Teaching children to respect all opinions can be problematic

The teaching of philosophy may once have been strictly withheld from students until they had entered college – and developed suitably introspective and grungy appearances – but no more thanks to advocates and campaigners for philosophy in schools.

The number of secondary schools offering the junior cycle short course in philosophy has risen to 27 by the latest Department of Education count, up from 17 in 2019. The subject is also getting a toehold at primary level, with interest buoyed by the Irish Young Philosopher Awards – now in its fourth year – and the backing of such influencers as President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina.

Marelle Rice, who runs courses for teachers in Philosophy for Children (P4C), says the subject is "foundational" to education. As a type of inquiry-based learning, P4C "provides a sense of connection and belonging for the student and can support all forms of inquiry across all disciplines".

Nonetheless, philosophy can still seem daunting to the uninitiated. Peter Worley, who heads up the Philosophy Foundation in the United Kingdom, recalls his first experiments in 2002 when, as a music teacher in primary and secondary schools, "I suggested trying out philosophy similarly to how I did the guitar in ensembles". There was a lot of trial and error.

“Right back when I started, I tried to teach the children about philosophers and the history of philosophy in the wrong way. It was too didactic,” he says.

“The best way is to present the children with a stimulus or a question that gets them to respond philosophically . . . For instance, if you were asked the question, ‘Can you step in the same river twice?’ only a little reflection will bring you to see how the answer is yes, in one way, and no in another; the ensemble effect brings out these different positions from different members of the group.”

Worley has combined his first-hand experience with research on different methods of P4C, also know as PwC – philosophy with children – and his favourite term Philosophical Enquiry (PhiE), to produce a book for practitioners.

The publication, Corrupting Youth, also feeds into a general debate about how to manage philosophical, religious or political debate in schools. A concern is that respecting everyone’s opinion can quickly descend into the rule that every viewpoint should be given equal weight.

A teacher facilitating a group discussion may for “perfectly understandable reasons” want to acknowledge the legitimacy of each standpoint, Worley says, but “the accompanying worry is that, far from being the antidote to ‘post-truth’ anxieties, P4/wC is, inadvertently, exacerbating them”.

He believes P4C is too heavily influenced by American pragmatists and would benefit from returning to its Socratic roots. While pragmatists like the influential educationalist John Dewey saw truth as a fluid concept, and perhaps even socially-constructed, the ancient Greeks believed it to be fixed and eternal.

"It is often said that philosophy is the antidote to the post-truth problem; I think your President said something like this before. But one needs to be careful with this. In fact, I think there is a sense in which philosophy may even be part of the problem. Think of post-modernism, and its challenges to all kinds of truth," Worley says.

“With regard to P4C, there is a specific problem. A lazy understanding of the pragmatist ‘community of inquiry’ can lead people to think that in philosophy ‘there are no right and wrong answers’, or that ‘everyone’s opinion is right, or can’t be wrong’, or that what we know is determined by the group.”

How exactly does the Socratic approach differ from the pragmatic one?

“This is the subject of my current PhD,” Worley replies. “At this early stage of my thinking, my tentative suggestion is that the Greeks – and by that I mean the Socratic tradition as it developed through Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, especially Socrates, of course – are less institutional, more individually oriented and more dissenting.

“The pragmatist tradition of P4C theory is based primarily on Dewey and he was trying to create educational reform. Socrates was simply trying to do philosophy. The P4C tradition, therefore, tends to be more politically oriented and the Socratic tradition is more singly dialectical – question and answer investigation.”

Rice is more enthusiastic about Dewey’s P4C model and is skeptical of the claim that it’s in conflict with Socratic principles. “It should be noted that P4C is not a straightforward homogenous lump; it is a form of inquiry-based learning and has many varieties as is evidenced by the large international community of practitioners,” she says.

Of Worley’s critique, she says: “Exploring an idea doesn’t mean you agree or will adopt it, but it does afford us the opportunity to recognise how emotion can interact with our thinking, and that we are primarily processors of ideas rather than the idea itself . . . The notion of an ‘anything goes’ approach just simply wouldn’t work in this structure and a community would come to realise that pretty quickly through the inherent reflection P4C incorporates.”

It’s clear there is a lot of common ground between P4C methods. Rice emphasises the “four thinking Cs” – collaborative, caring, critical and creative thinking – while Worley promotes the idea of the “open questioning mindset”.

Is commitment to objective truth a key pedagogical principle too?

“This is really tricky,” Worley replies. While he stresses there are better ways of thinking than others, “philosophy is in the business of nuance. It should not ‘take sides’ in the sense that the press or politics does”, and “there may be all sorts of ways that we might reach the conclusion that we are in some way relativistic”.

But, he says, “what philosophy is in principle opposed to, is the tacit acceptance of a pre-reflective, lazy relativism or subjectivism. And the worry I am responding to in my book is that this is exactly what philosophy in schools has been doing for a very long time. It’s time we re-evaluated, in a non-lazy way, how we do philosophy with young children.”

Fancy some philosophy?

Some useful links for students and teachers:

[ www.philosophyshortcourse.com ]

[ youngphilosopherawards.ucd.ie ]

[ creativetogether.ie ]

[ thethinkersmidwife.co.uk ]

[ www.philosophy-foundation.org ]