AARON: So let me ask you a question: imagine that I’m afraid of penguins.
NARR: That’s Aaron Yarmel. Aaron has a PhD in philosophy. He’s the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State. And right now, Aaron’s sitting in a public library, having a philosophical conversation about bravery.
AARON: Imagine that, like, when I see the Penguin I do this?
NARR: Here, Aaron lurches away from the penguin and makes a terrified face.
AARON: Right… Would that be brave? Like witches are kind of scary, right? Penguins aren’t scary, though.
KIDS: Yeah. Ewww.
NARR: I’ll mention here that Aaron’s interlocutors are five-year-olds. We’re jumping in here mid-conversation, so they’ve already talked about some other scary stuff, like witches, in addition to the penguin in question.
AARON: So if I’m doing this, would you call me brave? Because I’m, like, afraid of penguins?
KIDS: That’s not brave. And… and you could smash it, but that’s not nice.
NARR: To repeat for clarity: backing away from the penguin is not brave. And you could smash the stuffed penguin, but that’s not nice. We’ll come back to this moral and ethical claim in a bit – but first: hello and welcome.
NARR: I’m Carrie Welsh, and this is Ethics and Education. Today, we’re talking about what it’s like to do philosophy with children, and for children.
We’ll hear from experts in the field, from people like Aaron who lead philosophical discussions with kids, and from a specialist in child development. And across those conversations, we’ll think about questions like:
- What do we owe kids, when it comes to philosophical thinking?
- What about us grownups? Have we gotten worse at wondering? Do we owe ourselves more philosophy?
- And, are kids naturally philosophical?
[music]
NARR: If you’ve ever known a toddler, you know that kids ask a lot of questions. Philosopher Jana Mohr Lone appreciates this about them.
JANA: Children enter these conversations with so much less baggage than adults do, so few, so many fewer assumptions about what they already know, so much less self consciousness about how sophisticated or smart they sound, and so much imagination and openness to the possibilities.
NARR: Jana is the director of the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization – PLATO, for short. (The acronym, as you might have guessed, is not an accident.)
PLATO is a US-based organization dedicated to introducing philosophy to young people. As part of her work, Jana is often in classrooms. (We actually spoke to her right after she’d led a philosophy session with a group of fourth graders.) Jana says that doing philosophy with children has deepened her love for the field. Even back while she was getting her PhD in philosophy, she didn’t feel the same level of openness and curiosity as she does with kids.
JANA: There was a lot of quoting philosophers and how much you knew about Kant’s theory of knowledge, or what have you. And personally, I found that pretty deadening.
NARR: Jana firmly believes that you don’t need a PhD to be a philosopher.
JANA: I mean, I always knew philosophy was for everyone. But this work has just so enlivened that perspective for me, because every day I’m able to talk to, you know, teachers, students of all ages, and recognize how philosophically inclined human beings are. And that it isn’t something that belongs kind of nailed down in the academy for a select group, but it’s something that everyone should have access to.
NARR: Today, PLATO and other organizations that offer philosophy for children (or P4C) are trying to expand that access. Sometimes, that looks like a trained facilitator who comes to a classroom to lead an inquiry. Or, a teacher who gets trained on how to bring more philosophical thinking into the subject they already teach. There are ethics bowls and philosophy clubs started by students and teachers who are enthusiastic about philosophy. And there are programs for parents and other family members to learn about ways to engage philosophically with their children.
So, there are all kinds of formats and best practices for P4C. But at its core…
MAUGHN: If you think philosophy for children is, you know, getting children, including teenagers, involved in reading and thinking and talking about philosophy, that’s been going on forever.
NARR: That’s Maughn Gregory. He’s the director of another organization (like PLATO) that offers philosophy for children. It’s called the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (or IAPC). It’s housed at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where Maughn is also a professor of philosophy of education.
As Maughn said, P4C has been going on forever, but it was formalized as a field in the 1970s, when IAPC was founded.
[music]
NARR: One of the IAPC founders started writing philosophical ideas into children’s novels. These novels were taught in New Jersey public schools, where kids would read and discuss those ideas.
Another IAPC researcher then helped him develop workbooks to accompany those novels. The workbooks were made to support the teachers leading these conversations, and help them adapt the issues for different grade levels in K-12. The philosophers who did this work were Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp.
NARR: P4C practitioners still rely on this original curriculum today – it’s been translated and culturally adapted for use worldwide.
For Megan Laverty, Matt and Ann’s foundational work creates new questions for the field.
MEGAN: ‘Cause now we have to look back at what was done, review it, evaluate it, research it, come up with new theories based on it. So the development looks different, but it’s important to retain it.
NARR: Megan is a professor at Teacher’s College Columbia. She teaches philosophy and education, and she directs the graduate program there. She and Maughn often collaborate on research, and they are currently writing a book together on Matthew Lipman, one of the founders you just heard about.
Much of those founders’ early work was aimed at middle-schoolers and high-schoolers. But what about younger kids? Can they do philosophy too?
One person who thought a lot about that question was Gareth Matthews, a philosopher who was working with the IAPC founders. Back in the 70s, Gareth had young kids while he was working as a philosophy professor, and like a lot of parents, he would read picture books to his kids. He realized that the questions in these picture books were the same questions he was teaching in his college classes.
MAUGHN: So he started taking the kids book, the picture books, into his classes, and he found that that was a way that he could reassure his college students that philosophy is not some esoteric thing that has nothing to do with your lives. It’s actually– the ideas you find in philosophy are actually ideas that children find interesting, and the proof of that is in children’s literature.
NARR: This professor, Gareth Matthews, put a lot of stock in young children’s thinking abilities.
NARR: But before that, back in the 1930s, scholars who studied child development were still exploring whether young children could think and reason.
[music]
One Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, believed that most children weren’t even capable of abstract thinking before around age 12.
(You might remember Piaget if you took Psych 101 – he was the guy who did experiments with babies to see when they develop object permanence.)
Now, researchers have a much better understanding of how kids’ minds develop. Gareth Matthews and others have made philosophical critiques of Piaget’s work. And studies show us that kids do think philosophically well before age 12.
[end music]
This makes sense to me. I love having conversations with kids because they make me reflect differently about things that have come to seem obvious. All those Why questions that I’ve just taken for granted to get through the day.
Working on this piece, I wondered whether my adult brain was just tired and dusty, and that’s why these kid conversations felt so fresh. Or, is it that kids are inherently just more philosophical?
CYNTHIA: Yeah, that’s really, it’s a really interesting question.
NARR: I asked Cynthia Burnson, a human development expert. She studies how kids grow up within their many layers of context: all the factors that influence who they become. And her take on kids is that it’s not simply that kids are better at philosophy.
CYNTHIA: Alison Gopnik has this great idea that children are the R and D department of the human race. And sometimes people think that means, developmentally, that’s the R and D department of your own life, but she means literally for the entire human race.
Children are the ones throwing their consciousness wide open, and because they have such an extended childhood, they have this protected time to ask those questions, to explore the world. That is their purpose as children.
And it’s again, not just for themselves developmentally, but for giving them the space to explore, ask questions, think about things and just absorb the world and ask and probe it, is part of what keeps our entire species open minded and pushing boundaries. It’s so fascinating.
CARRIE: So you’re telling me that, that this is accessible to me, and that I didn’t grow out of it…
CYNTHIA: I mean, I think it’s still accessible, but I think for children, it is their job.
NARR: Cynthia said that there are ways to respect kids’ ability to do this job. For example, Maria Montessori, who created the Montessori Method of schooling, based her approach on child development. When Montessori talked about observing children in the classroom and watching them do what they do, she would use this metaphor of a caterpillar. When caterpillars are ready to build their chrysalis, they instinctively move to the edge of a leaf.
CYNTHIA: It’s like, I don’t know why they’re going to the edge of the leaf, and there’s some kind of environmental input, like maybe light or maybe height, but it’s just like what they have to do.
NARR: It’s the same thing for kids.
CYNTHIA: And if you set up the environment for them, both around relationships, but also the physical environment – so like their inputs, their conversation, their relationships – that they just, they have kind of this unfolding natural inclination towards something that serves them and serves the human race.
NARR: So even if it is kids’ job to think expansively, setting up the right environment for that makes a difference. That’s where P4C facilitators come in. Aka: grownups. Like Dustin Webster: He used to be a fifth grade teacher. Now, he’s a Postdoc at Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns. And before that, he was the Co-Director of Penn’s Project for Philosophy for the Young.
In our interview, Dustin raised a fair question:
DUSTIN: If children are natural philosophers and they’re doing this anyway, well then what is philosophical expertise? Because, you know, there must be something else that we’re bringing to the table.
NARR: One thing philosophers bring to the table: the ability to hold a lot of nuance, and see the many different sides of a complex topic. That’s what Dustin does when he facilitates P4C sessions with kids.
Facilitators also have a lot of practical considerations. A few things on Maughn Gregory’s list:
MAUGHN: Who’s who’s participating, who’s not participating? Is it? Is there enough harmony that people feel comfortable and safe to say risky things? But is it too safe? Is it too sweet? Is it too nice that nobody’s, you know, nobody dares challenge each other be sarcastic or, you know, there’s no frankness. People aren’t speaking with real frankness?
NARR: Which brings us back to Aaron and the 5-year-olds we met at the beginning, and their conversation about bravery.
[music]
Aaron, by the way, is an endorsed practitioner of the IAPC method. So as he was guiding that conversation with the kids, he was making really intentional facilitation moves.
After the session, we asked him to explain these facilitation moves to us – so we’re going to walk you through his thinking as the lesson unfolds.
When we left off, one young interlocutor had just confirmed that cowering from the stuffed penguin was not brave.
AARON: So if I’m doing this, would you call me brave? Because I’m if I have, like, afraid of penguins, that’s
KID 1: That’s not brave. And and you could smash it, but that’s not nice.
[end music]
NARR: She had some more to add about that idea.
KID 1: So I never smash it because I made it myself, yeah. And it has magnets inside.
AARON: It does?
KID 1: Yeah, so it can stick on my dishwasher and on my fridge.
AARON: Wait, I’m afraid of magnets, so now I’m more afraid of the penguin.
NARR: Aaron’s being playful here. But he’s pretending to be afraid of magnets for a reason.
When Aaron facilitates, he says he’s balancing three kinds of thinking: Critical thinking, Creative thinking, and Caring thinking.
And even within one of those, there are elements to balance. Sometimes care for the community might feel at odds with care for the inquiry.
You want to make sure everyone’s ideas are heard, and you also want to make sure the lesson is moving forward.
(For example, somebody’s excited to talk about a magnet-penguin, and you want to keep drawing out more ideas about bravery.)
So what Aaron did (again)–
AARON: Wait but, I’m afraid of magnets, so now I’m more afraid of the penguin.
– was show care for his participant’s contribution (about the magnets) AND incorporate that into his care for the inquiry (about bravery).
AARON: Could anybody tell me why it’s not brave to be afraid of this little penguin
KID 1: That it cannot hurt you.
AARON: Okay, it can’t hurt me. So it sounds like what you’re saying is, if something can’t hurt you, it’s not brave to be afraid of it. So I shouldn’t be afraid of things that can’t hurt me. Is that the idea?
KID 1: Yeah. Like, I’m still afraid of spiders, and there used to be a spider web that was guarding my swing, and it was a giant spider, and it was very scary. And I know they eat bugs and mosquitoes, so that means they’re good, so I just like saying hello to them.
AARON: That’s great. So you go and you say hello to the spider, because they eat mosquitoes.
KID 1: Yeah.
AARON: Okay.
NARR: Again, Aaron acknowledges the example. And then he folds it into his next question:
AARON: So let’s just talk about the, the penguin and the spider for a second. So I should not be afraid of the penguin because the penguin can’t hurt me. Do we all agree with that?
KID 2: Yeah, cause them just waddle and get on ice and doesn’t do anything else.
NARR: Okay, I find this adorable. And! It’s also sound logic as it relates to the question of bravery. Penguins do mostly just waddle on ice. And they’re not hurting you when they do that.
AARON: They waddle. Yeah. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that a brave person isn’t afraid of things that can’t hurt them. Is that fair?
NARR: Aaron says at this point, he could see the kids nodding to agree with his restatement. It’s really important for him as a facilitator to make sure the kids are engaged. He doesn’t want to mistake their compliance for consent. Especially since kids are so often expected to comply with what adults think they should be doing. And that doesn’t make for good philosophy.
So, with the kids nodding about what they’ve covered, Aaron introduces a new question.
AARON: So if something can’t hurt me and I’m brave, I won’t be afraid of it. Can the spider hurt you? That’s my question.
KID 1: No, it cannot hurt you. They’re completely harmless.
NARR: Aaron has a choice. He could contradict the kid, point out that some spiders can harm you. But Aaron chooses instead…to wait. (And here, Aaron would insist that this facilitation move wasn’t just a smart choice he made on his own, but something he learned from his training with the IAPC.)
Aaron says that whenever he hears something in an inquiry that strikes him as blatantly false, his assumption is that he just hasn’t understood.
This reminds me of charitable thinking, which is the philosophy term for assuming the person you’re talking to means well and is really trying to say something.
So to get us back into the inquiry – the kid says spiders are harmless. Aaron waits. And then the kid goes on.
KID 1: If you like, pick up the largest spider in the world… Like it would be like this: pretend that this is the spider and this is your hand, and you picked it up –
AARON: Okay.
KID 1: It could try to bite off your hand!
AARON: It could bite off your finger?
NARR: (Not so harmless after all)
KID 2: Yeah, if you see a spider, and it’s huge, and if, if you just wiggle your arm and you’re scared, it might bite you. But if you’re brave, it, it will not bite you, and just crawl on your hand. And if you want it to come off, just put your hand on the ground and it would crawl off of your hand.
NARR: Aaron paraphrases these points to make sure he understands the kid’s idea, and then moves on.
AARON: So with um, with spiders, it sounds like what you’re saying was a brave person can be afraid of things that are dangerous, but, but they’re not afraid of things that are not dangerous. Is that right? Okay.
So imagine that I’m on a swing set, and I go down the slide, and right when I get to the bottom of the slide, I like, fall into the ground, and I like, just I bang my knee up a little bit so it hurts a little bit. So I get hurt. Now, should I be afraid of the slide? What do you think?
KID 1: Uh, no.
AARON: No, how come?
KID 1: Since it’s it, since you just have to hold on to the railings, but put them on your lap like you hold on.
AARON: Okay, so I just didn’t do the slide properly. I should have held on. Okay, so it sounds like you’re telling me that I shouldn’t be afraid of slides. Is that right? Even if I get hurt on the slide.
NARR: By bringing up slides, Aaron has added another example to this discussion. Over the course of the hour-long inquiry, the kids gave most of the examples. (With older kids, Aaron says he wouldn’t have introduced any examples of his own.)
But here, offering the example of slides gives the children a scaffolding to explore conditions around fear and bravery.
AARON: So are there any slides I should be afraid of?
KID 2: Uh. I think a twirly slide that goes for like, like, this many twirlies.
NARR: “This many twirlies” meaning so many twirlies.
KID 1: And slides that are so high.
AARON: Mhm, how high?
KID 2: Like, all the way up there, and it goes like, “whewhewhewhew”
NARR: “All the way up there,” of course, meaning extremely tall. Again, adorable. And both of those are examples of slides that could actually hurt you. This is sound thinking by five-year-olds. Those are the slides it makes sense to be afraid of.
And from here, Aaron’s ready to move towards some conclusions.
AARON: Okay, so I want to ask you a question. So we’ve talked about spiders, we talked about halloween, and we talked about slides. We talked about what it looks like to be brave or not brave around spiders. And then we talked about that with slides. What is brave? What does it mean to be brave? Could anybody tell me?
NARR: Aaron says when he asked this final question – what does it mean to be brave – he wasn’t positive these 5-year-olds would offer an answer. But he knew they’d talked about some important criteria for bravery. So again, he let silence act as a catalyst.
AARON: Can anybody tell me?
[pause]
KID 2: Actually, I know what it is.
AARON: What is it, tell me.
KID 2: It’s like when, when– it’s kind of like scared, but when there’s something that’s that’s scary, and if you look at it, and it’s not really scary. But sometimes, I look at it for a long time, and then it gets not scary.
[music]
NARR: I love this. His answer captures what feels so thrilling about P4C: For two reasons.
- First, this answer is a refreshing example of what Jana talked about earlier, about how kids aren’t as rigid and conditioned in how they express themselves.
- And second, it’s an earnest swing at an answer about what it means to be brave, and one that makes me want to think more deeply about my own definition of bravery.
P4C isn’t a cute approximation of philosophy – it is philosophy.
[music ends]
NARR: Aaron and Dustin have both gone through extensive training to lead inquiries like the one you just heard, across all types of age groups. But even for teachers who aren’t P4C facilitators, there are still ways to pull philosophical thinking into the classroom. In Dustin’s view, this can be a matter of framing:
DUSTIN: Teachers are well versed when they’re reading a picture book at asking questions of the students as they’re reading. And a lot of Philosophy for Children can be just like that, where you’re reading a picture book, and you’re asking the students questions, but you’re just asking slightly different types of questions.
So instead of maybe asking a question like, Why do you think these two characters are friends, you then ask the question of, well, what makes a good friend? And just like that – maybe I shouldn’t snap – just like that, you’re in the realm of getting kids thinking philosophically about, well, What are the qualities that we, you know, look for when we’re looking for a good friend? and when we say friend, what do we even mean by that? Because we know all sorts of people. Are they all friends? Are our parents friends? Is our dog a friend?
And you know, you’re doing philosophy just like that.
NARR: Incorporating philosophy into the classroom has benefits for teachers too. There’s a lot of pressure on teachers to prepare the future of humanity, and to do everything right. Megan Laverty thinks a lot about these pressures.
MEGAN: Sometimes, I think, as a teacher, you’re being asked always to correct all the wrongs. And I think philosophy takes that burden off teachers and says, you know? That’s not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to create a space where you, together with your students, can inquire about these issues and these values and these questions. And you can help them do it better, and you can ensure that they do it cooperatively, so it’s as inclusive as it can be, and you can provide different resources. But it’s not, it’s not the role of the teacher to shore up the character and, you know, values of each and every student in her classroom.
NARR: We know kids are growing up in a world with real life ethical dilemmas and complex questions. Philosophy takes some pressure off of teachers to have answers to those questions, without shying away from the questions themselves.
One of the things I love most about working with philosophers is their ability to engage with complexity both seriously and playfully.
And when we let kids know they can engage that way too – Jana thinks it’s one of the ways we can acquaint kids with their own intellectual agency.
JANA: Being able to chart a course for yourself requires that you really trust that you have something unique to offer, and that you have confidence in the way you can articulate what it is you think, the questions you have, when you have a question, you don’t think, Oh, I should be quiet because there’s something everybody else knows I don’t know.
And I think that giving kids the tools to enter the world with that kind of skill and confidence– I don’t know that there’s a more powerful way to educate kids, and I think that philosophy is uniquely suited to do that, because it’s so question-centered.
NARR: And Megan reminds us that facing our lives, and facing our own questions – that’s a lifelong project. She said working in philosophy helped her realize that–
MEGAN: It was okay not to have, not to have all of your convictions settled, that you could be in the process of working through what convictions you maybe wanted to have, politically, ethically, spiritually.
And that also there was this commitment in philosophy, I felt, to: this is your work. It’s not the work of an institution, it’s not the work of a community, it’s not the work of a group or a family. It’s actually your work to do. And it’s work you can do better or worse, depending on how attentive you are to how you’re doing it.
NARR: Like Megan says, it’s okay to not have your convictions settled. And it’s encouraged to think and rethink your point of view. To figure out what you actually think, and how that might be different from yesterday, or different from your friend.
NARR: Cynthia Burnson, the human development researcher, tells us about a turning point in children’s cognitive development that makes those unsettled convictions possible. And researchers have tested this, starting with children’s convictions about snack food.
CYNTHIA: There’s been work like, for example, they take a toddler, and most toddlers prefer goldfish crackers over broccoli.
NARR: So in the experiment–
CYNTHIA: The experimenter would show which one they liked by eating one going, Mmm, yum delicious, and then going like, Ugh.
NARR: And then the researchers would have the toddler offer them one of the snacks. And for younger kids–
CYNTHIA: They’ll always give ‘em the goldfish crackers. Just like, any sane person would want the crackers.
NARR: But for slightly older kids–
CYNTHIA: They switch into this mode where they’re like, Okay, I get that they have a different preference than me, and I’m going to react to their preference, which is different from mine.
And there’s an age at which the toddler starts saying, like, I don’t know why she likes broccoli, but she does, so I’ll give her the broccoli.
NARR: This differentiation, this understanding that other people can have different experiences and preferences than you do, is called theory of mind.
As kids develop theory of mind, they become more equipped to engage in philosophical questions. And that opens up the door to ethical and moral conversations.
CYNTHIA: And when kids start to develop theory of mind, and they can start thinking about, well, I have this opinion and this preference that is neither right nor wrong, it’s just an opinion or a preference, someone else might have a different one. And that’s a huge leap.
NARR: As Cynthia explained how theory of mind develops in children, I found myself doing a kind of gut-check on my own intellectual empathy. When was the last time I offered someone a broccoli without judgment? Especially in adulthood, when we’ve swapped broccoli and goldfish for political candidates and cultural values.
It’s kinda cliche to say kids give me hope. But when we provide them a space like P4C, where they can practice intellectual generosity – that refreshes my sense of what it means to live in society. And it makes me want all of us to have access to this type of curriculum.
[music]
MEGAN: When you see children doing it, you realize how important it is, how vital it is that we continue to strive to work to make this something that becomes part of children’s education. So I really believe in it. I believe that children have a right to it.
NARR: Children have a right to ask questions, and to have someone really listen. When that happens–
MEGAN: Suddenly life gets richer, more complicated, more multi-colored. And when you see kids engaging seriously with those questions, and saying, I like philosophy because no one ever asks me what I think, no one takes me seriously, like I am taken seriously in a philosophy class. I just think that life is better for people if they get to do that.
NARR: And here at the Center for Ethics and Education, we agree.
[music]
NARR: Thanks so much for listening to Ethics and Education. This episode was produced, written, and edited by Jennifer McCord and me, Carrie Welsh. And special thanks to Aaron Yarmel for recording and producing the philosophy with children session you heard in this episode.
For more resources about how to include philosophy for children in the classroom, we’ve included links to IAPC and PLATO in the show notes. If Cynthia’s points about human development lit up your brain, you might be interested in a philosophical experiment conducted by Vivian Paley, from back in the early 90s. We’ve added a link to that too. And to lots of other P4C resources.
This is the last episode of the Ethics and Education podcast, at least for now. After ten years, we are winding down the Center for Ethics and Education, and we are so grateful for your engagement with our work. We hope you’ll continue to listen to the podcast and use the teaching guides. Thanks for doing this with us.