Might philosophy for children be of help to a generation growing up in a world drowning in BS? Greg Bruce seeks wisdom at an Auckland school.
On the floor before the class of 6-year-olds sat a koala cuddly toy surrounded by a series of cards each featuring a single word:
"Why", "What", "Could", "Should", etc. The kids took turns picking up a card and asking a question beginning with that word:
"Can the koala do a flip?"
"Does he like swinging on a branch?"
"Why does he have a green bow tie?"
"When does he sleep?"
These were all good questions, but they were also fairly predictable, and not really of sufficient interest to be included in an article about the teaching of philosophy to children. Then, from out of the blue, one of the children picked up the "Who" card and asked: "Who is he?" Internally, I punched the air. This was what I'd been waiting and hoping for: a preternaturally gifted child asking the sort of provocative, deeply philosophical question a university lecturer would be delighted to hear from any one of her first-year students.
As the question hung in the air, I could feel the world, in all its vastness and terror, opening up before these kids. Even I was a bit frightened by the issues it raised: Who, indeed, is the koala? Who are any of us? What even is "us"? What is anything? I looked at the teacher and wondered what training, if any, she had been given about how to deal with such a question. I felt for her, because, as the parent of a 6-year-old, I know that children of this age are highly susceptible to induced existential dread and are also good at sensing and exploiting when an adult doesn't know how to deal with a difficult situation. But if she felt any uncertainty, she didn't allow them to see it. She'd been in the game long enough to know that would be bad. She looked that kid right in the eye and said, in a voice that made clear she was speaking truth: "His name is Mr Koala."
Although it has the benefit of thousands of years of history and is the foundation of Western thought, philosophy has an image problem. It's perhaps best illustrated by the ridiculous story - repeated by generations of credulous secondary school pupils fearful of having to write their own English/history/media studies exam essay questions - of the philosophy exam that had only one question: "Why?" to which a student gave the answer, "Why not?" and received top marks. The point of the story is that philosophy is fancy nonsense: the ultimate instantiation of academic meaninglessness; a place where anything can mean anything if you say it mysteriously enough. This is an easy enough thing to believe if you've ever tried to read, say, the philosopher Wittgenstein, but more relevantly, it's reassuring: If you believe something is nonsense, you don't need to feel bad about the fact you don't understand it.
Maybe this belief has something to do with why philosophy is not taught more widely in schools, despite the fact that an international programme - Philosophy for Children (P4C) - with a large and growing base of evidence demonstrating its many benefits - has been in existence for more than 50 years, and in New Zealand for 30. Philosophy, at least as practised within the P4C framework, is the opposite of fancy nonsense. It's about learning how to engage in constructive discussion about an issue, using evidence and logic, to reach agreement or civil disagreement with others. What could be more important than that for a generation growing up in a world drowning in BS?
Balmoral School is one of the dozen or so across the country that has an active ongoing commitment to teaching philosophical inquiry. The school has a teacher dedicated to running the P4C programme and runs regular training sessions for the other teachers, who incorporate the programme into their regular timetable.
On the day I visited, the first class I sat in on was a group of 11- and 12-year-olds who were discussing whether or not a range of hypothetical scenarios could be said to constitute homelessness: Living secretly in someone's unused garage, sharing a two-room apartment with four other people, living in a refugee camp and so on.
One student argued that living in one's car should also not necessarily be considered homelessness : "It could be, like, a van," he said. "You could live in a van. It doesn't have to be a normal car."
Another student agreed with that proposition: "Because, say you're really rich and you just want to take a break and buy a limousine or something, and you can live in that limousine. It's massive! Or a van, or whatever. You don't have to sleep in one of those itty bitty cars."
A third student added further support: "You could have just got hungover or something."
Another kid spoke more generally: "A home doesn't have to be a house. It's somewhere that you come back to that you call a home. Like, for example, the bridge. It may not be your house but for the person that's sleeping under the bridge, that's the place that they come back to. So the money that you pay doesn't really matter as long as you have somewhere you can go back to that you can call your home."
Research has shown that P4C students make significant gains over their peers on a wide range of academic and cognitive measures: Reasoning behaviour, reading comprehension, maths scores, even IQ. But as New Zealand academics and educators Lynne Bowyer, Claire Amos and Deborah Stevens wrote in a 2020 review of the decades of research into P4C: "We fail to understand and hence appropriately nurture our young people if we consider them to be the sum total of an arbitrary list of measurable 'cognitive functions'." In other words, treating kids as units of intelligence that can be measured and reduced to test scores on which they are then judged is not necessarily the best way to think about education.
One possible better way to think about it: Does doing philosophy make kids into better people? The answer to that seems to be an even more resounding yes. Kids studying P4C have been shown to display higher emotional intelligence and schools using P4C have seen a reduction in bullying. In a 2004 study, half the P4C students reported gains in relationships, social behaviour and empathy, self-confidence, and self-regulation of emotion. On a test of self-esteem as a learner, P4C pupils gained significantly, while their peers didn't. In a 1995 study, students who had been through the P4C programme were identified by teachers (who didn't know they had been through the programme) as displaying markedly more motivation, curiosity, commitment, and concentration than other kids. The author of that study wrote, "One of the most striking and most positive results of this study was the heightening of children's own self-image and their personal view of themselves as thinkers, who were being taken seriously by adults and peers". This, he wrote, led to a significant decrease in negative interactions between them.
The co-ordinator of P4C New Zealand, Vanya Kovach, repeats a story told to her by a teacher friend in the UK: "After a few terms of doing philosophy, this young boy came up to me and said, 'Miss! Ollie said something absolutely horrible to me and I would have smashed him, but instead, I explained to him how wrong he was.'"
One of the most striking phrases I heard during the discussions among older students at Balmoral School, both because of its frequency and the way in which it was both delivered and received was, "I disagree." It was always communicated without passion or anger - just another phrase. In this regard, it was striking how different it was to, say, a disagreement between highly educated adults on Twitter.
Associate principal of Balmoral School Trish Cullen said: "Not to say we don't have fights, or we don't have anything that any other school would have, but I think one of the things I get is the ability to know that I can disagree with Jesse but that doesn't mean that he's not my friend - I'm just going to disagree with the idea he's saying. I think that's a huge thing they get out of it."
The last session I sat in on at Balmoral was with a class of Year 3 students. Their teacher began by telling them she had been visited the night before by a monster, who had offered her the opportunity to have him visit her class. She asked the kids to decide whether they wanted to meet him and to explain why. Most of the kids said they did. One explained, "If we didn't meet him, we might not know how nice he is." Another said, "It could be the only monster in the world and we could be the first to see it."
Then the teacher said: "There was something I forgot to tell you. As I got closer to him, the smell was HORRENDOUS. You remember how I told you my dog rolled in sheep poo the other day? It was like that, 10 times over."
Quite a few kids changed their point of view at that stage. One said: "I wouldn't want to meet him because poo can smell very bad, especially if it's very strong."
The teacher said, "Who else has got something to add?" She pointed at a girl with her hand up.
"I disagree," the girl said. "I think that even if you smell bad or people say that you don't fit in, it doesn't make sense that you should be set apart from other people just because you're different."
The teacher didn't pass judgment on the student's contribution, as she hadn't with any of the previous contributions. Being right wasn't the point of the exercise.