Maughn Rollins Gregory

As conceived by founders Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, Philosophy for Children is a humanistic practice with roots in the Hellenistic tradition of philosophy as a way of life given to the search for meaning, in American pragmatism with its emphasis on qualitative experience, collaborative inquiry and democratic society, and in American and Soviet social learning theory. The programme has attracted overlapping and conflicting criticism from religious and social conservatives who don’t want children to question traditional values, from educational psychologists who believe certain kinds of thinking are beyond children of certain ages, from philosophers who define their discipline as theoretical and exegetical, from critical theorists who see the programme as politically compliant, and from postmodernists who see it as scientistic and imperialist. The paper is written as a dialogue in order to illustrate the complex interactions among these normative positions. Rather than respond to particular criticisms in depth, I indicate the general nature of my position regarding them and provide references to published material where they have been made and responded to over the past 40 years.

Philosophy serves to determine and clarifying the meaning of experience, and to make experience more meaningful, in both of the senses that Dewey distinguished: to broaden the range and amplify the value of qualities we experience, and to multiply their relevant ties to other experiences. Children’s experience is replete with philosophical meaning, and in facilitating children’s search for meaning, we are obliged to lead them in the directions that we ourselves have found most fruitful, though we should avoid the “adultist fallacy,” of thinking that meanings experienced in childhood are merely instrumental to more mature meanings of adulthood, and the “fallacy of omniscience,” assuming that the meaning of children’s experience is completely accessible by adults. All of this applies to the realm of religious experience, which may be organized into four categories: socio-cultural, analytic, ethical and phenomenological.Learning a process of philosophical inquiry that is rigorous, public and open-ended might enable children to both inhabit their religious and spiritual experiences more fully, and to take some critical distance from them, in order to become more open to the kinds of religious experiences they deem most meaningful.

Gregory reports on a study by researchers from Ohio State and Pennsylvania State Universities that evaluated nine programs of classroom discussion. The programs were evaluated on their evidence of discourse features that have been shown in research literature to characterize quality discussions. Two programs, Philosophy for Children and Collaborative Reasoning, were found to provide the richest opportunities for individual and collective reasoning, due to the way teachers in these programs model and scaffold argumentation and cultivate a culture of dialogic inquiry in the classroom.