Philosophy for Children

Philosophy for Children is an interesting concept. It was developed by Matthew Lipman in 1970 after he taught Philosophy in Columbia University, New York. 'Why is it,' he asks 'that while children of four, five and six are full of curiosity, creativity and interest, and never stop asking for further explanations, by the time they are eighteen they are passive, uncritical and bored with learning?' Lipman(1982)

After seeing the lack of thinking skills in his philosophy class and the growing interest in the education system for trying to teach thinking skills, Lipman had the idea of why not use philosophy? Why do we need to create something new when we already have philosophy? Philosophy gives us the critical thinking skills and the questioning needed and it has been refined over the centuries to help it become more and more precise.
Thus through Matthew Lipman's work Philosophy for Children (P4C) was created.

When doing a Philosophy lesson, you can use a wide range of resources, from books to videos to debating a question. It doesn't matter what you use or the type of question you ask as anything, can use anything for a philosophy lesson. What Lipman did after he left his post at Columbia was design a programme for all ages that included philosophy and when designing this programme, he wrote a series of thought provoking books to be used in philosophy lessons (Fisher, R. 2013)

During a philosophy lesson, the role of the teacher is seen to be more of a facilitator and just to help the discussion/debate along. For a successful lesson, the teacher should:

• Question
• Defining
• Speculating
• Reasons
• Examples
• Distinctions
• Connections
• Implications
• Intentions
• Criteria
• Consistency
• Summarising

By doing the above, the teacher should manage to help the children develop their critical thinking skills and help them develop giving a reason with everything.

The teacher should make an environment where the children are not afraid to say what they think and why they think it. The teacher should make it a dialogic classroom where the following things happen:

• Collective - where everyone does things either in a group, or as a class but not individually
• Reciprocal - where everyone listens to each other, they share ideas and consider different points of view
• Supportive - where everyone speaks freely without being ridiculed
• Cumulative - where they build on ideas, theirs or others
• Purposeful - where teachers plan and facilitate dialogic teaching with a particular educational goal in mind

Hopefully, all teachers do this during a philosophy lesson and afterwards when they are planning what resources to use for the next philosophy lesson and if they have an educational goal in mind.

Philosophy for Children, does seem to be working but only if it is carried on through secondary school as well. The Clackmannanshire Research Project had findings that after having philosophy lessons, the children's IQ was raised by 6.5 points and that sustained for 2 years into their secondary school life. If in secondary schools, the philosophy lessons were carried on, then hopefully their IQ would a been raised more and their critical thinking skills would have improved even more.