Chapter 1
Plato, Children, and Philosophy
Philosophy occupies an odd place in education today. Student who take an college course in calculus or physics or English literature or Spanish will likely have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into. The reason is that they will likely have had in high school a class in mathematics, one in physics, one in English literature, and one is a foreign language, even if not in Spanish. By contrast, students who sign up for Philosophy 101 in college may have very little idea what they are getting into. And the reason is that they almost certainly will not have had a philosophy course in high school, let alone in middle or elementary school.
In our educational system, philosophy, properly speaking, is something that just pops up suddenly in college, without any clear anticipation in earlier schooling. It is, in fact, almost the only standard academic discipline in our major colleges and universities that is not generally taught in high school, and certainly not in the lower grades – not even in any rudimentary or preparatory way. Why should this be?
One reason is that people think of philosophy as dealing with, to use a jargon word here, “meta-cognition,” rather than the “ground-level” cognition, which we might take to include learning to read, to write, to do math, science, social studies, and literature. Since they think of philosophy as meta-cognitive, educators quite naturally think it has no place in the school curriculum because kids need to get the ground-level stuff in place first. Then at the college level, they suppose, students can appropriately think about what it is to have knowledge, what marks off good reasoning from bad, what it is for one thing to be the explanation of another, what it means to say that I have such-and-such an obligation, and so on.
This meta-cognitive objection to doing philosophy with children in the pre-college years comes in two forms. In one form, the objection is that children simply can’t do meta-cognition, or anyway can’t do it well. They can do cognition all right, that is, gain knowledge, lots and lots of it, but they can’t do meta-cognition properly, that is, think usefully about what they are doing when they learn or know or think or say things. In its other form, the meta-cognitive objection is the claim that doing meta-cognition is not good for kids. It messes them up – undermines ground-level learning, perhaps even threatens proper character-building and healthy socialization. I want to treat this second form of the meta-cognition objection as part of a more general objection, according to which, even if children could do philosophy, doing philosophy would not be good for them. So I’ll ignore it for the moment and focus on the idea that children simply can’t do meta-cognition, or at least can’t do it well.
In the abstract, this meta-cognitive objection makes a great deal of sense. Don’t we have to become sure-footed on the ground before we should start using ladders? Isn’t it as simple as that? Don’t we have to learn some science and math, social science and language arts before we can develop what are sometimes called “higher-order thinking skills”? It may seem plausible to say so.
It may seem plausible, that is, until one starts listening to what children actually say – to the questions they ask, to the comments they make, and to the reasoning they actually engage in, often without any special stimulus from a parent or teacher. The fact is that children sometimes make philosophically interesting comments, ask philosophically interesting questions, and even engage in philosophically interesting reasoning, all on their own. Consider this interplay between Steve, almost three, and his father:
Steve watches his father eating a banana.
Father: “You don’t like bananas, do you Steve?”
Steve: “No.” (Steve reflects.) “If you werei me, you wouldn’t like bananas either.”
Steve continues to reflect and finally asks: “Then who would be the daddy?”
This real-life exchange is certainly meta-cognitive. The cognition part is quite straightforward. Steve’s father likes bananas. Steve knows that. Steve doesn’t like bananas. Both Steve and his father know that. Perhaps wishing to stave off a little pressure from his dad, pressure that might force him to try yet again to eat a banana, Steve comes up with what philosophers call a “counterfactual conditional” – “If you were me, you wouldn’t like bananas either.”
The study of counterfactual conditionals, I can assure you, is a wonderfully meta-cognitive activity. It is an activity that has recently born rather impressive fruit. During the last decades of the 20th Century several philosophers came up with interesting theories of counterfactual conditionals based on something they call “possible-world semantics.”
Back to Steve. If Steve’s conversation with his father had stopped with Steve’s true counterfactual, ‘If you were me, you wouldn’t like bananas either,’ there would have been no philosophical trouble. But Steve thought a little more – not just about the fact that his father liked bananas and he didn’t, or even about the presumed further fact that if Steve’s father were Steve, he wouldn’t like bananas either. He reflected on what that counterfactual conditional could possibly mean. (That was clearly meta-cognition!) He found it puzzling. (Such puzzling is the beginning of philosophy.) What he puzzled over was how the antecedent (‘If you were me’) could ever be satisfied. That is a worthy puzzle. Apparently Steve tried understanding the antecedent to mean something like ‘If you were to replace me, or take my place, or if you were somehow to merge with me, perhaps as one icon can merge with another on a computer screen.’ So Steve asked, provocatively, “Then who would be the daddy?”
Grownups, unless they are philosophers, are very unlikely to ask Steve’s question. For that matter, children are also very unlikely to ask it. Still, from my observations, I would say that any randomly chosen child is at least more likely to ask Steve’s question, or something like it, than any randomly chosen adult is. As a matter of fact, children are more likely to ask almost any philosophically interesting question at all than any randomly chosen adult. And the reason is that philosophy includes, as one of its components, a willingness to think about things naively, from the beginning, so to speak. Typically, adult philosophers have to work hard at being naïve and thinking about things freshly from a naïve standpoint. Children don’t have to work at all hard at being naïve; they are naturally naïve, sometimes in a way that is philosophically provocative.
Before we leave Steve’s wonderfully philosophical question, let me say a little about a good way for an adult to respond to it. It is part of my mission in life to say a little from time to time about how parents and teachers should respond to philosophical comments and questions from children that stump their elders.
A first thing to say is that one should not be embarrassed that one does not know how to answer Steve’s question. The general assumption that any half-intelligent adult ought to be able to answer satisfactorily any question at all a young child can ask (and certainly any question a three-year-old can ask), is false, indeed, dangerously false. (The danger is that this assumption makes adults try to hide their inability to come up with a good answer by ignoring the question altogether, or else by simply changing the subject.)
A second thing to say is that adults should try to wean themselves and their children from addiction to this conversation pattern: child asks question, adult answers; child asks another question, adult answers, and so on. It is much healthier for the adult, for the child, and for the relationship between adult and child if the adult can learn to engage the child in a mutual effort to deal with the question or comment, whether the question or comment is a philosophical one or not.
In this case, even professional philosophers who specialize in counterfactual conditionals are not very good at dealing with Steve’s particular question. That should free us all up to think creatively about how to respond to it.
I suggest thinking with the child about other sentences that might begin ‘If I were you,’ especially the more puzzling ones. Would it be right, for example, for Steve’s father to say to Steve, “If I were you, I would be my own son”? And what about Steve’s saying to his father, “If you were me, you would be your own father.” Would either of those counterfactuals be acceptable? And if not, why not?
Those crazy counterfactuals suggest to me that supposing Steve and his father could actually be one and the same person doesn’t really make much sense. So perhaps, despite appearances, ‘If you were me’ – which is certainly a common enough way to begin a sentence – shouldn’t be taken to describe a possible situation in which you and I are, weirdly, one and the same person. Maybe it should be taken, instead, to mean something more like, ‘If you were in my place,’ or ‘If things tasted to you the way they do to me.’ If the antecedent does mean something like that, we can get rid of Steve’s intriguing problem of the “disappearing dad.” We don’t have to think of Steve’s dad as disappearing, only as taking Steve’s point of view on certain matters of taste.
More generally, one could have a conversation with Steve about how words don’t always mean quite what they seem to mean. ‘My shoes are killing me’ doesn’t usually mean that I am about to die, let alone that my shoes might soon be guilty of homicide. No doubt Steve could think of examples of things we say that need considerable interpretation. This is a conversation that could be picked up again on the way to a birthday party, or to a soccer game, or at night, when Steve is being tucked in bed. It can be as much fun for the adult as for the child. And it would certainly be meta-cognitive.
For other examples of spontaneous meta-cognitive questions, comments, and bits of reasoning, with occasional suggestions as to how the conversation between adult and child could go on, I refer the reader to my book, Philosophy and the Young Child.ii
In my view, the meta-cognitive objective to doing philosophy with children simply doesn’t work. It is true that philosophy tends to focus on meta-cognition. But it is not true that children need to wait until they are no longer children to do meta-cognition. Pretty much as soon as they have any knowledge at all, it is possible for them to reflect on what they know, or think they know, and raise and discuss, often with insight and a remarkable freshness, philosophically interesting question about it. The attentive adult may even be prodded into thinking freshly about something that, for good reason, puzzles the child.
So is there another objection to doing philosophy in school, even in elementary school? I have already suggested that there is. I shall call it the immaturity objection. It goes like this.
Young children are very impressionable. They are also at an early stage of character formation and personality development. They are easily influenced by others – certainly by authority figures, such as teachers, but also by other kids. Doing philosophy in school can easily be seen as a threat to the stability of a child’s emerging belief-system and to the healthy development of that child’s character and personality.
Plato seems to have been the first educator to offer this sort of objection to doing philosophy with children. Toward the end of Book VII of the Republic, at 538c-39c, Plato has his dialogue character, Socrates, explain how philosophy can undermine character development. Children normally learn to obey their parents and to accept the moral values of their society simply as part of growing up, Socrates says. But then when a philosophical questioner comes along and asks a child to give a philosophical analysis and defense of what is said to be morally right, the child cannot do it. That should come as no surprise. After all, children are simply brought up to accept the moral teachings of their home and community. They are not given philosophical arguments for those teachings. So, when they are questioned philosophically and cannot answer satisfactorily, they lose their moral convictions and become nihilists.
Plato makes Socrates bring out another threat, one closely related to the first. The philosopher flatters children, he says, by encouraging them to suppose they are fully capable of passing judgment on traditional values and on generally accepted beliefs. When children succumb to this flattery they naturally suppose themselves to be much wiser than they are. They then condemn or reject what they simply do not understand, or though immaturity, fail to appreciate. But they have nothing better to put in its place.
Socrates’s objections in Republic VII to doing philosophy with children rises to this climactic conclusion:
One great precaution is to forbid their taking part [in philosophical arguments] while they are still young. You must have seen how youngsters, when they get their first taste of it, treat argument as a form of sport solely for purposes of contradiction. When someone has proved them wrong, they copy his methods to confute others, delighting like puppies in tugging and tearing at anyone who comes near to them. And so, after a long course of proving others wrong and being proved wrong themselves, they rush to the conclusion that all they once believed is false; and the result is that in the eyes of the world they discredit, not themselves only, but the whole business of philosophy. Plato, Republic VII, 539bc (Cornford trans.)
Is then Plato dead set against doing philosophy with children? It seems so. But matters are not so simple.
Plato’s attitude toward doing philosophy with children is much more complex than any single passage can reveal; it is certainly more complex than anything we can learn from a short quotation from Republic VII. In his early dialogues, Plato presents his philosophical hero, Socrates, as being willing to do philosophy with almost anyone, whether young or old. In one of these dialogues, the Charmides, Socrates’s young discussion partner is no older than a teenager, and as one recent commentator has suggested, probably much younger than that.iii In another dialogue, the Lysis, there are two young interlocutors, Lysis and Menexenus, both apparently early teenagers. The Lysis is a particularly good example of how to do philosophy with children. In that dialogue Socrates plays no dialectical tricks on his young friends. He seems to be himself genuinely perplexed about the subject of the inquiry, which is friendship, and he seems to show real respect for his young friends and for the ideas they come up with in answer to his questions. Thus, long before he wrote the Republic, Plato wrote dialogues in which his philosophical hero, Socrates, does, and even enjoys doing, philosophy with children. Moreover, at least one of these early dialogues can be taken as a model for how to do philosophy with kids.
There is another complication to the story. Sometime after he wrote the Republic, Plato wrote a dialogue on the nature of knowledge, the Theaetetus. This dialogue is one of the most complex and challenging pieces of philosophy Plato ever wrote. Yet Plato makes Socrates’s chief interlocutor in that dialogue a brilliant boy mathematician, who is portrayed as being no older than about 16, perhaps a little younger.
To be sure, the Theaetetus can hardly serve as a model for how to do philosophy with kids. It is much too difficult for that. To use it at all for doing philosophy with children one would have to excerpt a short passage or perhaps rephrase a line of reasoning to make it easier to follow. In fact, I have myself used an idea from the Theaetetus in that somewhat simplified way. I discussed the third suggested analysis of knowledge from the Theaetetus (‘Knowledge is true belief with an explanation’) in a discussion with young schoolkids about whether you can know that the seeds in a packet marked “lettuce seeds” really are lettuce seeds.iv Although I used this suggested analysis of what it is to know something from the Theaetetus, however, I made no attempt to follow the style of discussion in that dialogue, which, in my judgment, is too sophisticated for introducing even unusually bright schoolchildren to the joys of philosophy.
Still, the Theaetetus, written well after the Republic, does star a brilliant teenage mathematician, whereas Socrates in Republic VII is made to say that, in an ideal curriculum, students will not be introduced to dialectic until they are, so to speak, at the postdoctoral level (age thirty), and they won’t be allowed to take up real philosophy until they come back for senior management seminars at age 50 and older. Thus in the ideal society of Plato’s Republic, anyway, not even college students would get Philosophy 101!
Yet, for all his reluctance to let even young adults in his Republic do philosophy, Plato in his later writings has Socrates doing some of the most daunting philosophy imaginable with an advanced-placement high school sophomore! How is one to understand this? What is one to make of the shifting attitudes Plato displays toward doing philosophy with kids?
In another bookv I have tried to trace out the fascinating changes in what the Platonic dialogues suggest is the nature of philosophy, who should engage in it, and what expectations one should have from doing philosophy. I suggest here that, while we certainly do need to take seriously Plato’s warnings about the dangers of doing philosophy with children seriously, we need not suppose that philosophy should be reserved for the years just before retirement. Indeed, the Theaetetus abandons that idea.
There is something else to learn from the Theaetetus. In addition to featuring a teenage mathematician as Socrates’s conversation partner, the dialogue also includes what seems to be almost a direct response to the worries expressed so forcefully in Republic about doing philosophy with children. Here is what he has Socrates say:
Do not conduct your questioning unfairly. It is very unreasonable that one who professes a concern for virtue should be constantly guilty of unfairness in argument. Unfairness here consists in not observing the distinction between a [mere] debate and a [philosophical] conversation. A [mere] debate need not be taken seriously and one may trip up an opponent to the best of one’s power, but a [philosophical] conversation should be taken in earnest; one should help out the other party and bring home to him only those slips and fallacies that are due to himself or to his earlier instructors. If you follow this rule, your associates will lay the blame for their confusions and perplexities on themselves and not on you; they will like you and court your society, and, disgusted with themselves, will turn to philosophy, hoping to escape from their former selves and become different people. But if, like so many, you take the opposite course, you will reach the opposite result; instead of turning your companions to philosophy, you will make them hate the whole business when they get older. (Theaetetus 167e-68b, Cornford trans.)
I think here of the most Socratic teacher I had when I was a graduate student in philosophy. If I offered an argument for some position I wanted to defend, he might reply with a devastating critique, perhaps one that drew on assumptions that I was clearly committed to. I would be, so to speak, knocked to the floor. But then my Socratic teacher would step back, think a little more, and say, “But perhaps what you had in mind was this.” He would then develop a line of thought that was much more sophisticated than anything I would have been able to come up with on my own. Yet he would be right in thinking that I had had the germ of the idea he was able to develop so beautifully and cogently on my behalf. He was a master of what Socrates in the Theaetetus calls “fairness in argumentation.”
I try to follow that teacher’s example when I do philosophy with children, or with college students, or with anybody, for that matter. Even if I can see that there are serious troubles ahead for the position my conversation partner has chosen to defend, I can usually find something worthwhile in it that can be built on and perhaps made defensible.
* * *
What I have done so far in this chapter is to point out, first, that kids in our society don’t usually encounter philosophy until they go off to college. I then asked whether there is a good reason to leave philosophy out of the elementary and secondary-school curriculum. I considered two possible reasons – the meta-cognitive objection (they can’t do philosophy because they are not yet ready for meta-cognition) and the immaturity objection (it isn’t good for them to do philosophy). I rejected the meta-cognition objection on the ground that children, even very young children, sometimes make comments, raise questions, and even engage in reasoning that can be recognized to be genuinely philosophical. In fact, I maintained, they are really more likely, as kids, to raise such questions, make such comments, and engage in such reasoning than they will be as adults. So it can’t be correct to say that children should not be introduced to philosophy because they are incapable of meta-cognition.
The second objection, I agreed, is very serious. It is also an old objection. I elaborated on it a bit by appeal to what Plato has Socrates say in Book VII of the Republic. This objection certainly needs to be kept in mind But the best response to it, I suggested, is Plato’s own response in his later dialogue, Theaetetus. Anyone who introduces philosophy to anyone, whether child or adult, should reason fairly and treat the learner with respect and consideration. Philosophy certainly can be used as a tool of abuse. It can also be used to make people arrogant and nihilistic. But it need not be used in those ways. Instead, it can be used to heighten curiosity, to encourage thoughtfulness, and to develop responsibility, both in the way we think and in the ways in which we act.
Although I have so far emphasized the striking absence of philosophy from the pre-college curriculum in our society, I certainly do not wish to claim that there is no philosophy at all available to kids in any primary or secondary schools today. That would be false. In fact, the idea of doing philosophy with schoolchildren, even with elementary schoolchildren, has been gradually meeting with some acceptance, both in this country and abroad. Progress is slow, but, I think, steady.
The pioneer in this field has clearly been Matthew Lipman, whose Institute for the Advancement for Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, has developed curricula, trained teachers, and promoted philosophy for children (“P4C”), not only in the United States, but throughout the world.
Two features of the Lipman program deserve special emphasis. One is the exclusive use of literature written by Matthew Lipman expressly for the purpose of introducing philosophy to kids. Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery (1974) was the first book Lipman wrote for this purpose. Later books, such as Pixie and Lisa, have also been very successful.
A second feature of this program is the teaching methodology, called “the Community of Inquiry, the aims of which Matthew Lipman describes this way:
. . . we can now speak of “converting the classroom into a community of inquiry” in which students listen to one another with respect, build on one another’s ideas, challenge one another to supply reasons for otherwise unsupported opinions, assist each other in drawing inferences from what has been said, and seek to identify one another’s assumptions.vi
The idea of a community of inquiry can be seen as a response to Socrates’s objections to doing philosophy with children in Republic VII, a response quite in keeping with Plato’s own admonition to be fair in argument in the later dialogue, Theaetetus.
A second approach to doing philosophy with kids is to make use of literature not written specifically for philosophical discussion. I have myself used conventional children’s literature in this way. With the help of colleagues I have composed questions meant to stimulate the philosophical discussion of children’s stories that seem to me especially well suited to being discussed philosophically.vii One can certainly use the community-of-inquiry methodology on such fiction as well, or indeed on non-fiction,viii both to help ensure that the resulting discussion will tend to be philosophical and also to promote what Socrates calls “fairness in argument.”
A third approach is to choose classic texts from the history of philosophy that can be put to this use and made the basis for philosophical discussion with kids. There are several ways one can do that. Some passages, for example, the story of the Ring of Gyges from Plato’s Republic, which I use in Chapter 3, can be discussed directly in a classroom setting or in an after-school program. Alternatively, one can amplify and focus on the reasoning in a portion of a classical text. I do that in Chapter 2 with a passage on friendship from Plato’s dialogue, Lysis, and again in Chapter 7 with Lucretius’s argument for the infinity of space.
In the remaining chapters of this book I choose some idea or line of argument from a classic text, usually by Plato, and make it the basis for a children’s story that I myself have concocted. One child in the story is a mouthpiece for Plato (or Zeno, in one story, and Augustine, in another). Although I certainly make no claim for the literary excellence of the stories I have written, I do find that having a child in a story present the philosophical issue to be discussed sometimes makes it easier for the kids in a class to accept the problem to be discussed as something they might well want think over and come to some conclusion about for themselves.
Using classical texts the way I do here as the basis for doing philosophy with schoolkids brings with it a very special reward. The issues those old philosophers wrestled with have great resonance in our culture. If it were not so, their writings would not, in fact, be classical texts. If I can get kids can to think about, and even come to some conclusion about, say, an argument for the nonexistence of time in Augustine, or a deep perplexity in Plato about the significance of divine approbation for how we ought to lead our lives, I have, I think, achieved something far more important than interesting children in mind games. I have introduced them to some of the great thinking in our culture. If they can decide what Tony should say to Susan, they and I (for, as you will see, I, too, have had much to learn from these discussions) will have joined with our philosophical forebears in a virtual dialogue across the centuries.