with a group of 11-year-olds led me to think differently about this topic. The children observed that sometimes one person wouldn’t call a relationship a friendship and the other person would, but the two might just have different ideas of what it means to be a friend. Sometimes we are friends without knowing it, they said.
Perhaps because being in the world is a more novel experience for children than for adults, children have unique approaches to exploring some of life’s larger questions. Yet even as our society has become more attentive to children’s needs and interests, we still seldom give them the benefit of respectful attention to their deeper thoughts and questions. Adults are generally unwilling to relinquish, as Gareth Matthews put it, “the automatic presumption of adults’ superiority in knowledge and experience.” Consequently, we miss out on their potential contributions to our shared thinking about important topics, and we forego opportunities to interact in more reciprocal ways with children. This is a loss for both children and adults, a loss Seen and Not Heard is intended to help remedy.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
Most of the topics discussed in Seen and Not Heard arose from the kinds of questions and thoughts that children have expressed in my work with them over the years, about the nature of childhood, friendship, justice and fairness, gender, race, climate ethics, happiness, and death. These are the topics that come up time and time again when I meet with children. The book includes examples of dialogues with children. I then evaluate the ways that the children’s comments and perceptions relate to what philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars have written on these subjects, and point out in what ways children’s views echo the established literature and where their ideas suggest new ways of thinking.
As I was writing the book, I came to understand that at its heart it is about listening. I began with the intention of conveying children’s original philosophical perspectives and the ways that talking with them can foster new approaches to challenging problems. But it wasn’t until I started writing that I recognized that the children’s words would determine the course of the book, and that the focal point would be listening to what they had to say. In the final chapter of the book, I explore the nature of listening and consider some of the unique ethical issues involved when adults listen to children.
How is your work relevant to everyday life?
Central to my work is a critical examination of what it means to do philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. In the United States and around the world, philosophy has largely become defined as the exclusive province of academic specialists, requiring advanced degrees and significant technical knowledge. Indeed, when hearing about my work, often people will recount their experiences of taking college philosophy courses and ask me how this can possibly be appropriate for children.
Of course, there’s great value in academic philosophy – in studying challenging philosophical texts, exploring the history of ideas through the work of great philosophers, understanding intricate theories, and furthering our thinking about some of life’s most complex problems through the development of rigorous philosophical arguments. But this isn’t all that philosophy is. Philosophy isn’t confined to what goes on in colleges and universities: it predated these institutions, and it’s alive outside of them.
Philosophical wondering is a part of being a human being. What is the right thing to do? Why do people have to die? Is this person really my friend? When adults think about such questions, we’re doing philosophy, participating in a tradition that’s been around for thousands of years, whether or not we hold a particular academic degree. Likewise, the fact that children are beginners at philosophy doesn’t mean that they aren’t taking part in the discipline.
Frequently adults lament the fact that they stopped wondering very much about life’s big questions as they moved out of childhood. I think it’s important to encourage young people to keep wondering and to maintain and develop their philosophical inclinations. Who knows? This might mean more college philosophy majors in the future!
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
I think there are always connections, explicit or not, between our professional and personal lives. For me, the inspiration for my work largely began with my own children. Although I had been interested in working with children and, before earning my doctorate, had been a practicing lawyer whose work centered around issues affecting women and children, it wasn’t until I had my own children that I began to recognize children’s philosophical capacities.
From the time my three sons were very young, we have had regular philosophical conversations about many of their thoughts and questions. They are now grown and it’s obvious to all of us that these kinds of conversations created another dimension to our relationships, fostering spaces in which we were engaging in a more equal way than was true of many of our exchanges when they were younger. I think this helped us develop bonds that are characterized by an inquiring give-and-take. Because we built a family culture that always included open philosophical discussions, there is an ease about our communication that I think reflects the fact that we have been attentive to each other’s questioning and respected each other’s points of view.
The kinds of philosophical discussions I had with my own young children and that I continue to have in elementary school classrooms are very different than the exchanges that took place in my undergraduate and graduate philosophy classes. We are focused not on the views of the philosophical experts, but on what we think and why. As a result, our personal qualities and histories come into play in far more explicit ways than I experienced in academic philosophy.
To my mind, one of the most vital elements of philosophical wondering, one that is too often absent from the work and discussions of professional philosophers, is the emotional significance of these questions. To ask what it is that makes us who we are, for example, is not just an intellectual exercise. It is calling into question the way we think of ourselves, our relationships, and our futures. What we think about this most fundamental of questions illuminates the kinds of people we are.
And after years of working with children, I am still sometimes taken aback by how effortlessly many children will freely talk about their lives and reveal their vulnerabilities and fears. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by [children].” When I spend time with children, I find myself more easily expressing my own thoughts without worrying how smart or sophisticated I sound, and more willing to admit that I don’t know or am confused by something. I have developed a much greater ease with vulnerability and a better understanding of the ways vulnerability can be a source of strength and deeper connections with others.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
My hope is that my work will have two primary effects. First, I believe that creating spaces for children to have conversations about the philosophical questions that matter to them empowers them to develop confidence in their own ways of seeing the world, a belief that their judgments and perceptions matter, and the skills to express their points of view clearly and compellingly. Second, I hope that reading Seen and Not Heard encourages adults to take more seriously children’s ideas and questions, and to be more willing to think with children about these topics and see children as people who might have something to teach us.
Acknowledging children as possessing important perspectives gives them a real opportunity to regard themselves differently, to develop confidence that their voices matter. Being a child shouldn’t mean being treated as a mediocre thinker. If children were regarded not as ‘defective adults,’ in the words of the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, but as people from whom we can learn, I think children would be more likely to grow up seeing themselves as full and valuable members of society.
As we outgrow childhood, our understanding of it is shaped, and distorted, by the adults we become. Our memories tend to be partial and hazy; a “sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background,” as Marcel Proust writes. Children’s thoughts can remind us of how we saw the world when we were children. Listening to children and taking what they say seriously offers adults greater access to the special capacities present in childhood – wonder and curiosity, vibrant awareness and imagination, openness, and a fresh way of looking at the world
I often think about a comment a child once made, “So much more is possible than we think.” If adults really listen to children, without preconceptions or prejudice, it can remind us that we too can be unafraid to try out ideas that might seem farfetched or naïve, and that possibility is alive in the world.
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Jana Mohr Lone
Jana Mohr Lone is director of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children and Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy. She is the author of the books Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012); co-author of the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016); and co-editor of Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012).
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
