Elementary school philosophy: A response

It is a daunting task to respond to the insightful and probing criticisms that Rory Kraft, Sara Goering, and James Kelly have made of some of the claims that I made in Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature. I would like to thank all three of them for providing me with an opportunity to think more carefully about what I said in the book and, indeed, my own views about doing philosophy with children in general. I hope that I will be able to answer some of their concerns as well as provide a slightly different view of what I have undertaken in my book.

Let me defer a direct response to their comments for a moment and begin by explaining the origin of Big Ideas for Little Kids. About a decade ago, I began teaching a course – ‘Philosophy for Children’ – in which my own undergraduate students at Mount Holyoke College facilitated philosophical discussions among elementary school students for 45 minutes once a week for seven or eight weeks. In many ways, Big Ideas for Little Kids developed as a handbook for the students in my class, for I was not satisfied with any of the books that I had used to help give them a roadmap for the bumpy and somewhat hazardous road that lay ahead of them when they went into the school to teach philosophy.

Big Ideas for Little Kids has another point of origin as well, and that is my first attempt to work in the field of philosophy for children. As I explain in the book, I began trying to implement a ‘philosophy for children’ program some 15 years ago, when my son was about to enter elementary school. I wanted to develop this program in part because I wanted him to have an opportunity to explore what I had come to see as philosophical concerns that he expressed and in part to assist the elementary school in a time of radical cuts to many of its core programs, including art, sports, and music.

When I thought about how to provide a program that teachers in my son’s school would be able to use, I realized that I would have to do something very different from what the late Matthew Lipman had pioneered. The teachers I was working with simply were not going to enroll in a course designed to teach them how to lead philosophical discussions based upon books that were specially developed for such discussions. In thinking about what would be possible with the teachers in my son’s public school, I decided that it made sense to use books that they already were required to teach, but to show them that there was a really interesting and innovative way to teach them, one that would allow the teachers to meet some of the educational goals they were required to fulfill, but that they often had difficulty in figuring out how to implement.

So, I chose to use picture books as what I now refer to as ‘prompts’ for elementary school philosophy discussions. These were books that teachers were supposed to be teaching; ‘all’ I wanted them to do was to use the books in a non-standard manner, as the basis for philosophical discussions among their students. So in writing Big Ideas for Little Kids, I also had in mind the elementary school teachers who were interested in implementing philosophy lessons. I hoped that the book would help them figure out exactly how to do that.

A third and somewhat subsidiary audience for the book was parents. They are the one audience that I think I neglected, for I think you have to approach a philosophy discussion with a single child or with a couple of children in a different way than I describe in the book, whose focus is classroom discussions among a smallish group of kids, say 6–12. You can’t really suppress your own opinions when you are dealing with a very small number of children, especially if they are yours. To really engage in a philosophy discussion in these circumstances, you have to say more of what you think than I allow my students to. This is not to say that you don’t also have to work at getting the child or children to express and defend their opinions, but that you have to do so in a different way than you would with the larger group of children that a classroom provides.

This is an issue that was brought to my attention by a careful reader of my book, a schoolteacher in Iran who is translating the book into Farsi. She was bothered about some of the discussions I report in the book as ones that I had with my son. She asked me why I made substantive contributions to the discussions, asking Jake about situations that he had not brought up. Did this not go against my advice to be just a facilitator and not a participant in the discussions?

Of course, she was right about what I had said in the book: I claimed that, as a facilitator of a philosophical conversation among a group of elementary schoolchildren, you had to efface yourself and just regulate the discussion, not make actual contributions to it. But with one child or a small group of children, especially when they are your own, it really isn’t possible to do that and, if you did, it would not generally lead to a fruitful philosophical discussion. So, should I ever get to publish a second edition of Big Ideas for Little Kids, I would definitely include a section for parents that suggests that they respond to their questions not just with other questions, but also with what they think, even though that should not become the focus of the conversation, which still needs to aim at getting children to develop and defend their own views.

Now it certainly is true that these three different audiences approach the task of facilitating elementary school philosophy discussions with different skills and experience. It would not be surprising to find that some of what I say at one point is more directed to one audience than another. I don’t see how that could have been avoided and I just assumed readers would ignore the parts of the book that were not applicable to their situation. Nonetheless, I believe that there is enough common ground among the three audiences for the book as a whole to be useful to all of them.

Each commentator raises some issues in regard to Big Ideas for Little Kids that the others do not, but there is one criticism that they all share: that I have not reflected carefully enough on what is necessary for a facilitator of an elementary school philosophy discussion to be, as Sara Goering puts it, a good facilitator of the discussion. Goering goes on to say that a facilitator needs to have what she calls ‘a good philosophical ear’. What that metaphor suggests is that a facilitator needs to be able to recognize when a good philosophical comment has been made, so that she can make the students aware that it has been made and then steer the discussion in the direction suggested by that comment. And this leads to the question of what type of philosophical education a facilitator would have to have in order to be good at it.

Rory Kraft develops his worry about my claim that anyone can be such a facilitator by saying that we need to distinguish between a philosophical discussion and actually doing philosophy. While the former can happen in a dorm room at 1 a.m., it is really the latter, he claims, that we aspire to engage children in. And that, he asserts, ‘require[s] knowledge of the history of philosophy, its methods, and the shortfalls of various approaches’ (Kraft, this issue).

James Kelly shares this concern with Goering and Kraft, but gives it a slightly different spin. Although he raises a number of different issues in regard to what is necessary for facilitating these discussions, his central concern is what is necessary if a teacher is to steer a middle course between being non-judgmental and being dogmatic. He also thinks that a facilitator needs to have more knowledge of philosophy than I have admitted in my book.

Let me begin my response to this very thorny issue with an admission. In a sense, all three critics are right: I did downplay the difficulty of being a skillful facilitator of elementary school philosophy discussion and the philosophical knowledge necessary to do that. But there was a reason for that. I was making a case to school teachers, college students, and parents that they could facilitate a philosophical discussion among or with children even though they had little or no philosophical training. It seemed to me – pragmatically – that is would be a bad idea to call attention to the difficulty of being a facilitator of philosophical discussions. It’s not that I don’t realize that it takes skills to do it, but I did not want to emphasize that for fear that it would discourage people from taking what is already a pretty adventurous leap into the unknown. And so I downplayed the difficulties.

On the other hand, I think that you can also emphasize the importance of formal philosophical training too much. The first teacher that I worked with in an ongoing way had no formal philosophical training. But, as I came to see, she had that philosophical ear that Goering emphasizes. I’m not sure where she got it, but it certainly wasn’t from reading The Critique of Pure Reason and I don’t think that everyone who has read that tome comes away from it with the sort of philosophical ear that is necessary for facilitating.

One thing that I think my critics overlook is that anyone who facilitates elementary school philosophy discussions has the opportunity, over time, to acquire a philosophical ear. The question ‘What is necessary for a person to begin facilitating an elementary school philosophy discussion?’ is different from the question ‘What does a facilitator ideally need to know in order to be a good facilitator?’ Over time, I believe a facilitator will come to learn what makes a discussion a philosophical one and thus acquire the skills necessary to facilitate it.

This is not just a matter of faith. In the book, for each story that I suggest using as a prompt, I provide two important additional resources that are there to help facilitators assist the children in having a philosophical discussion and thus assist them in being good facilitators. First, I supply the questions that they ought to use to initiate the philosophical discussions and I have preselected these for their philosophical relevance. This is a big aid, although some traditionalists in the community of inquiry style of classroom discussion think it is a mistake to impose any such direction on a classroom discussion. But I do so precisely because I am aware that some facilitators will need help, at least initially, in determining which issues that can be raised about a story are philosophical ones. This applies to all three of the audiences to whom the book is addressed.

The section of Big Ideas for Little Kids on each book also includes introductions to the philosophical area that that book focuses on and provides a basic explanation of the philosophical problems and the most significant ways that have been proposed to solve them. I included these introductions precisely because I realize that having some awareness of the philosophical terrain is helpful in facilitating an elementary school philosophy discussion, although I did say that those with sufficient philosophical background can simply skip them.

But my more general point is that, using these aids and working with children, a facilitator has the opportunity, over time, to develop a philosophical ear. Of course, not everyone will develop the ability to recognize a philosophical issue and not all of those who have that ability will necessarily be a good facilitator of elementary school philosophy discussions. But I still stand behind my claim that you don’t need to already possess a sound understanding of what makes an issue or a question a philosophical one before you start to engage children in philosophical discussions, for these discussions are part of a learning process for the facilitator as well as the children. And that’s the more profound reason why the book makes the optimistic claim that anyone can facilitate philosophical discussions among elementary schoolchildren.

I now want to turn to some concerns raised by each of the individual critics. Kraft faults me for some of the books that I include in my elementary school introduction to philosophy course and for one that I leave out. Let me begin my saying mea culpa in regard to the issue of feminism. I am especially embarrassed about this because I teach at a women’s college and doing so has made me generally very sensitive to the ways in which women have been excluded from the field. I have even written two articles about this issue (Wartenberg, 1998, 1999). But, if one is to worry about things that might have been included in the course, there is also the area of the philosophy of race. In fact, I have included such issues in earlier versions of this course, using Dr Seuss’s The Sneetches and David McKee’s Tusk Tusk.

I also want to respond to Kraft’s criticisms of two books that I did include in the course. We always begin the course with Arnold Lobel’s wonderful story ‘Dragons and Giants’, not because it is necessarily the best way to introduce ethics but because we have found it to be a great way to introduce children to doing philosophy in general. The story raises a number of deep questions about the virtue of bravery, most centrally whether someone can be brave and still be scared. Kids relate to that issue and find themselves doing philosophy, almost behind their backs. Which is not to say that it would not be good to take up other issues in ethics, such as lying, as Kraft suggests. But you also need to pay attention to the development of children’s philosophical abilities and how to initiate them into a philosophical discussion.

The problems presented by The Giving Tree are different. While it is true that the way in which the tree repeatedly gives to the boy whatever he asks for is deeply problematic, that is exactly the jumping off point for our philosophical discussions. We don’t ask the children to absorb any lesson about how to behave from the tree’s self-abnegation, rather we ask them to consider the way in which both the tree and the boy behave and what they think about that. This results in spirited discussions in which some children defend the boy asking for so much and the tree for giving it – ‘The boy needed what the tree gave him, otherwise he wouldn’t have a wife or family or home or anything’ – while others attack the boy for asking for what he did and the tree for giving it – ‘She shouldn’t have given him everything . . . her whole self.’ And this leads into a discussion of how human beings should conduct themselves in relation to natural entities.

None of this is to say that anyone has to follow my syllabus exactly as it is written. It is just a model of what a syllabus for an elementary school philosophy course might look like. In order to reach the widest possible audience, I took an admittedly conservative approach, focusing on topics that most philosophers would agree are central to the discipline and avoiding some that are controversial. But I am very happy to discover people adapting the syllabus to their own needs and interests, and have no interest in taking this syllabus to be normative in any way.

Goering raises two important issues. The first has to do with assessment. As she notes, I don’t say much about that in the book, so let me say something now. I do think that we need to assess our attempts to discuss philosophy with children. I helped design a study with two psychologists at Boston College that seeks to determine, among other things, whether children who have engaged in my program develop an understanding of the process of argumentation (Walker et. al., 2011). And the results were very encouraging. After only 12 weeks of weekly sessions of 45-minute duration, the children show a statistically significant increase in their ability to understand the nature of an argument, an advance that they retain when tested 12 weeks later. These studies are difficult to design and administer, but I think that we need to devote more attention to them than we have.

Goering also poses a question: Why would a teacher, facing a class of 28 unruly children, want to develop more assertive pupils who might be resistant to her exercise of authority? While this is a genuine concern, I want to point to something else that develops out of our classroom philosophy sessions: an awareness among the students that they are members of an actual classroom community that is capable of working together to inquire about the truth of any matter put before it. Although each individual in the classroom may come to feel empowered by our interventions, the class as a whole will also develop a sense of interrelatedness that will make them less tolerant of those who attempt to derail its investigations.

This brings me to some of Kelly’s concerns. First, he puts way too much emphasis on a remark I make about the relation between philosophy and debate. I don’t think anyone can deny that some of the skills required for presenting and defending a philosophical position are also necessary for taking part in a debate. But that does not mean, and I did not claim, that a classroom philosophy discussion is identical to a debate, nor do I think that the point of a philosophical discussion is to win, whatever that would mean in the context of a classroom discussion. But neither do I agree with Kelly that the aim of such a discussion is to achieve ‘a consensus on the truth’ (Kelly, this issue). In my classroom discussions, I am just as happy to have the children wind up disagreeing about something, such as whether the tree in The Giving Tree should have acted as she did, as I am if they agree about it. All that is important to me is that the children have clarified their own ideas and engaged in a conversation with others that takes seriously opposing points of view. Indeed, if we are interested in developing children into citizens who can take part in the sorts of civil discussions that are necessary for a democratic society, then allowing them to learn to disagree with one another is really important. I was very gratified, when reading the comments that some second graders made about what they found most valuable about their philosophy discussions, to find one eight year old say that he learned that it was all right to disagree with his best friend. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of our politicians had imbibed that lesson when they were eight?

Kelly’s comments about character development reveal that he has a somewhat different agenda than I do for introducing philosophy into elementary schools. Although I do take a forward-looking perspective that considers what children will need to have learned in order to be good citizens, I am also concerned with children in the here-and-now. I think they are bothered by questions like: Could I be dreaming now? Could the world have been created an infinitely long time ago? Are numbers more or less real than tables and chairs? Is a picture of a chair less real than the physical chair that I’m sitting on? And I think it is our responsibility as caring adults to provide children with a chance to engage with these abstract philosophical questions. My mentor in this regard, the late Gareth Matthews, thought that we needed what he called a ‘non-deficit model of childhood’, one that takes seriously children’s own concerns and interests, not just ours in them as adults-in-the-making. So one reason for teaching a broad introduction to philosophy is to allow the children to engage a range of issues that have puzzled them.

In this regard, I would also like to let a child support me. One child commented that she had always thought that she was weird because she thought about some of the questions that we had discussed. But discussing them in a classroom reassured her that her questions were not weird, that they were just philosophy.

I would now like to turn to a comment that Rory Kraft makes about an innovative course he taught using picture books for college students. Basically, he tried getting college students engaged in philosophical discussions by first having them discuss some of the picture books we normally use for teaching philosophy in elementary schools and then asking the college students to read standard philosophical texts about the issues the picture books raised. His example is Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book and Aristotle’s Categories. I guess Kraft’s experiment proves that great minds run in the same channels, for I experimented with a similar course in the fall of 2010. To my surprise, it was incredibly successful, with students energized by the picture books in a way that fueled their interest in the philosophical texts themselves.

This suggests that picture books can be an important resource not just in teaching philosophy to young children, but also in exploring philosophy with college students and other adults. Because of the way many picture books expose the puzzles underlying concepts we use all the time, they are able to engage people’s interest in exploring the world philosophically better than most works of traditional philosophy.

I began my remarks by explaining how I came to conceive the book as having three distinct audiences. I would like to end them by considering how well it works for each of these audiences. I can report that my own experience using it with college students is that it works very well. That is not too surprising since the book is a development and generalization of guidelines I have been giving my students for a number of years. It has also inspired at least one college student, Allison Drutchas at Davidson College, to develop her own program for teaching philosophy. Can teachers benefit from reading the book and using it as a model for their own philosophical interventions? Again, I can say ‘Yes!’, based upon emails that I have received from various teachers around the country and, indeed, the world. The teacher from Iran who is translating Big Ideas for Little Kids tells me that it will be used all over Iran – a very unexpected possibility, I might add. And parents have also contacted me to tell me the difference the book has made to them and their children. One parent who wrote to me, Laura Weston, was a photographer assigned to photograph the visit of the elementary school students to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She was intrigued and started using my web-based book module on Leo Lionni’s Frederick to guide her discussions with her son. ‘In the last 5 years’, she writes, ‘we must have read Frederick over 200 times, but when I used the discussion questions for the first time, the book took on a whole new meaning for my son. I asked him the questions about working and helping in the community and he came up with so many great responses. We talked about Frederick for over an hour! I really appreciate what you are doing . . .’

So the evidence I have garnered from emails I have received is that individuals in each of the audiences for whom I intended the book have found it to be helpful and I have been heartened by such responses to my book. As the philosophy for children movement gains momentum in this country and abroad, I can only hope that Big Ideas for Little Kids will play at least a modest role in helping philosophy become more broadly engaged in at every level of our educational system and social life.