Maughn Rollins Gregory

In pragmatist social theory communities faced with significant troubles or opportunities inquire after their advantage and reconstruct their habits and their environments. Three programs of philosophical practice—Socratic Dialogue, the Philosophy Café and Philosophy for Children—cultivate citizenly virtues necessary for this process. They facilitate dialogue and open-ended inquiry, give practice in cognitive and social skills, and institute shared authority. However, certain factors limit the programs’ effectiveness for citizenship education. They tend to construe social problems and opportunities in strictly discursive terms; they do not encourage empirical experiment with philosophical judgments; and they do not extend the shared governance of the dialogue to other aspects of social life. None of these are limitations of the programs’ stated objectives.

John Dewey was not a philosopher of education in the now-traditional sense of a doctor of philosophy who examines educational ends, means, and controversies through the disciplinary lenses of epistemology, ethics, and political theory, or of agenda-driven schools such as existentialism, feminism, and critical theory. Rather, Dewey was both an educator and a philosopher, and he saw in each discipline reconstructive possibilities for the other, famously characterizing "philosophy . . . as the general theory of education" (1985, p. 338). Dewey wanted each discipline to overcome its tendency to alienate knowledge and theory from experience and reconstruct itself as an enterprise aimed at personal and collective ..

Gregory reports on an evaluation study of nine different educational programs for small-group discussion, funded by the US Department of Education. The researchers evaluated Philosophy for Children very highly on each of the five discourse features: (1) Teachers' and students' use of authentic questions, uptake and questions that elicited high-level thinking (generalization, analysis and speculation); (2) Teachers' and students' use of questions that elicited extra-textual connections (affective, intertextual, and shared knowledge); (3) Students' elaborated explanations; (4) Students' exploratory talk; and (5) Use of "reasoning words" such as "because," "so," "if," "I think," "dis/ agree," in contexts of verbal reasoning.

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.