Having been involved for several years in attempting to investigate and implement the educational programme known as “Philosophy for Children” (Lipman, 1991; Sharp and Splitter, 1995) I have developed some very mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, it still seems to me to offer a powerful framework and method for involving children in productive discussion and thinking together in classrooms (Fox, 1995, 1996, 1998). On the other hand, some of the difficulties which children have with philosophising seem to me to be underestimated in the programme’s literature and training.
The main purpose of the present paper is to articulate my doubts about “P4C” (as it is familiarly known). In doing this I run the risk of giving readers the idea that I think the programme has no merits at all. In fact, however, I feel that the simple, yet subtle, pedagogy of the Community of Enquiry has a great deal to offer, as a core method of class discussion. I also consider that philosophy, in a loose sense of the word, is not altogether beyond young children and potentially has a kind of lurking role in the school curriculum, as a means of connecting enquiry and the methods of enquiry across different subjects. It also realises in practice a continuous means of promoting metacognition at different levels.
The sorts of productive thinking and discussion that I have in mind would constitute a kind of intellectual heart to classroom life, a forum within which any and all issues could be raised and considered within a clear framework of rules of engagement. Such discussions would be unbounded by worries about whether or not they were truly philosophical, however, since in my view children do not make systematic progress in truly philosophical thinking until much later (typically 15 or 16 years plus).
Having said all that, I intend to spend most of my space explaining why I am critical of what seems to me to be an excess of optimism, within P4C, about children’s thinking. I believe that this results mostly from a determination to ignore the findings of developmental psychology or to admit that there may be any real limitations to children’s powers of thought. The same criticisms may apply, more or less, to other programmes that set out to improve children’s thinking, or critical thinking, or have similar aspirations. I have four main points to make, each of which indicates a real difficulty which children have in this area, and which I think teachers need to take into account. The difficulties do not add up to an impossibility, but they do indicate that progress in these sorts of endeavours is likely to be both slow and irregular.