do in 1969 i was a professor of philosophy at columbia i had two children of about nine years nine ten years of age and there was a lot of disruption at the university and questions about whether the education of children was appropriate for their going on into college i thought that it might be good if we could teach children some reasoning such as the logic that i was teaching mainly to evening school students at the university uh but i thought well that would just impose another dry arid subject on these children if we taught them
logic so surely there must be some other way in which we can teach them reasoning without their disliking it so much i talked this pro this problem over with someone who said well why don't you write write a story and that struck me as very interesting because children always pause for stories and i thought why not write a story of children learning to reason all by themselves without a teacher there to instruct them and so i wrote what was later to become the book called harry stottlemyer's discovery i wrote a chapter but when i was
finished with that chapter i thought it was done with it i realized that i needed more explanation so i wrote a second chapter and a third and a fourth and i thought they needed to discuss their aims of education among themselves so i added a fifth and critical thinking and i added another one and and then i had the same children talking about science and art so it became really very much like a college undergraduate course and in philosophy then in 1974 and sharp joined me and we together formed the institute for the advancement of
philosophy for children um here at montclair state college i'd moved to montclair state in the meantime and we began to do a manual for harry stylemy our teachers manual we began training teachers in the classrooms we began inviting professors of philosophy and education from all over the country to come join us for a week or two weeks and discuss the matter of philosophy for children and we began to see that this thing was beginning to take off any new program that comes down down down the road will have to deal with philosophy for children as
a competitor because it's it really i think presents a paradigm of excellent reasoning education in other words it stresses concept formation it stresses reasoning and it stresses the improvement of judgment and i'm not sure there's any other program that can do that just as i don't think there's any other subject that can do what philosophy does narrative plays a very important role in philosophy for children first of all because narrative plays a special role in the lives of children themselves a narrative develops like a child it almost thinks like a child because the author is
thinking through the story and we read his thinking as we read the page his or her thinking we're interested in how the child develops now the child turns out we're interested in how the narrative turns out so there's a there's a community of feeling there's a uh of relationships between stories and children now the stories we use like most stories have characters in them and the characters in every episode are children i don't think in all the books there is an episode in which adults are shown talking without the presence of children the children are
always finding themselves faced with problems but they're not fantastic problems their everyday problems everyday difficulties and the children discuss these problems and try to be reasonable about them and to come to reasonable judgments about them so we are in effect presenting a different model of the child to the child the model of the reasonable child is different from the model of the emotional child or the violent char child or the active child in other words in children's literature ordinary children's literature or television almost never do you see the reasonable child as the model of childhood
and yet we have to have such we have to have such a model because children will not in usually will not engage in a certain kind of behavior that we want them to engage in unless we show them a model of it first and so the novel plays this kind of role it also is a model to the child of how reasonable children talk about things together uh how they conduct reasonable dialogues how they listen to each other how they respect one another how they enter into the dialogue at the appropriate moment or what they
judge is the appropriate moment there are many ethical characteristics of the um of the dialogue that children are taught simply by participating in classroom discussion but in any case narrative is i think just about indispensable children don't want particularly they don't want a third person narrator or an adult narrator i think that for these purposes um the narrator can be in the first person speaking the first person and that gives an immediacy to the voice of the narrator which a third person narrator doesn't do and that's what we're trying to achieve is immediacy intensity identification
i was not aware when i did harry stylemeyer in 1969 that the portrait i was giving of harry and his classmates was more than just a portrait of discreet individuals of separate individuals because there is even in a book like harry a portrait also of a group interaction of a community of interactive relationships a community of inquiry is able to deal with the problems of the community not just the problems of individuals but the problems that they together share as a burden by talking them out together by helping each other try to understand what it
is that's happening and for example aristotle quite rightly says that all deliberation is inquiry and i think you know that that sets the tone for what we're trying to do uh we're trying to teach ethics as inquiry to teach logic as inquiry to teach aesthetics as inquiry by inquiry meaning here self corrective procedures where the children become engaged in these problematic experiences and try to help one another to understand what they are dealing with and how they can improve and transform the situation that they're dealing with the kinds of skills that one accrues in a
classroom community of inquiry are different than [Music] the kinds of skills that that one masters in a traditional classroom for example children learn to give reasons for what they think in a community of inquiry and they're expected to give reasons it's not just enough to cite an opinion furthermore once they give that reason they have to be ready to hear the responses of their peers very often we discover that our reasons are not good enough and they're not strong enough to support the kinds of things that we're advocating children also need to learn how to
make judgments and again to cite criteria which are subclass of reasons for those judgments if i tell you that i think a movie is good or a book is good or a certain person is good i am responsible for telling you why i think it's good and in that telling you why i'm citing criteria for the judgment that i'm making whether the child is conscious of or not the teachers should be very cognizant of the fact that as children participate in such a community they will undergo a personal and hopefully an ethical transformation of the
self one of the most striking characteristics that seems to affect participants in such a community is that as time goes on they find themselves saying things that they can't even believe that they're saying for example consider children around grade 6 or 7 what we call middle school age and think about what it would be to hear a child saying this to a friend or to herself one you know mom i think i can tolerate ambiguity much more than i did last year or you know i find that i'm no longer pressured into accepting views that
i somehow suspect are not well justified i seem to be able to talk with my peers about what i think and not just do what they want me to do to belong to the crowd thirdly you know um i realize that i no longer feel a need to pretend what i think or i feel when i'm talking to my friends and to my uh parents or you know i find that my tastes are changing things that i thought were so important last year are not so important this year and things that i thought that i'd
never be interested in all of a sudden i find out that i'm very very interested in or you know i find myself listening more these days rather than speaking it must be that i am conscious that i need to hear different perspectives or you know once i was very certain about a lot of things and i held my views very dogmatically or very absolutely now i tend to be much more tentative about what i think and sometimes even about what i feel you know i think the longer i'm in this community the more i've come
to develop an appreciation for non-sloppy thinking uh when i first came to this classroom i really didn't care how people thought now when i find people contradicting each other or when i find people just airing their views and giving no reasons for the views or when i find somebody who seems incapable of self-correcting there's almost a visceral reaction and i realize that i just don't like that kind of sloppy thinking anymore it would seem to me that children who are exposed to a community of inquiry for their elementary education would be children who had a
certain disposition to act on on the world rather than to passively exist in the world children who know how to actively inquire usually develop into people who want to change the world in such a way that the norms and the standards that they believe in could become a living reality in the world as we experience it and any discipline that has subjects where there are concepts important concepts that need that the children need to absorb where they have to be careful and interested any such discipline can use the community of inquiry format um he might
think that mathematics would be an exception but it isn't um there are a number of researchers who have done excellent work showing how children as early as kindergarten can learn mathematical concepts better if they can invent them for themselves and discuss them among themselves than if they simply are in a didactic classroom situation and are told what these concepts are by the teacher in quebec too there had been some pioneer pioneering work by professors of mathematics and professors of philosophy and of elementary education to work out narratives for small children excuse me learning philosophy but
i'm sorry learning mathematics using this childhood community of inquiry format you can't study any other discipline without studying some philosophy the problem is that very often we don't even know that there's a philosophical dimension to other disciplines take for example mathematics in mathematics we're told that we're going to work with numbers but what is a number and how do you differentiate a number from a numeral in social studies we're supposed to study about democracy and justice and freedom but what do those terms mean and what have been the various views that have come down to
us through the history of thought about these concepts that seem to be so important to a discipline like social studies or history in language arts very often we're very concerned with meaning but what do we mean by meaning and how does one go about finding meaning in stories in literature in videos and in movies in art we're told that harmony and balance and unity are important criteria for producing good works of art but what do they mean and how do i know when i've achieved it as i think of the various disciplines especially science where
so many philosophical concepts play a central role like cause and effect uh description explanation habit laws principles and when i realize how many children have no idea what these concepts mean or are they even aware how controversial they are and the difference it would make if one assumes one definition rather than the other in engaging in the scientific pursuit you begin to realize how shallow the education in the disciplines is at the elementary school level because children have been denied the opportunity to explore the philosophical dimension of each of these other disciplines well what is
different about a philosophical dialogue is the usually the topic that is under discussion because people generally are engaged in non-philosophical discussions about specific topics that they understand well because they are clearly defined issues and they feel they know what they're talking about in the case of philosophy the topics that they deal with concepts like truth and justice and beauty and goodness are badly defined no one knows how to define them well and as a result nobody really knows much about these areas yet people enjoy talking philosophically because these issues are important justices justice is a
an important consideration in our lives truth is an important consideration and we try to investigate and explore these concepts by philosophical dialogue there really doesn't seem to be any other alternative to how to deal with them now you may say well but children don't need little children don't need philosophical subjects well but see we hold them responsible for knowing even though they don't know and we don't know i'm thinking for example of a topic a concept like truth we expect children to tell the truth we expect children to know the truth the difference between truth
and falsehood we can't explain to the students what the difference between truth and falsehood ultimately is but that's all right we expect them to understand and to be able to talk about it if necessary we expect them to understand that answers on tests should be true and not false or correct and not incorrect but nobody discusses the truth there's no time out for a half hour discussion of truth in our classes whether at the elementary level or at the university level uh it's something that's taken for granted and it's something that needs to be discussed
so that children have more security when they are asked about whether something is true or not they want to they they have to be able to explore the issues the considerations that we take for granted but that anybody dealing with truth has to be aware of i am i know that it's difficult for teachers to teach a subject in which the concepts are poorly defined the way philosophical concepts are but that's better than nothing the children are grateful for whatever little bits of understanding they can get and this is one of the reasons why the
community of inquiry develops in order that students may pool their understanding rather than have it just siphoned off and disappear when they're trying to get started investigating it children working together listening to each other imitating each other supporting one another children can often make progress in inquiry as well as an adult or as a several adults i mean they their cooperativeness pays off in the methods that they use the the community of inquiry is almost like a single person thinking that is to say uh one child will ask a question it may be that asking
questions hasn't been prevalent in that classroom before and that will be something of a surprise but a child will ask a question and immediately every child in the class every other child says to herself or himself well if he could raise a question i can raise a question too if he can raise a question i can answer it if he can ask a question then the rest of us can discuss these matters among ourselves it's not forbidden it's not useless in a traditional school of education answers are very important and a classroom community of inquiry
questions are very important and errors are very important because when we make an error we have a chance to see how we went wrong and to self-correct and very often out of that kind of inquiry comes a new way of looking at things in general children discover one classroom after the next one country after the next that the community of inquiry provides a pedagogy which is of i think unparalleled power to get children talking and by virtue of their talking to get them thinking and we know that they're thinking when we hear them offer opinions
on what is being discussed because if they offer opinions then they bring up controversial matters and then you really have a wonderful opportunity for the children to engage in good solid critical thinking because whoever says anything offers an opinion that's a judgment and a judgment generally requires a reason to support it and this is where reasoning comes in when children realize that they can't get away with reckless statements that they've got to have solid reasoning to back up their opinions so it's a change in the whole climate of the education of education in the school
if the classroom is converted into a community of inquiry i had been saying a minute ago that we need to engage in controversies in order that children should come out with reasons and children need to bring up their reasons in order that we can press them to state their reasons for those opinions and this is getting into the area of critical thinking now critical thinking is one component of higher order thinking it's a major component at least it's not trivial but if we can get them to engage in critical thinking we can in a sense
get them to think about their own thinking to think carefully about their own thinking to think correctively and critically about their own thinking uh to think we use the word in english normatively but i'm not sure that that's a the best term that we could have here we want them to think evaluationally that's a better term to think judiciously about their own thinking that may be a better term too it's not just enough that we can get children to be more accurate in their thinking accuracy is important but there are other things too we don't
want inaccuracy we don't want children encouraged to make mistakes all the time critical thinking can get them to to go over their thinking to to check it to uh to see what errors or mistakes or fallacies they might have fallen into but there are i would say two other major components of higher order thinking in addition to critical thinking which critical thinking aims not only to be logical but to be truthful in addition to critical thinking there's creative thinking now creative thinking doesn't aim at truth except in some kind of metaphorical way some kind of
figurative way if art is the truth figuratively speaking yes then creative thinking is important for that reason but we want children in addition to being careful and critical we want them to be imaginative and creative and this is the sort of thing that um all of us do when we uh are trying to find the means to give and ends or more we have to be creative when we're trying to solve a problem and we know what the solution is but we have to be imaginative and coming up with the path to the solution but
we have to be imaginative too when we are trying to put parts together to form a whole or when we are uh trying to see what unites one part of a work with another part of a work it's not easy to know what to do to encourage creativity or to encourage imagination but if there isn't that kind of atmosphere in the classroom then the work of the children becomes dull and sluggish and mechanical and and not at all the inspiring kind of thinking that creative thinking almost always is but there's this third kind of thinking
that's a component of higher order thinking at least in the way i look at it and that i call careful thing i'm sorry caring thinking without caring thinking higher order thinking lacks a scale of values it lacks a sense of the difference between what is important and what is unimportant it lacks recognition that some things are morally right and some things are morally wrong some things we are obliged to do because we are under moral obligations and some we are not so there needs to be this third category of caring thinking to round out the
components of higher order thinking uh let me give you a couple of examples because there are many different uh types of caring thinking and i i can't uh itemize them all but let me give you an example take the case of art there is a world of art a public that is interested in art and these consist first of all of the inventors of art the composers of music the sculptors who make sculptures uh in other words there is a creative component secondly there is there are the people who evaluate are the critics and who
try to be objective if they can um and thirdly uh there is the public that appreciates art and doesn't appreciate what is lacking in artistic value now that shows that for any given area there will be an evaluative task or a critical task that the critics and what the critics engage in there will be an imaginative or creative component or group and there will be the appreciative appreciators we can say the same thing with we don't have to go into this three-part arrangement but we can consider that caring thinking is something we need to be
dealing with when it comes to interpersonal relationships emotional relationships we don't want people who are uncaring who have to deal with us as persons in bureaucracies or in big social organizations or any kind of social organization we don't want uncaring people who write to criticism we don't want uncaring people who invent the art or music or whatever we want people who have a set of values and who appreciate value or worth in in what they encounter who respected and this is where caring thinking has to be brought in because without it everything is dreary and
mechanical in the past hundred years or 200 years people have been exhorted to be rational but then when they ask what rationality is very often they were somewhat shocked to learn that rationality is thought of as a kind of self-interest that a rational person is one who thinks first of himself or herself organizes his life in a rather egotistical manner and puts himself or herself first this is very different from the person personally describe when we talk about reasonable people reasonable people not only use reason and reasoning but they listen to reason from others they're
ready to to accept other people's reasoning if it is presented to them in the in the course of a discussion so reasonable people is much more of a cooperative and socially acceptable form than i think rationality is if we're going to try to develop democratic citizens and we want to use the educational system to shape and mold the character of individual children so as to become strong citizens and a strong democracy philosophy for children has i think much merit in that regard the one of the most important things that a citizen has to be able
to do is to use judgment to be not just decisive make decisions but to make just decisions critical creative and caring decisions and i think that philosophy for children is probably the only educational approach which is concerned to improve judgment it seeks to improve judgment not only by trying to understand what makes a judgment suitable for a given situation we have to make our children more judicious more aware more articulate more understanding we do not we should not confuse understanding with knowledge many people have a lot of knowledge but little understanding many people have understanding
but they can't translate it into applications applications to specific situations and that requires judgment so we have to go beyond just educating for knowledge educating for facts and think in terms of the discussion skills which will help children be more successful in their attempts to [Music] live in a century as complex as the one we seem to be moving into the child must be brought into the educational process the child must begin to appreciate the educational experience as an experience just as play is an experience just as work is an experience just as family and
love are experiences so education is an experience to be treasured cherished and and desired because it's something precious and it's something very stimulating when it is done right that means that there has to be new relationships developed between teachers and children more cooperative relationships more working relationships more caring relationships than we have seen in the past we have to make children flexible in their knowledge flexible in their skills flexible in their judgment so that they can deal with the many different pressures and problems that they will be called upon to face in their lives in
the century ahead this cannot be done simply by warming over the curriculum of last year over a hundred years ago it seems to me that we also have the responsibility to prepare teachers in in such a way that they can foster among children a global consciousness and what i mean by that is a sense of how they as individuals relate to the whole all of the people on the planet this global consciousness also involves an ethical awareness of our relationship not just to other people but also to nature itself how we should care for nature
and how our caring will be instrumental in the survival of the planet when i talk about the reform of teacher education what i'm implying is that from the very first year that the student enters into the university he or she should be immersed in communities of inquiry where they learn how to think together to work together and to construct knowledge together we can't expect teachers to be able to foster something that they themselves have never experienced there's a sense in which their entire education should be immersion into and fostering of the perfection of participation in
classroom communities of inquiry right now you can say what does that mean in the concrete well if you were to go into a traditional school of education today my hunch is that you would see many professors lecturing to students about how to teach if you were to go into a school of education that had decided to change its paradigm you would see people both teachers and students immersed in intellectual inquiry about matters that they felt were important to the educational process in 1992 some teachers asked me if i could write a letter to them giving
them some advice on how to teach philosophy to elementary school children they were not total novices they had been through a training program in philosophy for children yet as they began to teach in their own classrooms they were afraid they were afraid that a maybe they wouldn't be quote really doing philosophy secondly they were afraid that perhaps they would without being fully conscious of it be indoctrinating children and thirdly they were really not quite sure of how to proceed now you have to remember that these teachers were teachers who have been brought up in traditional
schools of education where the teacher was kind of a fount of knowledge somebody who supposedly knew all the answers she knew from her training program that philosophical issues are not the kinds of things that we have definite answers to we had tried to explain to teachers that a philosophical concept is what um we call the three c's it has to be common to all children's experience it has to be central or important to their experience but most importantly it has to be controversial it has to be the kind of concept that children need to share
views about before they can come to gain a clear understanding of what that concept means um for them such philosophical concepts are friendship or mind or what it is to be a person or uh what do we mean when we say the word love or what do we mean when we say the word good to be a good teacher philosophy one has to know how to listen it's not so much recounting what you know but rather listening to the opinions of the children and trying to remember for yourself how these opinions uh in many instances
uh reconstruct the history of philosophy as you have mastered it for yourself secondly it seems to me that you have to be a person who is willing to inquire with children they have to see you as somebody who not they have to see you as somebody who doesn't think that she knows all the answers and that this process of inquiry that we're about to commence can make as much difference for her as i can for you in coming to some deeper understanding of let's say a concept like mind or children's rights or what we mean
by justice the students also need to see you as a person who who loves ideas who has allowed herself to immerse herself in the uh philosophical conversation that's taken place for 2500 years and now wants to invite you into that philosophical conversation teachers have to learn how to take what children say very seriously and yet at the same time to demand a kind of logical rigor in the process of communal inquiry so that the children whether they realize it or not are coming to master certain ways of proceeding for example learning how to give reasons
learning how to give counter examples learning how to make good inferences learning how to question learning how to present alternative views in a non-threatening manner these are all important moves that one learns the longer one participates in a community of inquiry teachers uh in time come to realize the teaching of philosophy is like opening up a world not just for the children but for themselves it's an elementary school discipline that seems to be as full of wonder and full of meaning for an adult as it is for any child and that makes it very different
from other disciplines that elementary school teachers teach in the classroom after 22 years now of teaching i can still say that i find the teaching of philosophy in an elementary classroom vital meaningful and and lots of fun that lots of fun is very important uh i can't imagine a teacher not having fun in a community of inquiry at least a couple of times a day why because teachers should find themselves enjoying the inquiry as much as the students and they should in a relatively short time begin to see a difference in how they themselves go
about their everyday lives and their everyday worlds they should begin to realize that there's a sense in which they haven't stopped growing that they can continue to grow and they can begin they can continue to look at these concepts that seem to form the basis of our daily experience uh like self language meaning freedom and reconstruct what they mean for us in our daily experience as we listen to the children of the world and what they think very often teachers find it difficult to come to accept that the role of the teacher in a community
of inquiry changes with time in the beginning it's very important that he or she be able to model all the moves of good inquiry so if you were to visit a classroom in the beginning of the year you might find the teacher talking a great deal notice however that she's not talking substantively her remarks tend to be procedural in nature she's asking for clarification or if she's offering a counter example or she's asking other people what they think or she's asking for reasons or she's asking for alternative points of view however it would seem to
me that within a couple of months her need to do that kind of procedural prompting should disappear and the children should internalize the moves for themselves so that they're asking each other for reasons they're asking each other for assumptions they're identifying assumptions of each other's remarks and bringing them to the table for further inquiry if you want to prepare children to take part in a strong democracy it would seem to me that this kind of internalization of excellent thinking has got to take place at the very young formative ages of our educational process one way
is to um is to ask yourself what are you trying to do if one of the central traits of a community of inquiry is learning how to self-correct that implies that we become conscious of criteria or norms by which we can self-correct criteria of a good functioning community of inquiry should be discussed and made available to the students as well as to the teachers so that the locus of evaluation moves from administrators to teachers to the children themselves what i'm saying is that ultimately children should be able to evaluate their own sessions by telling you
how they have progressed from the last evaluation and making clear the criteria that they're using in making the judgments um of evaluation about themselves for example students are very capable of evaluating two sets of tapes one that was taken at the beginning of the school year and let's say one that's taken in the middle of the school year and they might say look how in the middle of the school year we're asking each other for reasons look how many of us are questioning the assumptions of others look how many of us are offering alternative points
of view uh look how some of us are making creative leaps in the dialogue that we never made in the beginning look how there seems to be an atmosphere of trust in the classroom where some of us are even trying out ideas that we're not even sure of ourselves and yet we all understand that because we just want to see where the idea would go and what the consequences of that idea would be this kind of evaluation it seems to me is congruent with the central aims of the community of inquiry well in a in
a society where education is valued one would hope that educators would be able to put pressure on the government to put more and more of their money into the education of future generations than into other expenses like military expenses however we might find ourselves in situations time and time again where nothing can be done about having 50 children in a classroom does that mean that a community of inquiry is impossible and the answer is no it certainly is far more difficult we're going to have to play different roles um as we proceed but it has
been my experience that it is not impossible if the children really believe that you are willing to inquire about philosophical concepts and are willing to take what they have to say very seriously even in a class of 50 or 60 students one can find authentic communal inquiry going on teachers are also concerned that very often the materials that have been developed by the institute for the advancement of philosophy for children are not appropriate for the situations in which they find themselves they're either too long or perhaps they do not relate to the life experiences of
the children with whom they're working and very often teachers ask me well can we use other things and the answer is yes of course you can use other things there are short movies there are short videos there are stories of all sorts of um kinds that that would be appropriate the materials that have been created by the iapc have in a sense put the philosophical concepts and the philosophical procedures right on the surface of the stories so that you almost have to be blind not to see what's going on that's not the case in children's
literature very often it's full of philosophical concepts and has the potential to initiate wonderful philosophical dialogue but the onus of responsibility in that case is going to fall very much on the teacher she's going to have to be able to identify those concepts for herself and be able to construct discussion plans and exercises that would initiate the kind of dialogue that would be appropriate for the age of the children constructing those kinds of discussion plans and exercises is not something that can be learned in a year or two it takes many years to a understand
the philosophical conversation that has taken place in the west b to be able to compare that conversation with views of the east and views of non-traditional societies like in africa and thirdly to be able to appropriate it in such a way that you can relate it to children's experience and to the things that they find puzzling and wondering in their own lives we have a saying at the institute that one has to be pedagogically strong but philosophically self-correcting that is that the children have to realize that the teacher is somebody who knows what she's doing
and that if they will only give her the benefit of the doubt in the beginning they might find themselves in inquiry that can be very meaningful and open up a whole other dimension of their life but in order for this to happen the children have to be able to trust her they have to feel that she can respect them as persons and as potential thinkers and even potential philosophers if that's in place it seems to me that fifty percent of the work is already done and the rest has to be done by the group themselves
they have to evolve for themselves rules and procedures of dialogue that make sense for them certainly if we all talk at one time nobody can hear anybody else on the other hand who should talk when and how we should proceed in letting this one rather than that one talk is something that the group just has to work out for itself as communal inquiry proceeds if you can speak at the age of three then you're more than capable of doing a philosophy if you find yourself among adults and children who are willing to engage in the
inquiry with you think of a child of three think of the things that are important in her daily life and of the words that she uses as she goes through her day her mother expects her to get up on time she expects her to be a good girl her brothers and sisters go to school when she asks why they go to school she's told that they go there to get an education all of these concepts time good education concepts that need exploration in order for a three-year-old to make some kind of sense of her world
philosophy for children does not represent knowledge it represents inquisitiveness curiosity creativity imagination it represents a mass of questions of all different sorts of subjects that children can become more and more intrigued by and teachers too you
