what is philosophy and why is it important for children to have the opportunity to discuss it?
I think of philosophy as an activity more than anything else. so for me, when working with children, it’s important that the philosophy is embedded in the conversation. The reason why it is important for children to do philosophy in this style of conversation is to get them to respond to the problems they encounter in the first place. second, reflect on those problems, reason about them, and then, most importantly, reassess. Those are what I call the four Rs of philosophy: respond, reflect, reason, and reevaluate. So, for example, you may run into a problem in the classroom, or with your friends, that leads you to ask “what is fairness?” They may be faced with a situation where a child girl in the class is getting more attention. that the others. when they reflect on it, on the one hand, they may think that this is fair because the child needs that attention. on the other hand, they might think that it is not fair because justice has to do with equality of parties and equal treatment. immediately there is a conflict that leads to the question of what exactly is justice. kids often don’t get to that point, and if they do, they often won’t get over it. so it is important to provide a structured dialogic approach for children to start thinking about these things.
You are reading: Philosophy books for kids
What is also clear is that these questions, such as “what is fairness?”, are relevant to children. They are not just for adults. Once you have provided children with a structured environment and, more importantly, gotten them to respond to each other, they will begin to move on to the reflective, reasoned, and reassessing aspects. they can start by giving a bunch of different answers within a class, leading to all sorts of conflicts and problems. then it moves them to the next part, which is the reasoning part, putting it in an orderly, sequential, and logical process. of course, you go back between these stages at all times. The bottom line for me is that philosophy isn’t philosophy unless it has this fourth R: reassessment. so okay, we have all these reasons about what equity could be, is that account correct? Are there possible problems with this account?
Kids don’t need a lot of prompting to ask philosophical questions. they ask, ‘what happened before the universe began?’ or ‘is there a god?’ or ‘why do you treat me differently from others?’ those questions seem to come to them quite naturally. but it surprises me that children are often more concrete in their thinking than adults, and less happy with abstract arguments. and philosophy is often characterized as a very abstract subject…
There has been a lot of academic debate about whether or not children are capable of abstract reasoning. In Piaget, there are strict rules about what children can do at certain stages of development. There has also been a lot of literature on how Piaget got it wrong. I am a great practitioner, I am in the classroom working with children. what I see is that children are much more capable of abstract reasoning than many adults might think. they are certainly capable of tackling abstract concepts and weird abstract questions, like, “does the hole exist in this donut?”. you get to 12 or 13 when all of a sudden those abstract activities and ideas become less interesting.
but for your example you have chosen something physical, a donut. if you only said, ‘is nothing something?’ that would have lost most people, wouldn’t it?
In fact, that’s a question that engages kids right away. ‘nothing exists?’ is a great way to engage kids in thinking about things, as long as they understand how the word exist works, which they generally do, from a fairly young age. Those kinds of questions are perfect. there are strategies and techniques that we use with very young children to help them with this, which brings me to the first book that I have chosen.
this is the story of the frog and the toad by arnold lobel.
yes. so there is a wonderful story there called “dragons and giants”. the frog and the toad are trying to find out what is brave and what is to be brave. They start by saying that these characters are all brave and they look in the mirror and ask, “Are we brave?” they say, “well, we look brave.” which is great, because then you can ask the kids “what does brave look like?” and make them do all kinds of poses. the next part of the story shows you how the two characters try to prove their bravery by climbing a mountain. they come across various things, such as an eagle and an avalanche, and each time they get quite scared and yell, “I’m not afraid!” and move on to the next. at the end of the story you start with a simple question and say, “were the frog and the toad brave?” it connects to the story in a concrete way by referring to the characters and the concept. you get some answers. then after a while we move on to the abstract. I could say to the children, “what exactly is brave?” sometimes they need a little help. could propose some concrete examples of their own. we began to put together an image of what it means to be brave.
“I can accept the question” is there a hole in this doughnut? to practically any age group.”
once we have some sort of description of what bravery is, we’ll get back to the concrete question. I’ll say, ‘ok, if bravery is x, y and z are brave like the frog and the toad?’ I call this the hokey kokey method. uu.], because it goes in (concrete), comes out (abstract) and goes in (concrete) again. is a very useful general principle for using stories with young children. he is also very socratic. Socrates would take concrete examples to prove the theories. if someone came up with a definition of, for example, justice, beauty, or courage, then he would have to give an example that could refute that.
how do you keep all the kids from talking at once?
sometimes we don’t stop them. after a story and asking a question, you always give them a few minutes to talk. they need to do that. then we go back to a structured approach, so we have a ball and several rules for one person to speak at a time. my job is to try to get people to respond dialogically to each other. so if, for example, someone says ‘yeah, I think they’re brave because this, that and the other’, my next job is to find if there’s anyone who has a response of some kind to that comment. or to find out if there is someone who thinks they are not very brave. By facilitating in this way, the children, as a group, begin to do what a philosopher does as an individual. this is really key to the way we work. it is connected to the Socratic idea of silent dialogue, where a philosopher will think of something in his own head and present possible objections and problems and alternative points of view, and then go on to deal with them. what we do is make the children as a group think in a way that we could characterize as philosophy. and that will include the reassessment aspect. children will often say, “I think that’s what bravery is,” and then stop. but another child takes the baton and says: “but what about this?”. it could even be the first child who responds in defense of the first thesis. or it can be another. but the point is that this dialogical movement is starting to happen. the children look at each other and the goal, hopefully, is for them to internalize this process so that later they start doing the same thing in their own heads.
what about the silent child, the one who sees everything that happens?
many of these children will engage in some form of silent dialogue. the usual sign that they are not interacting is if they are being disruptive. Silent members are often encouraged, because if they’re sitting there quietly, that’s usually a sign that they’re participating. but my job over time is to bring them out of themselves and make them join the group. we find all kinds of things that play a role in this: how shy a child is, what cultural influences they have from their origins. for example, some girls are very reluctant to speak up because they are not encouraged at home. my job is to try to find a way to bring everyone into the conversation. We have two objectives: one is the construction of a dialogical philosophy and the other is inclusion, trying to involve as many children as possible. the key is to try to strike a balance between those two: that everyone is involved at the same time that there is some kind of linked sequential movement in the discussion.
Let’s grab another book then. you have the odyssey on your list, which is also a book of stories, improvised by a trip. how do you use it?
I have written my own version of the odyssey that I use in the classroom. I tell it a lot in the oral tradition, I tell the story to the class.
Are you asking, ‘Is it okay to stick a sharp stick in the Cyclops’ eye if he’s holding you prisoner?’, that sort of thing, or is it just too scary?
That story is one of his favorites. the question we usually use around that story is not ethical, but explores the nature of mythical creatures. so we used that story as a springboard to discuss whether or not cyclopses exist, how many eyes cyclopses would have and things like that. but you’re right, most of the odyssey stories focus more on ethical questions than metaphysical ones.
Can you give an example?
there are the classic dilemmas. So, for example, scylla and charybdis, where you have the two monsters on either side of the rock faces that the ship has to go through. there’s a whirlpool to the right, and what the crew doesn’t know is that there’s a six-headed monster hiding in the cliffs to the left.
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There is no easy path through the rocks between Scylla and Charybdis. which is the dilemma it seems that you lose in any way.
I have made versions of the trolley problem with this story. Odysseus knows about the six-headed monster, but the crew doesn’t. so as they go, if they get too close to the whirlpool, the whole ship will sink and everyone will die. Odysseus’ dilemma is: should he tell the men about the monster on the left that they can’t see? because if you tell the men about the monster, you risk making them too nervous to approach the cliff on the left side and endangering the entire ship by getting too close to the whirlpool. if you don’t tell them, they won’t be ready for the six-headed monster and you’ll lose six men.
so this looks like the famous moral thought experiment of the trolleybus problem, in which a train spirals out of control onto six people on a track. you have the possibility to divert it to another track so that it only kills one. should you do it? most people think that you should probably sacrifice one to save many. here’s the sacrifice with the added element of hiding information…
yeah, it’s much more interesting when you add the topic of information, which comes up again and again in the odyssey. it’s absolutely full of that, because odysseus, and other characters, but mainly odysseus, they get information through prophecy or demigods and so on. Very often, your dilemma is what should you disclose? Interestingly, this is also the narrator’s dilemma. The Odyssey is an oral history, and the narrator’s dilemma is always, what and when should I reveal to the audience?
the odyssey is a compelling set of stories that have obviously been perfected over time. they are very seductive in themselves. presumably you have all the kids listening eagerly and then you get into a dialogue with them about it. do you think they then transfer that into their own lives?
That’s the plan. one of the things i’ve written about in my own book on the odyssey, the if odyssey and also in a book on storytelling, once upon a if, is that these stories allow us to rehearse bad situations without actually having to be endangered. what would we do in these circumstances? it is a kind of essay for the moral agent, particularly when discussing the ethical dilemmas and questions that arise in the odyssey again and again. my goal with the use of stories is to activate the audience as a participant, as an active moral agent. a simple mechanism with a story would be to not read it to the end, but simply stop it at the point where the characters are faced with a dilemma or whenever there is tension or conflict. then you say to the audience, “what would you do?” or “what would you do if you were him or her?” these are different questions and you can engage the children in different ways.
Another interesting thing about role-playing and making use of the audience in this way is that you can bite back into dilemmas. very often, in philosophy discussions, children inhabit a sort of underworld of sitting on the fence. you’ll often find them saying “I think so for this and I think no for that”. we don’t want to be too violent with children. in fact, I had a discussion with someone who said that the tram problem is a form of ethical violence, because it puts the person in a very uncomfortable situation. Are you saying to an 8 year old, “Are you going to throw it away or not?” it looks really nasty. However, tell them: “I would like you to imagine that you are Odysseus, that you are the captain of a ship, which means that you have to make the decision one way or another. Would you tell the men or not? I know you’ve given me reasons for both sides, but now I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you, as the captain of the ship, to make a decision. It’s a really powerful way of giving the dilemma, as Nietzsche used to call it, its sting.
We’ve been talking about using ancient stories to introduce moral discussion. There is also a long tradition in philosophy of creating thought experiments specifically designed to test the feelings and intuitions we have about situations. as your next book, you have chosen a compendium of these by julian baggini the pig that wants to be eaten.
thought experiments are great. they have a stickman quality to them, I think they’ve been described as stickman stories, they lack a real life dimension.
Yes, that’s usually missing because they’ve controlled the parameters, the variables, to such an extent that you don’t have developed characters, you don’t have complex situations.
the reason i chose julian’s book is because i find thought experiments to be a very lively way to engage children with philosophy. it’s the fun part, the evocative part. they are very powerful. If you want to engage children in thinking about philosophy, most philosophers will start with a thought experiment of one sort or another. this book gives us many examples of how you can bring a thought experiment into the classroom.
They’re also bite-sized. they don’t require the kind of investment that telling the odyssey requires. a thought experiment where you can just drop it, you can parachute it into someone’s consciousness and it can have a really powerful catalytic effect.
Also, there’s what you already mentioned, which is that the thought experiment tries to hold on to the variables. this is also one of the problems with thought experiments, of course. when you go into a classroom and you present the thought experiment to a group of people who don’t know what a thought experiment is, you often have kids say, “maybe this and maybe that.” bring back the variables. that have been removed to test whatever you’re testing.
It’s not just kids who do that, but college students too. They will say that if it is a runaway train it depends on who is on the line, if it is hitler I would let it run…
yes, they just put these things back together and it can be quite tricky. To help with this, we have developed a number of questioning techniques in the foundation of philosophy, along the lines of ‘iffing’. a classic example would be brain swapping. you get into a discussion about, if they were to swap brains, where would connor be and where would matthew be? It’s a great discussion, but oftentimes kids come up with things like, ‘but we can’t do brain swaps yet.’ so we just say “well, if it were possible to do this, where do you think two people would be? With a thought experiment it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong in the real world, as long as it’s wrong in the right way.
baggini asks the reader to suspend disbelief in order to figure something out. but then there is the question of whether he can safely return to the real world with its particular imperfections. Do kids ever ask, why should I even bother with that question? the skeptical child saying: ‘this is how it is, and I’m not going to talk about hypotheses’?
Some kids respond that way, not with that kind of sophistication, but they just put their foot down. the strategy is usually not to put them on the spot, but to invite the whole class to think about the question and see what people think. the more sophisticated problem of how valid thought experiments are when they’re just hypothetical isn’t really something you can get into with very young children. with adults and teens you certainly can, it’s a great topic to explore with older kids.
Your next book is more accessible than the one we just discussed. It’s the Stephen Law Philosophy Archives. what is it about this book that attracts you?
Just like Julian’s book, this book allows a young child to read something that is close to “real” philosophy.
I think both books are real philosophy.
yes. they are much more representative of the things you can get involved in when you’re in college doing a philosophy major, certainly in this country. That’s why I like to include them, because it’s great for very young children. Just to give you an example, I’ve had kids in sessions actually explain the difference between qualitative and numerical identity to me, and even use the correct nomenclature. The reason they’ve done it is because they just read the chapter in Stephen Law’s book on whether or not you can step in the same river twice, which is one of my perennial favorites in the classroom.
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maybe you can explain what is the difference between those two?
numerical identity are those particular materials from which something is actually made. the qualitative identity describes the properties of that thing. So if you’re talking about the water flowing in a river, some kids will talk about the stuff the river is made of and say that because water is always changing and evaporating, you can’t step in the same river twice. . others will talk about the fact that it has water and it flows and follows the same path and it doesn’t matter that it’s not exactly the same water.
So what you’re saying is that young children are actually capable of discussing some of the philosophical topics that are normally reserved for college freshmen or sophomores?
Young children are very good at identifying these sophisticated ideas. I’ve had kids identify an infinite regress, even though they don’t use those words. they may also notice that someone is working on a guess. or, as I have said, they could make a distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. this is the kind of thing that children do, descriptively. they generally don’t have the nomenclature, so it’s quite nice, with the stephen law book, that they can go out and read on their own and come back having learned this and then apply it in the context of these dialogic sessions that you’re having. /p>
It also has a great quirky sci-fi storytelling technique that appeals to both adult and child readers, doesn’t it? with a good sense of humor too.
That’s right. my favorite, which captures all of these qualities, is the story of brad baddely and the time loop. It is about a man who is on a planet that is about to explode. he’s stuck there, his spaceship has broken down and then just before the planet explodes, he’s visited by his future self who has traveled back in time to save him. so he gets into his future self’s spaceship and they take him back to the space station that he came from. It sets up all of this possible paradox and Stephen has a nice way of framing it so you don’t get into too much trouble. at the end, he backs off and the two characters are watching this on tv.
you are immersed in the paradox, because it is logically impossible for that to happen. it just becomes the plot of a science fiction movie…
exactly, stephen puts it in a frame within the book which works great. it’s good to get kids to think about the paradox before revealing that it’s really just a TV show.
In a sense, it follows the same tradition, albeit with a more futuristic twist, as the next book you’ve chosen. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, are full of wacky scenarios that are entertaining in themselves, but also raise interesting questions, suggest paradoxes, dilemmas, and complications on reflection.
yes, also because, of course, lewis carroll, or charles dodgson as he was, was a logician. he wrote a lot of books on logic, so what you get are correctly reported problems. the good thing is that it doesn’t really look like that. this is slightly different from stephen’s book. stephen’s book is introducing people to philosophy and in that sense it is quite pedagogical or didactic. what lewis carroll does is just tell a story, and then you realize that everything is sprinkled with little problems and things to think about.
“This is the beauty of using books with children, very often the question you need to ask is already in the book and all you have to do is stop and ask them.”
a good example of this, for me, is humpty dumpty. When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, he starts talking to her about language questions. he begins by asking her what her name means. she replies, “must a name mean something?” later, she mentions him for his use of the word glory, which he describes as ‘a good knockdown argument’ and she says “but ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a good knockdown argument'”. she says, “when I use a word, it means exactly what I choose it to mean, no more and no less.” the nice thing about this is that while it may seem like a lot of nonsense, it actually took a classic debate within logic and reversed its usual usage. most people would say that names themselves mean nothing, that they just refer to someone. and yet most people would say that we have fixed meanings for words like “glory” or whatever. what humpty has done is reverse that problem, so that the name is what has a fixed meaning for him and it is the other words that can mean whatever he wants them to mean. there is a clever inversion of a classical problem within logical nominalism.
How would you use this book with children?
I happen to have a chapter in my book dedicated to this. this is the best thing about using books with children, very often the question you need to ask is already in the book and all you need to do is stop and ask it. I could go on practically every sentence of Humpty Dumpty’s story, but it starts with a description of him sitting on the wall and Alice says she’s as sure of who he is “as if his name was written on his face.” Before you even tell the kids it’s humpty, you can ask them “who do you think it is and how do you know?” or “how does she know?” then when humpty dumpty asks what her name is, he simply asks the kids, ‘what do the names mean? Do the names mean anything?’ And she looks at what they say. when she says, the words mean exactly what I choose them to mean, no more and no less, so you can say, “can the words mean exactly what you choose them to mean?” they have been written to make you think, and many of them have: very often you get the question and you just have to give it back to the child and see what he thinks.
And the stories of Alice in Wonderland are a rich source of such scenarios?
it’s dotted with them.
do you recommend volumes that contain both stories, like the full alice or the annotated alice, which gives readers some pointers on what’s going on? the thinking behind the examples is sometimes cryptically hidden…
the alice annotated by martin gardner is the one I use. in a way, it could show a lack: that for this book to really shine, one needs to read something extra to get from it what there is. in a way, perhaps, that reveals its hidden didactics. One almost needs a teacher’s manual to go along with it, and that’s what the annotated Alicia does. It gives you a kind of manual, and when I read it, I read the annotations as carefully as the rest. that’s where I get a lot of pleasure. but of course children can access all this from the main text.
If you had one piece of advice for a parent trying to engage their child in philosophy, what would it be?
It would be to shut up and let them think things through and let them talk. this is the key that I see constantly with parents and even with teachers. a very good exercise is to observe yourself when you are working with a young child on a puzzle. if you don’t take care of yourself, you find that you do everything for them. you start telling them some things and the minute they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you just pick the right piece for them. but the best you can do is just ask them questions: ‘what do you think you should start with?’, ‘what do you think we should do?’, ‘can you find the right piece to go there?’, and if you just can’t to do so, according to your questioning, then it stops. you don’t finish it for them. it’s the same with reading books and stories.
Because the objective of the exercise is to get children to think for themselves, not to parrot their parents?
one of the problems we have as parents is that our criterion of success is that they have completed the puzzle, or that they have interpreted the story correctly. really, all you need to do when you read a story is ask them, “what do you think this means?” “why do you think he did that?” and if they have nothing to say, so be it. but if you keep asking yourself those questions regularly, they will eventually start to say things. and if, after they’ve given their interpretation, you think they misunderstood, you don’t give them the correct interpretation, as you see it, because then you’re doing all the work for yourself. to them. parents must allow the child to misunderstand it. That’s why I would say that the key is to step back and let the child approach the story in her own way. maybe not all the time, maybe there is a time to play a story for a child, but you want them to think for themselves.
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