Jane Griffiths, head of Berwick First School, realised that she had a problem. A pupil attitude survey had revealed that a group of eight-year-old boys in Year 3 were not engaging with the school or with their education. The survey, developed and tested by Keele University (see references) asked questions like, ‘do you enjoy helping the teacher?’ and ‘how do you feel about coming to school?’ Jane had looked at all the answers. While Jane could have predicted some of the boys who revealed their disaffection from the school, others came as a shock. Little Jimmy, for instance, always appeared to be keen to help her set up equipment but was apparently unhappy and bored with school. For the nearby middle school, disaffected boys playing truant and causing trouble were causing concern. Jane could see that this would be the fate of her boys unless she did something. She also knew that, in this area of high unemployment, their failure at school would probably be just the first in a whole series of failures.
So what did she do? First the problem was aired in a staff meeting and all teachers were issued with a list of those children, all boys, whom she felt to be at risk of turning away from their education. The teachers in the school were primed to encourage the boys and notice all signs of effort or interest from them. However, Jane felt that this was insufficient. Something more radical was needed. The N-RAIS team of local consultants had introduced her to Philosophy for Children and she decided to try it out. She started a philosophy club in the school and invited all the at-risk boys to attend it.
It might seem strange to think that philosophy could help to re-engage children who were already becoming estranged from education. In the past philosophers have been accused of promoting disaffection through asking too many undermining questions. This was certainly the main charge against Socrates, the archetypal philosopher, at his trial. In about 400 BC Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth of Athens through questioning their gods and traditions. In response he could not completely deny the charge. But philosophy also has another, much more constructive, side. Through teaching the art of questioning and the open exploration of possible answers, philosophy enables people to create meaning for their own lives.
Jane Griffiths could see that her boys were becoming disaffected from education because they experienced it as something that other people were doing to them and not as something that they were doing for themselves. This problem could not be adequately addressed from outside by, for example, giving them more praise if they were good and more blame if they were bad. This would be simply more of the outside imposition of other people’s meanings that had caused the problem in the first place. What was required was more a change from within the disaffected boys themselves. Somehow they needed to be encouraged to take charge of their own meaning-making. Philosophy, as practiced on the Philosophy for Children model taught by the N-RAIS team, might be able to give these children the opportunity and the tools that they needed to question the world and to construct their own meaning within it.
Jane’s strategy worked. The boys took the bait and seriously engaged in thinking up challenging questions and exploring answers together. They learnt how to raise questions in every context and to explore knowledge in the classroom. Through this, they became more involved in their own education. And when, at the end of the year, they went on the Middle School Jane had the great satisfaction of seeing them thrive there. She was convinced that without her intervention and use of philosophy they would have joined the disaffected sub-culture of the Middle School and been destined for educational failure.