The paradox of philosophy for children and how to resolve it

Abstract

There is a paradox in the idea of philosophy for children (P4C). Good teaching starts from the concrete and particular, and it engages with each student’s individual interests, beliefs, and experiences. Preadolescents (and to some extent everyone) find this approach more natural than a more impersonal one and respond better to it. But doing philosophy involves focusing on the abstract and general and disengaging oneself from one’s personal interests and beliefs. It involves critiquing one’s attitudes, seeing abstract relations, and applying general principles. So, if good teaching focuses on the concrete and personal, and good philosophy on the abstract and impersonal, how can there be good teaching of philosophy to children? I call this the paradox of philosophy for children, and in this paper I explore how teachers should respond to it. Should they sacrifice good teaching practice, adopting a heavily teacher-centred approach in order to correct their students’ natural biases? Should they lower their expectations of what philosophical skills children can acquire? Should they even attempt to teach philosophy to children? The paper will argue that there is a better option, which exploits children’s imaginative abilities. The core idea is that by encouraging children to imaginatively identify with other perspectives, we can use their natural focus on the concrete and particular to lever them into more abstract, critical ways of thinking. In this way, their focus on the concrete and personal can be the very means to get them to think abstractly and critically. The paper will go on to outline a general strategy for implementing this approach, the Scenario-Identification-Reflection (SIR) method, which will be illustrated with examples drawn from the author’s own classroom practice. The paper will also respond to some objections to the proposed strategy and offer some general reflections on the SIR method.