Doing philosophy with young children: theory, practice, and resources

ABSTRACT

The last half-century has seen a slow, tentative change in adult attitudes about young children’s capacity to think abstractly. Parents and teachers know the young child as a dramatic mixture of the concrete, sense-bound, and the transcendent, and it is just that mixture, cultivated and pursued, which makes for philosophy. Young children’s capacity for wonder runs through all their discourse, but their speculation tends to fall on the thematic categories of appearance and reality, identity and continuity, permanence growth and transformation, ‘ultimate questions’ such as death and deity, and epistemological issues (how do I/you know that?). While play and story are the primary languages of early childhood, communal philosophical discussion introduces the child to a new one, which demands new skills: listening carefully to another’s statement, waiting to speak, formulating a response which takes another’s statement into account, staying on the subject, and giving reasons for judgements. The leader of young children’s philosophical discussions is model, encourager, and sometimes enforcer of fundamental rules (not interrupting, keeping at least generally on the subject, etc.), and an interpreter of children to each other, for often a young child has a significant thought, but can communicate it only elliptically or partially. Teacher resources include, not just the stories and discussion plans of the Philosophy for Children curriculum, but numerous picture books for children that suggest philosophical concepts, as well as concrete ‘object lessons’ designed to spark group dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy for children
• young children’s thinking
• community of philosophical inquiry

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

David Kennedy

David Kennedy is Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University and Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. He is author of numerous papers and book chapters, most recently “Community of Philosophical Inquiry and the Play of the World” in the journal Teaching Philosophy. He is author or author or editor of six books, including The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity and Education (2006); Changing Conceptions of Childhood (2006); Philosophy for Children in Transition: Problems and Prospects (2011); Philosophical Dialogue with Children (2011); My Name is Myshkin: A Philosophical Novel for Children (2013); and Philosophy of Childhood: Exploring the Boundaries (2016). His scholarly and research interests include philosophy of childhood, community of philosophical inquiry, and theory and practice of democratic schooling.