It’s a curious thing but I can’t remember ever hearing the phrase ‘My brain hurts’ when I was a classroom teacher, yet it’s a phrase I hear all the time when I am working with young people these days. But then, these days, I’m not trying to teach them anything. I’m trying to make them think. The question of whether learning was a subset of thinking - or was it the other way around? - had vexed me a long time and the main reason I had come into the wonderful education profession was to help young people improve their thinking skills. Or was I helping them to improve their learning skills? Do we teach thinking to young people as a way of improving their learning or would we do better to teach children how to learn in order to improve their ability to think. After all, as the advocates of a knowledge-based curriculum point out regularly, you have to have something to think about.
The Baby Question
As an advocate of Philosophy for Children and the man responsible for those Thunks that so many teachers use around the world to get children’s brains hurting, a good place to start when looking for answers is with a bit of a philosophical think. A great virtual tool for thinking about thinking is to take advantage of a new-born baby, in particular its brain.
An obvious Thunk to set the ball rolling here would be, does a baby think? In order to attempt an answer – and it’s not about whether the answer is right or
wrong but what you consider the response to be, not what you have learned but
what you think – you need to start reflecting on the nature of babies, thinking and thought and about how we might know one way or the other. By ridding ourselves of the pesky need to quickly and efficiently get to the one correct answer so we can move on to learn the next testable nugget, we have to stop, and think, deeply, and, importantly, think for ourselves. Once someone comes up with ‘an’ answer (which is different to ‘the’ answer, especially bearing in mind that the response to a Thunk can be yes, no, neither, both or something else) we need to interrogate it with further questions to see if their view either holds up or blows up. In this example, if the suggestion is yes, babies do indeed think, we could hound the truth out of the response by asking follow-up questions such as:
- When did the baby start thinking?
- Was the baby thinking before it was physically born?
- Does the baby know it is thinking?
- Does a baby (or indeed anyone) direct its own thoughts?
- And the million-dollar question, if a baby thinks, what does a baby think about?
Of course, even that question can be interrogated further as, perhaps, ‘thinking’ and ‘thinking about’ might be two distinct activities. In other words, and we’re back with the rabid Hirschians again, can you ‘think’ without ‘thinking about’?
Of course, if the initial response was no, a baby doesn’t think, then you need to harry such an answer with equal vigour so the truth comes out of hiding, if it is there at all.
- So, when does it start thinking?
- What makes it start thinking?
- What is happening in its brain if there is no thinking going on?
- If ‘I think therefore I am’, am I not until I start thinking?
- Would the baby’s first thought be about itself or something outside of itself?
In this way, questions lead to questions and just when a brain is in the process of thankfully alighting on an answer, the world tilts again and the brain is left fluttering in space once more with nothing solid beneath its feet.
