Ann Margaret Sharp

Some Educational Presuppositions of Philosophy for Children

Recent interest in the educational possibilities of philosophy as an elementary school subject suggests that attention should be given to what this curious innovation must presuppose. Exploration of such presuppositions might in turn throw new light on the always murky connections between education and philosophy. In the past, discussions about philosophy for young people have assumed that the students would be no younger than of secondary school age. The prospect of encouraging philosophical reflection among elementary school children was literally unthinkable. Such discussions have further tended to assume that the difficulties hitherto experienced in presenting philosophy to young people lay in the inherent complexity of the subject, to say nothing of an abstractness which made it much too dreary and forbidding for children. Consequently, efforts to introduce philosophy to young people were limited to seeking ways of making the subject simpler and more palatable. But of course one can go only so far in that direction, and so it was assumed that one should concentrate upon providing philosophical enrichment to the concluding secondary school years of some of the brighter students. These presuppositions were of course part and parcel of an older theory of education, for which the learning process consisted in nothing more than the transmission of the contents of human knowledge from the old to the young, much as a parent bird might drop bits of food into the yawning mouths of its offspring. The alternative theory of education that more or less taken for granted by proponents of philosophy for children has it that the educational process must generate thinking activities among those so taught. Accordingly, it is presumed that as the proper teaching of history generates historical thinking and the proper teaching of mathematics generates mathematical thinking, so the proper teaching of philosophy must generate philosophical thinking, regardless of the age of the students. It is characteristic of this approach to assume that philosophical thinking involves, on the one hand, an appreciation of ideas, logical arguments and conceptual systems, and on the other, a manifest facility in manipulating philosophical concepts so as to be able to take them apart and put them together in new ways. Those who contend that philosophy for children is capable of encouraging philosophical thinking generally express assurance that virtually all children have both the interest and the ability to engage in such activity. Our traditional reluctance to discuss matters philosophical with children is the product of our reliance upon an archaic theory of education. Having observed few children eager to browse through Kant or even to peruse the livelier passages of Aristotle, having met with little success in our efforts to convey directly the impact and urgency of the greatest happiness principle, we have been led to draw the irresistible inference that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the disciplined