The Development and Contextualization of Philosophy for Children in Mainland China

Abstract

The past three years have seen a steady growth of interest in researching and practicing Philosophy for Children (P4C) in educational settings in China because many educators and administrators consider it as a coherent curriculum for developing student critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinking. Excited and gratified with children’s philosophical sensitivity and enthusiasm, three representative Elementary Schools in mainland China, namely South Station Elementary School from Yunnan Province, Shanghai Liuyi Elementary School, and Washi Elementary school from Zhejiang Province, started to practice P4C in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Without succumbing to the aggravated uniformity of the educational system, the three schools demonstrated innovative ways to reform their educational practice, which helped to develop a different form of Chinese educational praxis. This study provides a review on three schools’ P4C practice from the perspective of motivation, development of school-based curricula, the mode and effect of P4C. The three schools found Lipman’s P4C curriculum inspiring but, for the most part, culturally and contextually inappropriate, thus developed their own P4C textbooks, pedagogy and conceptual framework. The study further offers glimpses of P4C historical development in the past thirty years in the model schools, and discusses the challenges, opportunities, existing methodological approaches, theoretical and practical tensions that Chinese P4Cers experienced when P4C being practiced. Then it proposes methodological advancements and possibilities of future P4C practice and research in mainland China.