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Showing
children can do Philosophy
An Interview with
Michel Sasseville
By Saeed Naji
Ed. by Soudabe Karimi
Most of philosophers and people hearing the term "Philosophy for Children" wonder and ask: Children and Philosophy? How? Philosophers and grown-ups might understand some philosophical Ideas, but how do you want to teach children the abstract philosophical Ideas?
One of the most impressive responses to those wondering (curious) people is your television series on P4C. You present the series as evidence that we have of children doing fine philosophy. Could you tell us about your experiences in the series? What is your opinion on children ability to deal with philosophy?
Your question reminds me the comments I heard many times when I tried to bring P4C at Laval University 20 years ago. Many were saying: well if it is philosophy it is not for children and if it is for children it can't be philosophy. 20 years later, this comment totally disappeared. What happened?
1- I would say that the research of Vygotsky is now well known in the field of Education. Piaget is no more the king in this discipline. Vygotsky's insights supported by many researches after his death show clearly that children can work with abstract notions.
2- Some of my colleagues have rethought their conception of philosophy and more specifically their conception of how philosophy can be thought. If, as Lipman and Sharp did, we redesign the teaching of philosophy in such a way that this discipline can be interesting and useful for children, then the possibility of doing it with children is evident.
3- We have seen a profound reform in Education in Québec since 20 years and now, at primary school, we talk about competencies and transversal competencies among them we find critical judgment. More than that, the ministry of Education of Québec goes up to say that the classroom should be transformed into a community of learners. In this context, P4C is more than welcome because doing philosophy with children means inviting them to become critical thinkers (not only that but also that) within a community of inquiry. This is exactly what people in primary schools are looking for. And here we are with more than 40 years of experience showing how this could be done and the impacts of doing this on the performance of the child in other disciplines. No surprise that people are more and more interested by philosophy for children.
4- Since 20 years, we have trained thousands of teachers (by means of programs of formation, see http: www.ulaval.ca/philoenfant) who have learned how to do philosophy with children. So, with their help, we have collected a series of discussions among children showing that they can do philosophy if they are assisted by a teacher who knows how to invite them to engage themselves in philosophical inquiry. For sure, we can talk and talk theoretically about the capacity or not of the child to do philosophy. But there is nothing better than a base of observation to talk about it. And this base shows clearly that children can do philosophy. Recently, with the help of Laval University and Canal Savoir (an educative channel television in Québec), we have created a television series of 13 shows (30 minutes each) about philosophy for children. Called "Des enfants philosophent", this television series shows that children (from 6 to 12 years old) can engage themselves in a philosophical inquiry. What we see in this series is children trying to define concepts like friendship, love, war, curiosity, difference, justice, freedom, and on and on in such a way that they give reasons, examples, counter-examples, formulate hypothesis, are looking for criteria. All these moves (and many more) are those we can observe when we look carefully at what philosophers are doing. If there is a difference, it is only a difference of degree, not of kind. Just like when we see children playing baseball, or hockey or football. Even of they are not professional no one would say that they are not playing baseball. In the television series on P4C, we see and hear children engagement in dialogue with each other, trying to become more clear about their own ideas, helping each other, trying to contradict what others have said... We see them puzzled by what someone else have said, ready to self correct if an argument leads to an other conclusion then the one they had previously... well the list of cognitive behaviors as well as social behaviors is quite long. And through this television series, we can also hear children talking about their experience of doing philosophy together. Their comments are quite clear: they love to do philosophy, they think that it is better to inquire whit others than to be alone to do this inquiry, they think that defining terms is very important, they think that thinking is some sort of dialog within ourselves. Some of the children believe that doing philosophy can be summarized by: listening to the person who is talking, looking at the person who is talking, moving, reading a story, thinking, talking, and asking questions (Elisabeth, 6 years old). Others would say that they love philosophy because they learn how to think for themselves. And what about this one who says: "Philosophy is really interesting, because if you find a philosophical question, there is no answer to it. You can always find more answers. And once you found your opinion, you can still change it." (Gabriel, 11 years old). So if we want to argue about the possibility for children to do philosophy, first let's have a look at what they do in a situation designed for this. Then we will be able to support our judgment. The television series, among other things, serve this purpose.
Please tell our readers about the series more. What were the preliminary purposes to develop the series?
As I said previously, we have programs of formation for teachers at Laval University in which teachers can learn how to do philosophy with children. For that purpose, I have followed the pedagogical principles that Lipman and Sharp have shown to me, that is learning by doing. Clearly, it means that teachers (actual of future) learn to do philosophy with children by being engaged themselves in the creation of a community of inquiry. But, since many years, we were aware that something was missing in this way of doing this: children. Certainly, it is important to be a member of a community of inquiry before trying to do it with children, but it is also quite good to see children doing it. This aspect was absent of my courses at University. So, we decided to create a television series on P4C that could not only explain what is philosophy for children, but also and mainly show children doing philosophy. Actually, what we have done is a combination of sequences showing children doing philosophy and children talking about their experience, as well as teachers doing the same, parents and experts (like Lipman, Sharp, Kennedy, as well as philosophers of Quebec) explaining some aspects of the process. The 13 documentaries can be taken as 13 introductions to philosophy for children, one presenting the role of the facilitator, another one presenting the importance of inquiry in education, and the other one introducing the relationships between philosophy for children and prevention of violence. Here is the list of all the main topics covered by the documentaries:
1- Doing philosophy with children
2- Observing a community of inquiry
3- Thinking for oneself and self-correction
4- The first moments of a philosophical community of inquiry (reading and questioning)
5- The importance of talking
6- Facilitating the construction of a community of inquiry
7- Reasoning
8- Inquiring
9- Defining
10- Prevention of violence
11- Ethical inquiry
12- The education of citizen
13- Enrichment of the experience
We know your television series on P4c connected to an on-line course where students can observe children doing philosophy. This course focuses on the cognitive, social, philosophical (and on) moves of the children as well as of the teachers engaged in the building of a community of inquiry. Could you tell us more about the course please? How can foreign (/Persian) students use this on-line course?
Thought the documentaries are a good introduction to philosophy for children, we rapidly came to the conclusion that a television series would not be enough, especially if we want to keep the main principles that govern the pedagogy of a community of inquiry: social construction of knowledge, critical thinking, self-correction, dialogue... The problem with the television series is that the students are passive. We wanted to make sure that students would become active in the process of discovering philosophy for children. So we move on to the creation of a course that would combine the television series and a web site in which student would be invited to create a virtual community of inquiry. That was not easy to do because, as it seems, 3 years ago, no on-line tools were available to help us in this process. Of course, we have discussion forums, but we wanted to go beyond the forum. We wanted to make sure that student will be engaged in a process where they will be "forced" to correct their position, if necessary. So we created what we call: the Collaborative Virtual Observatory (CVO). The CVO looks like a little virtual building in which you can find 6 rooms: The Staff Room, the Observatory, the Library, the Secretariat, the Video Library and the Agora. Each of these rooms gives to the students the possibility to be in touch with other students. Combined with the television series, the CVO gives to the student the possibility to learn how to observe a philosophical community of inquiry composed of children aged from 6 to 12 and to justify their judgment about what they think is present or not in the sequence studied each week. The main idea is to become member of a virtual community of inquiry in which your task is to observe sequences of children doing philosophy, sharing your comments about these sequence as well as your justifications about your judgment concerning the presence or not of some elements (cognitive, social, philosophical) in these sequences.
A foreign student is certainly able to follow that course. Actually, we have students from France and Switzerland. Of course, for the moment, everything is in French. But, my hope is that everything will be translated in different languages and people from abroad might want to introduce this type of course in their own country. That's why, for example, I went to Oxford recently: presenting this course to persons who might want to translate the whole thing and use the CVO in their country.
It seems the series present some evidence against the Piaget's conception that young children cannot deal with abstractions. Could you discuss the problem? How much may his conception cause Children Education deviate from its real purposes?
Well, Piaget was right when he said that young children are not able to engage themselves in abstract process. He was right, given the context in which he was working. But if you change this context, that is if you invite children to work with peers and invite them to go beyond what we can normally (piagetian's context) expect from them. Then you see them able to engage in high abstract process. In other words, if you use another experimental context, like the one suggested by Vygotsky, you arrive at results that are very different from the one you can expect if you work in a piagetian's context. Now the question is: Should we invite children to go beyond what we could normally expect from them? My answer is yes because I think they deserve it. And what we see in the documentaries, as well as in the 12 hours of sequences accessible through the course on-line is very young children who like to be challenged, who like to go deeper than what we might expect form them. I think the fact that they like it is already a good reason to do so.
We know teacher's roles in the building of Community of Inquiry are similar to Socratic dialogical Method. Is the Socratic skills enough to a p4c teacher or there are some other skills which a p4c teacher must learn them? Could you tell us about your distinctive Ideas about the skills (art) a p4c teacher's should learn?
Socrates is probably a good model of what we can expect from a teacher in P4C. He wanted to make sure that his interlocutor will, with time, discover that what he thought he knew for sure was not necessarily so sure. And Socrates was doing so by inviting his interlocutor to follow the arguments where they lead. From that point of view, Socrates, as I said, is probably a good example of what a teacher in P4C can do. But, I don't think we should follow Socrates in every way. What I mean is I am not sure that Socrates was always an inquirer like the teacher in P4C should be. Sometimes, I get the impression that Socrates knows in advance the answers (or the absence of answers) he wants his interlocutor will get. In a community of philosophical inquiry, we never begin (except when the question is a logical one for which we have some answers) the inquiry with the idea that we should arrive at no answer at all or at some specific one. We just don't know at what we will arrive. For this reason, there is no move done by the teacher to make sure that students will arrive at this or that. The pedagogical behaviors of the teacher are directed toward the formation of the judgment of the students, not toward some sort of answers (or no answer at all). In order to help students to become better judges, he or she will ask them some questions that will invite them, if necessary, to make nuances in their judgment, to define terms, to underline presuppositions, to identify consequences, to look for counter-examples, to inquire with others, and on and on. The list of pedagogical moves done by the teachers is quiet long.
Also, we have to remember that, most of the time, Socrates is discussing with one person at a time. This is very different from the situation in a community of inquiry where 25 to 30 persons are involved into the discussion. Given this context, the teacher has to make sure that students will be connected to each other. So there is a social dimension, as well as an affective dimension that seem to be absent in the Socrates' dialogues. And this makes a big difference in the role of the teacher compared to the one Socrates had. In a community of inquiry, the teacher facilitates not only the philosophical inquiry by helping children to engage themselves in the metaphysical, epistemological ethical, etc, dimension of the problem they are investigating together, but she also try to make sure that the whole process will be a co-construction of understanding among children, in which distributive thinking will take place. In other words, by her interventions, she tries to make sure that this child will take into account what others have said, this other one will try to find a counter-example of what the previously have said, this other one will reformulate what an other one has said.... So, her task is not to make sure that the interlocutor will follow her argument where it leads, but to help everyone involved in the inquiry to follow the arguments where they lead, including her arguments but not only them. Moreover, her task his to make sure that the affective dimension of the persons involved in the inquiry will serve the development of the inquiry. And in order to do so, she will try, for example, to help every student to listen carefully to everyone involved, to respect the different points of view expressed during the discussion, in a word to make sure (at least as much as she can because here also, we can not be absolutely sure) that people will feel at ease (not be scary) to say something during the inquiry.
So, given what has been said before, I would say that a teacher in P4C will become better and better in facilitating the inquiry if she or he:
1- Knows how to foster the practice of all the thinking skills: reasoning, inquiring, concept formation, translation (and probably more than that given that we just don't know for sure exactly how many they are). In order to do so, she has to know these skills and be able to recognize how they are well employed. Only for this reason (there are many other), it takes more than a couple of days of training to become a good facilitator in a community of inquiry. In my case, even if I already had a master degree in philosophy when I began to facilitate philosophical inquiry with children, it took me many years to feel at ease to recognize if these skills were employed rightly during the discussion. And, I have to confess that after 22 years of experiences with children and teachers, a PhD in this field, it is still a hard work to see clearly all the time when this or that skill is well employed in a community of inquiry. Because, more than knowing all those skills, you have to be a very good listener. And this, sometimes, is not easy either because you are simply tired, or because so many things are going on at the same time that your attention to this aspect of the educational process involved in P4C is not totally there.
2- A teacher in P4C will become better and better in facilitating the inquiry if she or he knows are to recognize the different styles of thinking and to help each child to become himself in his own style of thinking without forgetting that other styles of thinking are also very productive if we want to enlarge our understanding of the world. In order to do so, the teacher has to admit, at least, that her own style of thinking, let's say Socrates's style, is not the only one that should be foster in a community of inquiry, that her way of looking at things is not the only one that should be practice. After all, the goal is not to make sure that we will have 25 Socrates at the end! The goal is to make sure that we will have 25 five person who will think for themselves, in their own way of thinking that might be very different of the one that Socrates had (or the teacher has). And in order to achieve this goal, she has to make sure that every child will get a chance to express himself during the inquiry, even the one (and I would say especially the one) that, in his own style of thinking, seems to be at the opposite of the style of the teacher. So, the teacher has to become more and more aware that the different styles of thinking, of learning are sources of enrichment in a community of inquiry, and not sources of impoverishment. But this is easier to say than to do because for a lot of people it seems that, at first, the difference, what ever it is, is a scary thing. And it is also difficult because some people think that if children are not doing exactly what we have asked them to do, then the goal will not be reached. I am not saying that in a community of inquiry, we should just let the children express themselves, without let's say helping them to support their judgment by reasons and more than that good reasons (which suppose that you take time to invite children to evaluate reasons that are given). The only thing I am saying is that if you foster only one style of thinking, Socrates' one or your own style of thinking because you think that this style is the ONE that should be foster given that a philosophical investigation is more than expressing yourself about the world, you miss the point. Yes, it is true that philosophical investigation in a community of inquiry is more than just asking children what they think, but it is also more than lead them to think that the way the teacher thinks is the one that should be retained. For that reason, I am always skeptical about those who think that doing philosophy with children is mainly a question of being engaged in a discussion where the teacher is at the center of the process and what the children have to do is to emulate what the teachers is doing. Indoctrination is not only a question of content. It can be also a question of procedure.
3- A teacher in P4C will become better and better in facilitating the inquiry if he knows how to facilitate collaboration among children instead of competition. Again, it is easier to say than to do, because collaboration is not a question of being friends to each other. Collaboration means that you will accept to engage yourself in cognitive conflict (socio-constructivism), to be challenged by the other and eventually to modify your point of view because what has been said lead to this change. You see, the point in a community of inquiry is not to win a debate, but to collaborate to the understanding through deliberation. Most of the time, if children are invited to say something in the traditional classroom, it is either to give a short conference to others or to express themselves in such a way that some will win while other will lose the debate (battle) about this or that topic. In a community of inquiry, at least one that has got it's cruising speed, there is no debate, but deliberation. So, it is not a question of competition (who will win and who will lose), but who can contribute to the development of the common understanding. And in order to do so, the teacher has to promote the context in which the deliberation will occur. If she or he focuses mainly on how this position is not acceptable, while another one is clearly the one that should be retained, she is not helping children to see that the game here is not a debate. Also, she has to make sure that children will say what they believe, and not say what they don't believe just to make sure that by this they will convince other children and therefore win the debate. I like how Lipman differentiates a debate from deliberation when he says somewhere ( I think it is in Thinking in education) that those engaged in a debate try to convince the other of what they don't necessarily believe, while those engaged in a deliberation don't try to convince the other of what they themselves believe. I really like this way of distinguishing debate and deliberation because it shows well that in a community of inquiry, where deliberation occurs, the idea is not to win against others but to participate to the development of the understanding. If the teacher is not ready to engage him or herself in this context, the whole thing will collapsed at one point. Does that mean that it is useless to engage children in debates? Well it depends. If your goal is to foster thinking skills, it might be interesting and even useful. But if your goal is to help them to think for themselves, in other words to become more and more aware of what they think, more and more aware of the values they have (and should have given what has been discussed), the sort of person they are and they want to be, then I thing the debate is useless. More than that, I think it can be harmful because you can get the idea that what is important is not what you think but the impression you can make when you think, regardless of the impact this impression can have to the quality of your own life as well as the one of your peers. When you take into account the values you have and the values others have and you try to create a world in which everyone would like to live in, maybe then you can say: you are my friend. As you can see, this type of friendship is not easy to build, but I assume that it is the one involved in a community of inquiry. So when I said that collaboration is not a question of being friend to each other, I should add: it is a question of learning how to become friends to each other. This learning is not an easy task and requests from the teachers a deep understanding of how the relationships (social, emotional as well as cognitive) among children are an important aspect of P4C.
4- A last point concerning the quality of the teacher (don't get the impression thought that everything will then be said about this topic). To become a good facilitator in a community of inquiry, you have also to develop all the dispositions that you think your students might develop during the process: disposition to become critical, self-critical, to wonder, to feel a need for reasons, principles, regulative ideas, to take care of the tools of inquiry, and on and on again... The more you will interiorize these dispositions, the more you will be an example for your students and the more you will become an example, the more what you will do will be coherent with what you say when you invite them to develop these dispositions. A good facilitator in a community of inquiry is at the opposite of the one who says: do what I say and not what I do (or what I am). Doing philosophy with children is not a job. It is a way of doing things, of acting in the world, of being a member of a larger community, that is the international community of human beings interested by the liberation of the child and the development of a planet liberated of the tyranny of those who think that freedom is only for some people. If, as a facilitator of a community of inquiry, you act in such a way that we have the impression that only some of the children have the right to express themselves, only some questions are interesting, only some thinking skills are important, only some point of view are acceptable, etc., then you are not acting as someone who has develop the dispositions involved in the educational dimension of this process. And if this is so, be sure that the incoherence between what you say and what you do will be underlined by the children, as if you were inviting them to do what you don't believe, as if you are engaged with them in a debate. My experience in this is that rapidly children will tell you that doing philosophy is not very interesting because what they are invited to do is not what the teacher is doing. And because of that, most of the time, the teacher will stop to do philosophy in the classroom on the basis that children don't like this activity. But, as you can imagine, the reason given here might not be the right one. I am not saying that a teacher should wait to begin doing philosophy with children up to the point where he or she feel that she has developed all the dispositions. It might not be possible. The only thing I am trying to say is that self-correction is very important in this process and when a teacher becomes aware that he might change some of his/her dispositions in order to become more and more coherent with the goals of P4C, he should do it and help children to become aware that this change is occurring in himself. After all, no one is perfect right at the beginning (neither at the end) but self-correction, I hope, is always possible.
What is Canadian education administrators' view about accomplishing the Program in all of the Canada schools? Is not there any resistance against it?
I can’t say about all Canada, and each province of the country has its own way of dealing with education. What I can say about the province of Québec (where I live) is that the Ministry of Education is aware of the existence of P4C and has nothing against the idea of introducing it in schools, given the recent reform in education in Québec (the shift from objectives to the formation of competencies, the transformation of the classroom into a community of learners, the importance of transversal competencies like critical judgment, self-identity, communication skills, and on) and the theoretical foundations of P4C (I am thinking of Buber’s cultural psychology, Vygotsky and of course Dewey). But, having nothing against P4C does not mean that the Ministry of education has introduced P4C as another discipline in the curriculum. P4C is still an option in the curriculum. And as long as philosophy will not be introduced officially as an obligatory discipline, it’s presence in the primary and secondary schools of Québec (or everywhere else) will be in the hands of the teachers who think that without philosophy, something is missing. They may be a lot out there doing philosophy with their students (I don’t have a list of the teachers who, after have followed the training at Laval University, have decided to implement philosophy in their classroom, but I received many @mails of them asking for material and follow-up). But, given as I said that it is not an obligatory part of the curriculum, the life of P4C in Québec’s schools is very fragile.
When the Ministry of education introduced its reform almost 10 years ago, I think to myself: great, here is another occasion to show how philosophy can be very useful if we want to make the shift proposed but this reform. But this reform came also with the assumption that transversal competencies will emerge from the teaching of specific disciplines and therefore we don’t need another discipline, like philosophy, to make sure that transversal competencies (like critical judgment, communication…) will be part of the education system. I have to say that I share this assumption. I agree with those who think that transversal competencies are always contextual and the training of these competencies can not be done in a vaccum. But what most of the people in education have not seen yet is that the discipline of philosophy, with its content, its concepts, its problems, its methodology, is the most appropriate discipline to foster these transversal competencies. To my knowledge, it is the only discipline (given also, I must say, the transformation of the classroom into a community of inquiry) that combines all the transversal competencies into a unified and coherent whole. Experimental researches have shown that there is nothing like the practice of philosophy to foster critical thinking, to develop your identity, to become a better inquirer, a better citizen… because by doing philosophy you engage yourself, with others, in the investigation of problems that force you to become critical, to be conscious of your own thinking process, to inquire, to be part of a society as a reasonable person. I don’t see how this can be done so well with the other disciplines thought in primary schools. So, yes I agree that these competencies can not be developed in vacuum. But, something more valuable can be done in schools to foster these competencies than only teaching the traditional disciplines. And philosophy is the discipline that should be introduced if we want children to be able not only to think in the disciplines, but also to be able to think between the disciplines.
If this is so, we could ask: why the Ministry of Education has not introduced philosophy as an obligatory discipline with its reform? To answer this question, I would propose the following hypothesis:
1- Those who were responsible of the reform didn’t know too much about P4C;
2- Those who were responsible of the reform knew enough of P4C to see how it could be an obligatory part of the curriculum, but were persuaded that by introducing this discipline, it would request too much change in the system of education;
3- The combination of both hypothesis: they knew enough about P4C and estimated that its introduction would mean such a big change that they decided to move slowly but surely into this direction.
I know, the third hypothesis is very pretentious. As if P4C can be a model toward which we should go. But, what if it would be the case? What if the schools would become more and more communities of inquiry? What if the system of education would focus on the cultivation of judgment? It would mean to go up to the end of what has been introduced with the actual reform. It would mean to stop to see disciplines as non overlapping area, to change the way teachers are trained at the university, to give more attention to the process of thinking, to introduce epistemological consideration in every discipline, to change the way we evaluate children in their performance, and on. Here in Québec, the schools and the Universities are moving slowly toward these changes. Maybe the next reform will be the one where philosophy will be seen as an exemplary discipline if we want to understand the spirit of this new reform. Of course, I don’t know what will be the future, but to take the words of Lipman, it seems that it is already too late to go back.
One more thing before going to your next question. Recently, some schools have introduced P4C with the aim of prevention of violence. And the Ministry of education endorsed this project. But even if the prevention of violence is a good thing, I think it is only one aspect of P4C and not the most important one. For me, what is central in P4C is the cultivation of judgment. Certainly, to see the benefit of doing philosophy by the effects it could bring is important. But, when we pay too much attention to the effects, we sometimes forget the causes of these effects. As long as the causes will not be seen as the most important thinks to do in education (fostering critical thinking, creative thinking, caring thinking to name only some of the causes that lead to prevention of violence), philosophy will not be treated as what it is: an extraordinary tool by which we can take care of what, I think, is the most important dimension of a human being: it’s mind.
We have some kind of books (including stories, questions and pictures) which are used in CoI. What kind of books can be very interesting and exciting for children (user-friendly) in CoI? If you are agree with using some stories in CoI, what is your point of view about content of the books?
This last question, as simple as it is, is so complex. Because it is not any kind of books that can be use in P4C. Lipman wrote stories that are good models of what can be used as a starting point of the process. If we look at them carefully, we see that each stories:
1- exemplifies the dialog the may occur in a community of inquiry;
2- presents children not as what they are without support, but at what they are when they are invited, with the help of their peers as well as with the help of adults, to think for themselves in a critical, creative and caring manner;
3- contains some sort of intrigue that lead the children to desire to go further;
4- does not contain some sort of moral that the children should get by reading it;
5- present the knowledge as something that is ambiguous, not clearly defined;
6- shows adults as persons who like to talk with children, who like to inquire;
7- introduce philosophical content (concepts, reasoning process) that will invite children to go beyond their original wonder;
8- shows how thinking together can be done in practical situations and how self-correction might be very valuable if we want to live together.
We could add more criteria to these, but let me stop here just to say that if we want to respect only the criteria I just cited, it is not so easy to find books that may serve as a starting point of the process. For sure, Lipman’s stories are not the only stories we can use. Others have written wonderful stories in P4C (I think of those written by A. Shap, R. Reek, P. Cam, G. Talbot., M.-F. Daniel). And I am not saying that only stories written by philosophers in P4C should be used in the classroom. But, when you choose a story that could be the starting point of the creation a community of philosophical investigation, I would say: be careful to make a choice that will not go against what you intend to do with children, that is helping them to think for themselves. Especially if you are at the beginning of the process with them. Children, as well as adults, need models. Why not making sure that these models will not be in contradiction with the kind of behaviors (cognitive, social) that are involved in a community of philosophical inquiry? Having said that, this does not mean that all characters in the story should be as reasonable as we could expect all the time. If you take Pixie (Lipman’s story) for example, we see her having some behaviors that might not be part of what we could consider as a reasonable person. But on the overall, Pixie likes to think for herself, she likes to ask questions, she likes to wonder, she likes to invite her peers to be part of the inquiry, and on. By reading the story, children in the classroom might be interested to follow what Pixie is doing. And by doing so, the story becomes, by itself, a wonderful tool in order to achieve the goal of P4C: helping children to become themselves, by becoming more and more able to think for themselves in a democratic situation where everyone sparticipate actively to the development of a more reasonable society.
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