Philosophy for Children and its Critics: A Mendham Dialogue

Abstract

As conceived by founders Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, Philosophy for Children is a humanistic practice with roots in the Hellenistic tradition of philosophy as a way of life given to the search for meaning, in American pragmatism with its emphasis on qualitative experience, collaborative inquiry and democratic society, and in American and Soviet social learning theory. The programme has attracted overlapping and conflicting criticism from religious and social conservatives who don't want children to question traditional values, from educational psychologists who believe certain kinds of thinking are beyond children of certain ages, from philosophers who define their discipline as theoretical and exegetical, from critical theorists who see the programme as politically compliant, and from postmodernists who see it as scientistic and imperialist. The paper is written as a dialogue in order to illustrate the complex interactions among these normative positions. Rather than respond to particular criticisms in depth, I indicate the general nature of my position regarding them and provide references to published material where they have been made and responded to over the past 40 years.

Full text

Philosophy for Children and its Critics:
A Mendham Dialogue
MAUGHN GREGORY
As conceived by founders Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret
Sharp, Philosophy for Children is a humanistic practice with
roots in the Hellenistic tradition of philosophy as a way of life
given to the search for meaning, in American pragmatism with
its emphasis on qualitative experience, collaborative inquiry
and democratic society, and in American and Soviet social
learning theory. The programme has attracted overlapping
and conflicting criticism from religious and social
conservatives who don’t want children to question traditional
values, from educational psychologists who believe certain
kinds of thinking are beyond children of certain ages, from
philosophers who define their discipline as theoretical and
exegetical, from critical theorists who see the programme as
politically compliant, and from postmodernists who see it as
scientistic and imperialist. The paper is written as a dialogue
in order to illustrate the complex interactions among these
normative positions. Rather than respond to particular
criticisms in depth, I indicate the general nature of my
position regarding them and provide references to published
material where they have been made and responded to over
the past 40 years.
INTRODUCTION
The dialogue that follows was inspired by one that took place in May 2008
at a convent in Mendham New Jersey, during an eight-day seminar of the
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). The
theme for that seminar was ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’,
1
and the
dialogue followed a presentation made by our late colleague, and IAPC
co-founder, Ann Margaret Sharp. Some of what follows comes from the
transcript of that dialogue; some comes from my recollection of other
conversations, with Ann and others; some is a report of internal dialogues
with authors I have read. I have condensed the number of participants to
five, organised ideas thematically, put words in people’s mouths, and
rounded out some of the arguments with ideas taken from published
Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2011
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material. What follows bears little resemblance to the original dialogue
that inspired it, and the characters here should not be taken to represent the
original participants.
The purposes of this reconstructed dialogue are: to present a particular,
normative account of the work of Philosophy for Children (P4C),
2
to
situate that account in relation to a number of different kinds of criticism
the programme has attracted, to illustrate the complex interactions among
these normative positions, and to indicate where these positions have been
taken up in the literature over the past 40 years. Rather than respond to
particular criticisms in depth, I indicate the general nature of my position
regarding them and provide references to published material where they
have been made and responded to. In that regard, this paper is more a
review of the literature of P4C advocacy and criticism than a defence of
the programme against any particular criticism.
THE DIALOGUE
Rosario: Ann, I met you some years ago when you spoke about how
philosophy can help children develop critical and creative thinking, and a
kind of ethical awareness you called ‘caring thinking’. But this week, at
this seminar, we’ve been discussing philosophy as a way of life—as the
study and practice of how to live well, to live wisely—as opposed to
‘academic philosophy’, which most of us have experienced as learning a
history of ideas, and learning to become ‘intellectual’ in ways that have
little to do with how we live. So my question is: do you see Philosophy for
Children as having moved away from a focus on thinking, toward a more
practical or applied approach to philosophy?
Ann: No, I think the emphasis on wisdom has always been there. That’s
what Mat [Lipman] had in mind from the very beginning. You know, he
comes out of the pragmatic tradition, that pays close attention to everyday
experience and the art of making judgments that might improve that
experience.
3
When I first met Mat in 1974 and asked him what he was
trying to do, he said something like, ‘I want to introduce children to
philosophy because I think that’s the way to improve their judgment.’
4
And
when I asked him, ‘What is philosophy, to you?’ he said, ‘Philosophy is the
search for wisdom’. Mat saw the whole conversation of philosophy, going
back to Socrates, as a quest to help us to lead qualitatively better lives.
5
Rosario: Better, how?
Ann: Well, if we’re talking about Western philosophy, then we’re going to
focus on aspects of our experience that have ethical, or aesthetic, or
political, or logical or even metaphysical meaning. And when we learn to
become more conscious of those kinds of meaning, you see, we have the
opportunity to inquire into them, and to make judgments that, hopefully,
can make our experiences more just, more free, more beautiful, or what
have you. Mat’s idea was to use philosophy to help children learn to do
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that. It’s very explicit, for example, in Suki, which he wrote in 1978—over
30 years ago. Suki is an attempt to help children become conscious of the
aesthetic dimension of their experience, and to make judgments that
enhance or stabilise, or diversify the aesthetic qualities they value in their
experience—and also to avoid what is petty, or mediocre, or downright
ugly or offensive. But also, of course, to problematise what it means to
find something attractive or repulsive, and hopefully to be more careful
about making judgments like that. As I say, it’s very explicit in Suki, but
this emphasis on the meaning of experience is just as strong in Pixie, and
in fact, it runs throughout the IAPC curriculum.
6
Joe: But Rosario is right, isn’t she, that P4C has always emphasised thinking
and thinking skills?
Ann: Well, yes. I would say that in the early days, especially, my friend
[Lipman] had a reputation of being very fascinated with the logical
component of the programme, and he probably had more to say about
critical thinking than about its other aspects. Remember, he started working
on Philosophy for Children in the 1960s, after his experiences teaching
philosophy to college students and adult education students at Columbia,
and the political upheaval he saw there and on other university campuses
around the country convinced him that learning to think critically, to inquire
about philosophical questions and to form reasonable judgments should
begin much earlier in life.
7
But then, even in those days, all you had to do
was to open the curriculum and you would see it there—the search for
wisdom. Mat didn’t separate the skills—the thinking and concept-forming
and inquiry skills, the creative and caring skills, and the dialogical skills—
from that project of living a meaningful life. Do you see? Because to do that
you’ve got to be awake, or sensitive to all these kinds of meaning; to know
how they feel. But you’ve also got to see them as full of ambiguities and
problems and opportunities. You’ve got to be curious and questioning about
them, and know how to think about them carefully, and to dialogue about
them with others who think and feel differently. And you’ve got to live with
them and experiment with them, to see what you can make of them.
Maughn: I suspect that P4C’s emphasis on meaning, experience and
judgment is one reason that parents and teachers haven’t been afraid of
it—because they don’t think of it as ‘Teaching Children Plato’—but then
that’s the same reason that philosophers haven’t been enthusiastic about it,
until recently. I think it’s significant that the way we practice philosophy
with children—with self-examination, a certain ethics of dialogue,
communal caring, and a focus on how to live—is in some ways a return
to the philosophical practices of some of the ancient schools.
8
Megan: Actually, a number of educational theorists, like Noddings
(2005), Nussbaum (1997 and 2010), Rose (2009) and Sternberg (2003),
have been drawing attention to the moral and political danger of education
that aims exclusively at socio-economic advancement, and not also at
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living well, or wisdom. A student might be very successful in terms of
getting the disciplinary knowledge, the intellectual, social and technolo-
gical skills, and the cultural capital she needs to compete in the economic
market, without having considered whether her life has any meaning or
purpose beyond that, and without knowing how to cultivate personal or
collective wellbeing. In fact, Sternberg (2003, p. 163) and Nussbaum
(2010, pp. 73–6) have recommended Philosophy for Children precisely
because it prioritises critical, emotional, political and ethical know-how
over getting ahead. Of course, that distinction goes back to Socrates.
9
Ann: We’ve even been accused of ‘corrupting the youth’. I remember the
bumper-stickers that one mid-western school district had printed up,
saying ‘Get Harry Stottlemeier
10
out of our schools!’
Joe: They were afraid it would inoculate their children against their own
indoctrination. It’s like a parent once said to me, ‘No one should talk to
my children about right and wrong, or about death, but me’. Some parents
and educators don’t trust children to be ‘the guardians of their own virtue’,
as you and Mat wrote (Lipman and Sharp,1980, p. 181).
Megan: That’s one kind of criticism the programme has attracted, from
the political right; and what Maughn just said about academic
philosophers not taking it seriously is another.
Ann: That one, I think, has to do with lingering institutional chauvinism
about the intellectual work of teachers—who are mostly women—and of
children.
11
Maughn: It also comes from the ‘pure versus applied’ distinction,
12
that
still haunts some of the disciplines. Real philosophy is supposed to be the
discourse (the thinking and talking and writing) of professional
philosophers; and anything we do to put that discourse to work—in our
friendships or our politics, say—isn’t, unless it results in more professional
discourse.
13
But of course that distinction has been challenged for some
time now, by pragmatism, feminism and continental philosophy. They put
the work of philosophy on par with the work of other disciplines, as caught
up in all kinds of political, economic and cultural agendas.
Megan: It’s not just philosophers, though, who have said that children’s
discourse can’t be philosophical. We’ve heard that from developmental
psychologists—the ones who read Piaget as ruling out certain kinds of
cognitive functioning at certain ages.
Joe: I’d say that line of criticism has been mostly deflected by social
learning theorists. I just finished reading Mat’s Natasha: Vygotskian
Dialogues (1996a), and it made me realise how formative social learning
theory was to P4C. I knew the pragmatist genealogy of ‘community of
inquiry’, from Dewey and Peirce,
14
but I hadn’t paid much attention to this
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strand of educational psychology in Lipman’s theory, from Vygotsky and
Davydov. It helped me to understand what’s at stake in the Piaget
versusVygotsky debate,
15
and it made me look at our work in the schools
in a whole new way: as a pedagogy of ‘cognitive cooperation with . . .
peers and mentors’ (Lipman 1996a, p. 45).
Ann: Mat developed a strong interest in 20
th
-century Soviet psychology,
partly because of parallels he found with the pragmatist social psychology
of Mead, Dewey and Buchler.
16
He was something of a pioneer in the way
he implemented that theory in a practice of classroom dialogue.
17
Today,
of course, Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ and Davydov’s
‘ascent to the concrete’, are more influential in educational theory than
when Mat was working.
18
Rosario: As a matter of fact, some of the strongest proponents of P4C
these days are educational researchers, who have shown how the
programme can be instrumental in achieving educational objectives like
critical thinking and reading comprehension.
19
But then that very
instrumentalism is the target of some of the harshest criticism the
programme faces today, from the political left—from critical and cultural
theory and postmodernism.
Ann: Say more.
Rosario: Well, of course critical theory, coming out of Marxism, the
Frankfurt School and feminist philosophy, has to do with
human oppression and liberation. Critical theorists are concerned with
how cultural practices that presume to be morally and politically neutral,
are in fact oppressive. A lot of their work focuses on race- class-
and gender-based oppression, especially as these are integral to the
institutions and ideological frameworks of Western culture. Critical
theorists of education look at how education often perpetuates, but can
also subvert those kinds of oppression. So, for example, today we
have colleges of education offering courses in cultural responsiveness,
race consciousness and social justice, to prepare teachers to use ‘critical
pedagogy’.
20
Joe: The faculty in our college has debated ‘critical thinking versus
critical pedagogy’. Some who defend critical thinking say that education
should be politically and even morally neutral; that it shouldn’t take sides.
They say critical thinking is about how to think, and they worry that
critical pedagogy teaches children what to think. In fact, the thinking skills
component of P4C is something that some conservative parents and some
professional philosophers have supported: the parents, because it’s
content-neutral—it doesn’t impose any particular ideas or values on the
children that might compete with what they get at home—and the
philosophers because informal logic is a recognisable philosophical
practice.
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Rosario: But for a critical theorist there’s no such thing as value-neutral
education—or any other kind of cultural production. And since education
that pretends to be neutral winds up being oppressive, they say education
should be deliberately emancipatory. It should be explicitly anti-racists
and anti-sexist and anti-heteronormative and even anti-capitalist. It should
wake students up to the oppression they participate in, and give them tools
to intervene against it. So, from that perspective, teaching critical thinking,
without also doing some kind of consciousness-raising with them, is
politically suspect.
Ann: What’s the suspicion?
Rosario: Well, it’s that if our consciousness hasn’t been raised to
recognise the systems of oppression we live with, critical thinking could
end up being just a tool we use to chase after desires that have been
manipulated by our patriarchal home lives and the capitalist media and so
on. Or worse: if we get some power we might use our critical thinking to
oppress others. Also, I think many people outside of P4C think of critical
thinking as an individual thing—something we do alone, inside our own
heads, whereas consciousness-raising typically involves understanding our
connections to others, and aims at solidarity. I think these are well-
founded suspicions.
Maughn: But philosophy has always been culturally critical and even
subversive, going back to Socrates. Think of Nietzsche’s call to do
philosophy with a hammer. Think of Jane Addams’ work in Hull House.
And this element has been emphasised by many of our colleagues, who
see P4C as a way of getting children, not merely to think critically, but to
be critical of the world.
21
Ann: That’s just what I was saying: you have to be awake to the ethical
and political meaning of your experience—emotionally as well as
conceptually—before you can sense, and then articulate that there’s
something wrong with it. That’s why the philosophical content of the
programme is so important. It’s not incidental; it’s not just something we
use to practice thinking; it’s chosen deliberately to help children recognise
those kinds of meaning. That’s an indispensable part of the search for
wisdom.
Joe: There is also the method. A lot of work has been done by feminists
and others who see the community of inquiry in P4C as a method of
critical pedagogy, because of how it distributes power and brackets the
teacher’s content expertise; and also how it nurtures timid voices and
brings traditionally marginalised voices forward; how it makes adults
take children’s ideas and perspectives seriously, and how it works by
collaboration.
22
Wasn’t there an exchange between Mat and Paulo
Freire, and didn’t the two of them see their work sharing a kind of
liberatory agenda?
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Rosario: I can see that, but there is still an ongoing debate about whether
getting children to pay attention to ethical and political meaning, inviting
them to criticise the world as they experience it, and giving them practice
in reasoning and egalitarian dialogue is enough, without also teaching
them about racism and class oppression—teaching them to ‘read the
world’ in those terms. How else can we prevent those philosophical
practices from being co-opted by oppressive systems? That’s especially of
concern to critical theorists who suspect that rationality itself is a practice
of domination.
Megan: But that’s a problem for critical theory, isn’t it? The theory needs
a grounding conception of human flourishing on which to base its
diagnosis of oppression; but the suspicion that all theory is ideology
undermines the attempt to find such a conception, doesn’t it? Even the
Frankfurt school ran into that cul-de-sac. The part of critical theory that
points to a more enlightened society or a more self-determined human
subject is in tension with the part that sees rational autonomy as a liberal
contrivance. Also, inasmuch as the method of critical theory involves
empirical observation and means-end rationality, it becomes another
science, in need of political deconstruction. So then, ‘critical pedagogy’ is
just as much in need of ‘a pedagogy of interruption’
23
as is ‘Socratic
pedagogy’.
24
Rosario: Yes, and that’s why people like Terry Eagleton have argued for
cultural theorists to pay more attention to suffering, objectivity and human
nature: to maintain the relevance of their work to real-world struggles.
25
Ann: I want to step back a bit. I have my doubts about some of these
distinctions, like individual versus community, and critical thinking versus
critical consciousness. I’m thinking about Dewey’s recommendation that
education in each subject explain the processes of inquiry that produced
the ‘textbook knowledge’ in that subject, including all the failures and
reconstructions along the way, rather than presenting it as a finished
product that came out of nowhere and is above critique.
26
I don’t see why
concepts like tolerance and equality and diversity can’t be shared with
children as products of inquiry into sexism and racism and etc.—as
concepts that have taken on certain meanings and been shaped in certain
ways, in response to certain problems. To do that, you see, is to invite
children into the ongoing conversation about the meaning of those ideas,
and to bring their own experiences to bear on them. It’s no different from
having them focus on concepts like person, friendship and fairness, that
they use every day in a conventional way, but in philosophy they discover
that these concepts have a wide range of meanings they may not have
considered, some of which might help them make more sense of their
experience, and find ways to enhance it. Coming up with a new
understanding about what fairness means—let’s say, in relation to race,
class or gender—could have profound, immediate consequences in the life
of a child.
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Joe: I wonder if that approach makes P4C less vulnerable to conservative
critics who say that values like ‘social justice’, ‘feminism’, ‘social
democracy’, ‘environmentalism’, or even ‘tolerance’ are too partisan, too
leftist to be taught in schools.
27
They say they want schools to be left out
of the American culture wars.
Rosario: I notice they don’t mind involving schools in culture wars over
school prayer, or teaching creationism and nationalism.
Maughn: The kind of thing Joe is talking about—parents who don’t want
schools teaching their children what to believe about certain religious or
moral or political issues—hasn’t been a problem for P4C. Parents who
investigate the programme can see we don’t have that kind of agenda.
28
But Rosario is pointing to something quite different and not so easy to deal
with: that some parents don’t want their children to question, or even to
think critically about the religious or political beliefs the parents teach
them. They believe in their own exclusive right to shape their children’s
beliefs.
29
Rosario: But can P4C really be value-neutral, in the way that Ann
was suggesting? Did I understand you correctly, Ann? How can it be
value-neutral, and at the same time be a normative practice in so many
ways?
Ann: No, you’re right, it’s not value-neutral, or, I should say, not entirely.
We are committed to procedures of inquiry, and practices of political and
ethical interdependence that we take to be normative; and, as I said, to the
aim of practical wisdom, or better ways to live. But these commitments
aren’t dogmas. If someone wants to challenge them, we should give that
challenge a fair hearing. But there’s a presumption, let’s say, in favour of
these aims and these procedural norms, based on how well they have
served us in the past. We don’t pretend to be neutral about them, and we
don’t pretend they are compatible with every idea we might discuss. But
of course, they are neutral with regard to all kinds of other questions. So I
guess I’d say our practice is relatively value-neutral
30
—if that makes
sense.
Joe: It’s really a priority of commitments, isn’t it? Aren’t you just saying
that our commitment to these practices is prior to, or more solid than our
commitment to the outcomes? In the way that we would find it easier, in
most cases, to question the outcome of a science experiment or a trial by
jury, than to question the norms of experimental research or the rules of
evidence? I mean, we would ask ourselves if we followed the method
carefully enough before we asked if there were something wrong with the
method.
Maughn: That puts me in mind of what some of the philosophers we’ve
been reading at this seminar have written about what it means to be a
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philosopher, or to live philosophically. There seems to be a norm or an
ideal of a kind of personhood at work here, and I’m now wondering if that
ideal isn’t integral to the practice of P4C.
Ann: What kind of ideal are you thinking of?
Maughn: Well, it has the same kind of priority of commitments Joe just
described. I would say the most basic commitment is to continually seek
out the true, the beautiful and the good as categories of existential
meaning—the kind of meaning that can be lived. I don’t think it actually
matters very much whether we talk about them as universal, essential or
evolutionary, non-transcendent categories of meaning. In any case, the
philosophical person yearns for, and works for those kinds of meaning.
The secondary commitment is to the methods we’ve evolved for doing
that—including analytic thinking and cultural criticism and hermeneutic
dialogue and contemplative exercises.
31
The next level would be a lesser
commitment to whatever ideas and values and ways of life we’ve found to
be meaningful. And Joe’s right: to say we prioritise the last one least is
just to say that we are more fallibilistic or humble about specific beliefs or
values than we are about the methods we used to get to them, or than we
are about our self-understanding as meaning-seeking creatures. That’s
close to what Rorty meant by being an ‘ironist’,
32
about our beliefs, and
it’s close to what Ann often says about learning to hold our beliefs more
tentatively.
33
Megan: Yes, I think something like that is the ‘hidden curriculum’ of P4C,
and it also has to do with what you were saying earlier, Ann, about the
ethical, the aesthetic, the political, and so on, as the aspects of experience
that we find, or ought to find, to be most meaningful.
Ann: Why, or how do you think it’s been hidden? It seems pretty overt, to
me. That kind of ‘existential meaning’, as Maughn calls it, was what Mat
thought philosophy could bring to education, with his understanding that
many children find school quite meaningless.
34
Megan: Maybe what I mean is that there is a kind of humanism assumed
here, an idea of what it means to live well, or to be a full-fledged person.
But, then, that idea is the target of the most recent theoretical critique of
P4C, from postmodernists and posthumanists.
Ann: What does that mean—‘posthumanist’?
Megan: Well, as I see it, postmodernists, poststructuralists and post-
humanists mistrust the very attempt to find objective or trans-cultural
foundations for knowledge or for values, or for what it means to be a human
being.
35
The possibility of such foundations has been undercut by anti-
realist and anti-rationalist theories of the fragmented subject, the
slipperiness of meaning, the inescapability of discourse, and the ubiquity
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of power. So there have been postmodern critics of P4C who have noticed
this hidden curriculum of the ‘reasonable’ or ‘philosophical’ child, and
critiqued it as just one normative model of human subjectivity among many,
without any objective or foundational reasons to privilege it over others.
36
Ann: Yes, I know that line of critique. People have been raising it against
our work almost from the beginning, and there have been a number of
responses.
37
In fact, you know, some have analysed P4C as a post-
colonial, postmodern practice.
38
I wonder if ‘posthumanism’ is just a new
vocabulary for the very old—in fact, maybe the oldest—philosophical
problem of scepticism. In any case, I would say that yes, there is some
kind of ideal of personhood at work in P4C, though it would be wrong to
accuse Mat or me of claiming any kind of absolutist foundations for it.
Mat, after all, sided with Dewey’s (1997 [1910]) Darwinian arguments
against the idea of a fixed human nature, and my dissertation was on
Nietzsche’s view of the teacher as liberator! And while, on the one hand, I
think it’s good to be sceptical—to remember to hold our theories lightly
and be willing to give up our favourite certainties—scepticism alone
doesn’t give us a method for deciding what to believe or how to live. It
just isn’t sufficient to the project of human flourishing.
Joe: I think it’s important to distinguish different kinds of scepticism.
Ann, you’re describing what I would call a Socratic scepticism,
39
which is
just ordinary fallibilism, as Maughn mentioned before: not taking our
beliefs or values to be final; being willing to self-correct.
40
That’s quite
different from the more radical scepticism I think Megan is referring to,
that is not just cautious but actually anti-foundational, which, I think, can
become paralyzing.
Maughn: That depends on whether the claim that there aren’t foundational
reasons to choose a certain belief or a way of life over others is meant to
imply that, therefore, there’s no way to choose—that foundational reasons
are the only kinds of reasons we could use. For me, that would be a false
dichotomy: to say that either we know for certain or we don’t know at all.
Just because we know enough to be sceptical, ironic, tentative about our
beliefs, doesn’t mean we have reasons to stop believing them. For one thing,
how do we know which ones need to be reconstructed before they get us
into trouble? And in the mean time, it seems to me we can have plenty of
non-foundational reasons for preferring certain ways of life over others.
Megan: Like what?
Joe: How about, for instance, that I have made myself accountable to a
community of my peers, who have challenged my ideas; that I have
double-checked my reasons for believing—the methods of inquiry or the
authorities I’ve relied on; that I’ve been willing to self-correct; that my
current beliefs help me cope with experience—help me understand it in
ways that enable me to act intelligibly; and that I have no other reasons for
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doubting them now, though I’m open to finding reasons to doubt them
later. What more is there to knowing, or even to being certain, than that?
Maughn: Just one thing I would add: we know, on the level of qualitative
experience, what it means to live with a political culture of civil rights, to
participate in collective decision-making, to do the kind of self-work that
moves us from avarice and animosity toward humility and compassion.
41
Even if we can’t justify this way of life on absolutist grounds, we can say
why we prefer it to certain other ways we know of. I agree with Ann: we
need to be fallibilistic, but it’s only our positive beliefs, values and
practices—our vision of what it might mean to be human, even just for here
and now—that constitute meaning and make life worth living. Education is
just as much about sharing that kind of vision with the next generation, as it
is about equipping them to escape it or take hammers to it.
42
I’d say it’s
every bit as risky not to socialise our children in the ways of life that we
have found most ennobling and enchanting as it to socialise them so
completely that they can’t see their way out.
43
The fact that our vision isn’t
transcendent doesn’t mean that it must be naı
¨ve or politically sinister.
Megan: But then, as you say, we have to worry that educating children
into the humanistic ideal behind P4C might make them resistant to
alternative ideals. For instance, many postmodernists mistrust the attempt
to distinguish inquiry as a type of discourse that aims at certain kinds of
objectivity, from other types of discourse like interest-group politics or
consciousness-raising.
44
So there have been critics of P4C who have said
that its criteria for ‘reasonableness’—like maintaining relevance,
uncovering assumptions, . . .
Joe: . . . identifying fallacies, evaluating evidence . . .
Megan: . . . right, and making valid inferences—thanks, Joe—that all of that
is just another way of exercising power—the Eurocentric, or even the Anglo-
American way. They see argumentative inquiry, with its scientific forms of
reason and its drive toward even provisional concords of perspective, as
another machinery of dominance,
45
and they worry that by imposing these
structures on children, P4C will colonise their thinking and their desires, and
make it next to impossible for them to offer radical alternatives—which,
some say, is what is most precious about childhood, and about philosophy.
46
Joe: But that construal of rationality misses the point of all those
philosophers of politics and science and ethics who have shown us that
what’s important and efficacious about rationality is not, or not only
certain logical structures, but a family of social and ethical practices like
curiosity about alternative views, freedom of expression, accountability to
peers, non-dogmatism and self-correction, that sometimes result in
‘unforced agreement.’
47
Certainly the practice of community of inquiry
makes us aware that there are many points of view, and different kinds of
thinking going on, even in communities that seems heterogeneous.
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Ann: And also, isn’t the argument that learning one way of thinking—like
learning one language, or one tradition of music, or one method of
agriculture—makes it difficult to learn alternative ways, at least contest-
able? I mean, is it a theoretical argument or something we can observe? I
don’t see why, on the contrary, the more ways of thinking you learn,
shouldn’t make it easier to learn others.
Maughn: Of course we can’t step outside our own beliefs and values to get
a glimpse of Truth Itself—but that doesn’t mean we’re trapped inside our
own perspectives, either. As long as we’re able to read widely, and travel
some, and get into hermeneutical circles with people who see and feel
things differently, there’s every chance we will find reasons to alter our
beliefs, adopt new values, learn to practice different kinds of subjectivity,
and otherwise change our vision of human flourishing.
Rosario: But let’s be careful. There’s a difference between ‘going
visiting’, in Arendt’s sense (1978, p. 257), and going shopping.
48
The
postmodernist emphasis on novelty, uniqueness, heterogeneity and radical
otherness—the categorical mistrust of the collective and the normative—
seems to me like a dangerous (and typically capitalist) distraction from
political struggle and solidarity.
Ann: And also, what’s the alternative? To act as if children are born
outside of culture? Give them nothing to try out, build on or rebel against?
Talk about oppressive! If children don’t grow up with some kind of
language and rationality, and with minimal nutrition and hygiene and
literacy and human relationship, they aren’t going to be fit to articulate the
ugliness or injustice they experience, much less a new vision of the kind of
life they want to live. I mean, it’s one thing to want to treat children as
ends in themselves, and not just as means to our own cultural
imperatives;
49
but I can’t make any sense of what that would mean—to
treat children as ends—if I didn’t take them to be capable of thinking and
speaking for themselves and taking intelligent action. And those
capabilities don’t happen in a vacuum.
Maughn: Besides that, I think to find your own voice you have to have
something to struggle against.
50
Or, as Dewey put it more positively,
human individuality and uniqueness does not precede socialisation, but is
actually a result of certain kinds of association.
51
He thought a process of
social inquiry—in which multiple voices are heard, meanings are clarified,
sympathies are formed, traditions are reinterpreted, compromises are
considered, and new accommodations are created—was as necessary for
meaningful individuality as for political solidarity.
Rosario: I wouldn’t go that far, but I agree that we can’t afford not to
educate children to be literate and critical, because people—including
children—who aren’t capable of problematising and critically analysing
what they are told and what happens to them and all the media they
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consume are so easily victimised. They are far more likely to become ‘true
believers’ of other people’s political agendas, or else completely diverted
and neutralised from serious thought—in either case they have suffered a
loss of agency. That’s why I lose patience with deconstructionists who act
like their work has no political consequences. If postmodernism under-
mines education for critical rationality, or norms of human liberation that
come from the experiences of the underprivileged, we know who will
benefit and who will suffer as a consequence!
Joe: So the attempt to distinguish inquiry from negotiation, truth from
ideology, right from wrong, and being treated as an end from being treated
as a means, has political and moral consequences.
Megan: Still, that’s not to say that Western culture has a corner on any of
those ideals. Another criticism of P4C has been its lack of multi-
culturalism, even just philosophically speaking. For one thing, the nearly
exclusive focus on dialogue eclipses other kinds of philosophical practice,
like exegetical and contemplative. And as for content, many people have
pointed out the lack in the IAPC curriculum of ideas from continental or
Asian philosophy, and all the American colloquialisms and cultural norms
portrayed in the novels—which, after all, were written for US schools.
52
I
believe P4C has to work harder to incorporate more philosophical
traditions, especially non-Western traditions; otherwise all the talk about
broadening our perspectives and being open to challenge are empty
platitudes.
Ann: I’ve been saying that for a long time now, and I’ll give you three
reasons. One is what we’ve just been saying: we need radical alternatives
to be shocked out of our habitual ways of seeing, so that we can appreciate
an idea or a practice that is more beautiful than anything we might have—
and also sometimes just to re-discover the meaning of our own ways.
Second, if philosophy is a way of life, as many of us here believe, then
these alternatives are actually ‘existential options’, in Hadot’s sense.
53
And third, we have to do our best to sympathise with options we don’t take
ourselves, in order to avoid violent conflict and to become citizens of the
world.
54
Joe: But there’s a big difference in multiculturalism as a more thorough,
more open-minded search for greater truth, beauty and goodness—that’s
what I hear Ann describing—and multiculturalism as a postmodern
playground of ideas and arts and kinds of government, with no normative
comparison, which is actually the repudiation of those regulative ideals for
meaningful life.
55
Maughn: And let’s not lose sight of how the globalisation of P4C, almost
from the beginning, has changed the programme. There have been many,
very successful cultural adaptations of the novels. And people from
many different parts of the world have adapted the programme to blend
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with local methods,
56
have written new curriculum that draws on local
cultural themes or incorporates regional children’s literature, and have
brought the work of a wide range of philosophers to bear on P4C
practice.
57
The early emphasis on critical thinking has been transformed
by theorists who see the community of philosophical inquiry as a
political laboratory,
58
amethodofwisdomtraining,
59
an operational
application of social learning theory,
60
a means of raising philosophical
questions across the school subjects,
61
a method of religious exegetics
and education,
62
and even a contemplative or spiritual practice.
63
I’d say
the programme has had little chance of being culturally or theoretically
insulated.
Ann: In fact, all these criticisms we’ve been discussing today have been
discussed for most of P4C’s 40-year history—a fact that often goes
unnoticed. Thousands of academic books, articles, and doctoral disserta-
tions contending with P4C have been published, from scores of countries.
Pre-college philosophy is the topic of dozens of academic conferences and
special conference sessions every year, in every part of the world. It’s
been the primary focus of four academic journals, and a frequent focus of
other leading journals in philosophy and education. The published
literature includes both philosophical and empirical research on myriad
aspects of engaging children and adolescents in different kinds of
philosophical practice. I find it very troubling that so many new pre-
college philosophy programmes and new rounds of critique against ours
lack an honest review of this literature.
Joe: I think the nuns are about to ring the lunch bell, and before we stop
I’d like to try to summarise what we’ve been saying. First, we’ve been
uncovering—some of us, and others I guess are just reiterating—that P4C,
as conceived by Mat and Ann, is a practice or a set of practices that derive
from, and re-inscribe a particular norm of what it means to be human. That
norm has roots in the Hellenistic tradition of philosophy as a way of life
given to the search for, and the experience of certain kinds of meaning,
and also in American pragmatism—especially its emphasis on qualitative
experience and its theory of inquiry—and in American and Soviet social
learning theory. This normative account of P4C attracts at least five kinds
of overlapping and conflicting criticism that we’ve identified: from
religious and social conservatives who don’t want their children to
question traditional values; from educational psychologists who believe
certain kinds of thinking are out of reach for children of certain ages; from
philosophers who say it’s not real philosophy because it focuses on
meaning and how to live, rather than on theory and exegesis; from critical
theorists who think it’s too value neutral and politically compliant; and
from postmodernists who worry that it’s imperialistic and hegemonic:
training the minds of children on the trellises of scientistic, bourgeois
Western liberalism. Is that about right?
Ann: As Pixie would say, that’s the story of how the story happened!
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Correspondence: Maughn Gregory, Department of Educational Founda-
tions, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ07042, USA.
Email: gregorym@montclair.edu
NOTES
1. The seminar included sessions discussing chapters from Dewey, 1989; Hadot, 1995 and 2002;
Shusterman, 1997 and 2000; Sharp, 1998; and Lipman, 1978 and 1980.
2. Those not familiar with the program may consult the IAPC website at www.montclair.edu/iapc
(accessed 11 January 2011) and Gregory, 2008.
3. John Dewey wrote, e.g., that ‘[P]hilosophy 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’ (1991, p. 389).
Similarly, Shusterman sees pragmatism as a contemporary revival of the ancient Hellenistic ‘idea
of philosophy as a deliberative life-practice that brings lives of beauty and happiness to its
practitioners[;]’ of philosophy having the ‘crucial, existential task: to help us lead better lives by
bettering ourselves through self-knowledge, self-criticism and self-mastery’ (1997, pp. 3 and 21).
4. Lipman describes the aim of philosophical inquiry as ‘ethical, social, political, and aesthetic
judgments . . . applied directly to life situations’ (2003, p. 279).
5. Lipman et al., recommended ‘philosophical inquiry—not as an end in itself but as a means for
leading a qualitatively better life’, (1980, p. 84).
6. Lipman wrote a series of philosophical novels for children and adolescents, including Elfie
(1987), Kio & Gus (1982), Pixie (1981), Nous (1996b) and Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery
(1969), for elementary school, Lisa (1976) and Suki (1978) for middle school, and Mark (1980)
for high school. Each novel, titled for a principle character, shows young people exploring
philosophical dimensions of their experience—especially logical, ethical and aesthetic
dimensions—and dialoguing about them with and without adults. In Philosophy for Children,
these novels are used to help students recognise and problematise philosophical dimensions of
their own experiences, and to dialogue about these together as a ‘community of inquiry’,
facilitated by an adult with philosophical training.
7. See Lipman’s autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking (2008).
8. See Hadot, 2002, pp. 29, 33-6, 71-3, 124, and 138; and 1995, pp. 92-3, 163, and 274.
9. Socrates famously critiqued education that focused on materialistic and mundane objectives to
the detriment of wisdom. See Hadot, 2002, p. 59, and Gregory and Laverty, 2010.
10. Referring to Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery (see Note 6).
11. See Sharp, 1989.
12. See Shusterman, 1997, pp. 4–5.
13. George Pollack, for instance, writes that ‘to apply philosophy is not thereby to do it. Application
of philosophy is exogenous to philosophical activity itself; it comes after the fact’ (2007, p. 246).
14. See Lipman, 2004 and Gregory, 2002a.
15. Lipman drew on Piaget’s ideas of active learning and constructivism, but also on Vygotsky’s
social construal of those ideas. See Arkady A. Margolis’ afterward to Lipman, 1996a, p. 124;
Lipman, 1991; and Lim, 2004.
16. ‘The conclusions I found in Vygotsky . . . showed me how to apply, specifically to the
relationship between teaching and mental development, the views I had arrived at earlier as a
result of repeatedly dipping into Peirce and Dewey, as well as more sustained examinations of
Buchler . . . .’(Lipman, 1996a, p. xiii).
17. As Nussbaum observes, Dewey ‘never addressed systematically the question of how Socratic
critical reasoning might be taught to children of various ages . . . But teachers who want to teach
Socratically . . . can find very useful and yet nondictatorial advice about Socratic pedagogy in . . .
Philosophy for Children developed at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for
Children . . .’ (2010, p. 73).
18. See Reznitskaya et al., 2008.
19. See e.g. Topping and Trickey, 2007 and Soter et al., 2008.
20. See e.g. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy, http://
freireproject.org, accessed 18 November 2010.
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21. See e.g. Morehouse, 1994; Vigliante, 2006; and Sharp, 2009.
22. See e.g. Reed, 1992; Daniel, 1994; Glaser, 1994; Lone, 1997; Gregory, 2004; Turgeon, 2004; and
Laverty, 2009.
23. See Biesta, 2007, p. 790.
24. See ‘Socratic Pedagogy’, chapter 4 of Nussbaum, 2010.
25. See ‘The Politics of Amnesia’, chapter 1 of Eagleton, 2003.
26. See ‘The Child and the Curriculum’, in Dewey, 1990a, pp. 181–209.
27. See, e.g. Caleb Warnock: ‘BYU Drops Controversial Education Program’, The Daily Herald
article posted 2 July, 2010, and Erik Eckholm’s article, ‘In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some
See Agenda’, TheNew York Times, 7 November, 2010, p. A-16.
28. ‘No course in philosophical thinking . . . can succeed if used as a means for implanting the
teacher’s values in the vulnerable minds of the children in the classroom . . . . One goal of
education is the liberation of students from unquestioning, uncritical mental habits, in order that
they may better develop the ability to think for themselves . . . . There is no study that can more
effectively prepare children to combat indoctrination than philosophy’ (Lipman et al., 1980,
p. 85).
29. See ‘On Philosophy, Children and Taboo Topics’, in Gregory, 2008, pp. 35–36; and Law, 2008.
30. See Gregory, 2000a.
31. On the latter see Hadot, 1995 and Zajonc, 2008.
32. See Rorty, 1989, especially essays 3 & 4. Rorty’s notion of philosophical irony, of course,
derives from Socrates and other Hellenistic philosophers, for whom, as Hadot observes, ‘‘‘irony’’
. . . is a kind of humor which refuses to take oneself or other people entirely seriously; for
everything human, and everything philosophical, is highly uncertain, and we have no right to be
proud of it’ (2002, p. 26).
33. See Sharp, 1987. Elsewhere I have explained that, ‘The attitude toward our knowledge that
follows from the pragmatist model of inquiry is not skepticism but fallibilism . . . . It does not
follow from the expectation that we will need to revise our beliefs at some point, that we can or
ought to make ourselves doubt them in the meantime, before we discover what’s wrong with
them by implementing them. In fact, it is only by trusting our beliefs enough to use them that we
can find out their errors and limitations’ (Gregory, 2000b, p. 47).
34. ‘It was my hunch that children were primarily intent on obtaining meaning—this is why they so
often condemned school as meaningless—and wanted meanings they could verbalize . . . .
Philosophy might be indispensable for the redesign of education, but to make this happen it
would itself have to be redesigned’ (Lipman, 1996a, p. xv). Judith Suissa (2008, p. 139) argues
similarly that for adolescents in particular, their ‘struggle to find meaning is a struggle not just to
understand the concrete aspects of experience with which they are confronted in their everyday
lives, but to make sense of the human knowledge, ideas and concepts reflected in . . . social
knowledge and cultural meanings.’ Howard Gardner (1993, pp. 203–4) recommends Philosophy
for Children for introducing what he calls the ‘foundational (or existential) entry point [which]
examines the philosophical and terminological facets’ of a subject and provides the opportunity
for students ‘to pose fundamental questions of the ‘‘why’’ sort associated with young children
and philosophers . . .’.
35. ‘Humanism specifies what the child, student, or newcomer should become, before giving them an
opportunity to show who they are and who they will be. Humanism thus seems to be unable to
open to the possibility that newcomers might radically alter our understandings of what it means
to be human’ (Biesta, 2007, p. 795).
36. See e.g. D’Angelo, 1978; Murris, 1994; Wilks, 1995; Coppens, 1998; and Yorshansky, 2007.
37. See Lardner, 1991; Benjamin and Echeverria, 1992; Weinstein, 1994; and Kennedy, 2002.
38. Fabian Gimenez (1997), for instance, argues that P4C’s practice of the community of
philosophical inquiry is a postmodern approach to alterity. See also Sharp, 2008.
39. ‘American students whose parents are affluent enough to send them to reasonably good
colleges find themselves in the hands of teachers [who] do their best to . . . make them
a little more conscious of the cruelty built into our institutions; of the need for reform, of the need
to be sceptical of the current consensus . . . . [O]ur hope that colleges will be more than
vocational schools is largely a hope that they will encourage such Socratic scepticism’ (Rorty,
1999, p. 116).
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40. ‘Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental
assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals enter
a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction’ (Kennedy, 2004, p. 203).
41. See Gregory, 2006.
42. ‘[T]he word ‘‘education’’ covers two entirely distinct, and equally necessary
processes—socialization and individualization’ (Rorty, 1999, p. 117). ‘It would be well
for the colleges to remind us that 19 is an age when young people should have finished absorbing
the best that has been thought and said and should have started becoming suspicious of it’
(ibid., p. 124). Compare Biesta’s argument (2007, p. 789) that ‘good education should always
consist in a balanced combination’ of three functions: qualification, socialisation and
interruption, and my own similar arguments in Gregory, 2001 and 2000b. Roger Scruton
(2007, p. 20) argues, in fact, that one of the purposes of education is to preserve cultural
knowledge: ‘True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their
pupils as a benefit to knowledge’.
43. I make this argument in greater detail in Gregory, 2002a and 2002b.
44. For more on the distinctive characteristics of inquiry discourse, see Walton, 1998 and Robertson,
1999.
45. Nancy Vansieleghem (2006, p. 179) argues, for instance, drawing on Bakhtin, that ‘The
community of inquiry turns the dialogue into an argumentative game in which every movement
is being converted into a specific code system[; and] this concept of dialogue can’t listen to the
voice of the other because it operates in function of the reproduction of a certain communication
system’. She argues, in fact (p. 180), that ‘The attempt to understand everything is exactly what
leads to totalitarianism and oppression’.
46. See e.g. Kohan, 1999 and 2002. In response to the latter, see also Guin, 2004.
47. The phrase is from Rorty (1991), p. 38. He argues (p. 37) that ‘Another meaning for ‘‘rational’’ is
. . . something like ‘‘sane’’ or ‘‘reasonable’’ rather than ‘‘methodical.’’ It names a set of moral
virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on
persuasion rather than force . . . . On this construction, to be rational is simply to discuss any
topic—religious, literary, or scientific—in a way which eschews dogmatism, defensiveness, and
righteous indignation.’ Others who construe rationality in this way are Eagleton (2003, ch. 5);
Appleby et al. (1995, pp. 271–309); Longino (1990, pp. 62–82); Dewey (1986 [1938]) and Peirce
(1878).
48. See also Sharp, 2007a.
49. See Cassidy, 2004.
50. ‘[I]t is as necessary to be immersed in existing knowledge as it is to be open and capable of
producing something that does not yet exist’ (Freire, 1998, p. 35). Compare Rorty (1999, p. 118):
‘Socialization has to come before individualization, and education for freedom cannot begin
before some constraints have been imposed.’
51. ‘Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in
rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a
distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association’ (Dewey, 1990b, p.
150).
52. See e.g. Reed, 1991; Jesperson, 1993; and Rainville, 2000.
53. See note 8.
54. See Sharp, 1995; Slade, 1997; and Nussbaum, 2010, pp. 79–94.
55. ‘[T]his postmodern world . . . is a playground world, in which all are equally entitled to their
culture, their lifestyles, and their opinions’ (Scruton, 2007, p. 83).
56. See e.g. Palsson, 1988; Zelman, 2004; and Martens, 2008.
57. See e.g. Curtis, 1985; de la Garza, 1990; Martens, 1990; Kohan, 1996; Glaser, 1998; and Lim,
2003.
58. See Johnson, 1997; Cevallos-Estrellas and Sigurdardottir, 2000; and de la Garza, 2006.
59. See De Puig, 1994; Gregory and Laverty, 2009; and Sternberg, 2003.
60. See note 15.
61. See Weinstein, 1986, and Knight and Collins, 2000.
62. See Du Puis, 1979, and Deitcher and Glaser, 2004.
63. See Vallone, 1987; Sharp, 1994a, 1994b, and 2007b; and Mendoca, 1996.
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