Chris Houghton: Why P4C still matters

Hello, my name is Chris Houghton. I am a trustee of the charity Thoughtful, formerly known as SAPERE. Our mission is to make a positive difference to as many children’s schools and communities as we can, by introducing them to P4C, that is philosophy for children.

P4C is a fantastic process that our Directors will be able to explain fully to you. In the current political and economic climate, we have had many obstacles to overcome and any help a philanthropic funder could offer would help ensure our work can continue at its existing outstanding levels. I worked for many years as a consultant teacher for the school improvement service of a local education authority with high levels of deprivation.

I implemented P4C in many schools. One of my colleagues worked very closely with one multicultural school in particular where many children suffered a great degree of hardship. He embedded P4C throughout the school.

For one half term, I joined him in a project to reach out to parents and carers as there had been quite a few incidents of adults fighting in the playground. On Friday afternoons, the school had golden time where pupils could choose to engage in a variety of fun activities. P4C was on offer and proved very popular.

I was invited along to encourage parents and carers to join us for tea and biscuits. Once there, they soon found themselves involved in enquiries while their children were participating in their own circle across the hall. The adults enjoyed using pictures. Pictures which posed a dilemma as their stimulus. They were mostly intimidated by literature. They preferred the pictures to video stimuli as they could take the photos home with them to continue enquiring with family and friends. The outcomes were wonderful.

The behaviour of both adults and children was measurably improved. As I left the group, I had a chat with a few parents and I will now share a short clip of that conversation.

“My kids, since we’ve been coming to this, [if] Cordy does something wrong or Daniel does something wrong, instead of fighting about it, we talk about it and we ask why, why has Cordy said this?“



“Do you know all these people from my school, they have got an opinion and just because my opinion is different from theirs, they don’t have to agree with me. And I don’t have to agree with them, do you know what I mean?“

“Mine don’t realise that I have got an opinion. It might not be what theirs is, they might not agree with what I’ve said, but it’s my opinion.“

“But they do realise now that I don’t have to agree with them, they don’t necessarily have to agree with me. You can agree or disagree, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to fall out. But it doesn’t mean that I’m right, and it doesn’t mean that they’re right.“

That was 20 years ago, and I realise you may fear it is no longer relevant. I would argue that it serves to underline the fact that Philosophy for Children is not some kind of here today, gone tomorrow, trendy initiative, but a long-respected pedagogy with rigorous theoretical underpinnings that has continued to enrich the lives of thousands of children. Our bedrock has always been Socrates, who believed that the unexamined life is not worth living.

3,000 years later, Snoopy noted that in the book of life, the answers aren’t always in the back. As members of Thoughtful, we facilitate enquiries where children and adults can tussle with issues, leading them to consider the kind of people they wish to be, and the kind of world they would like to live in.

As P4C Founder Matthew Lipman said over 40 years ago:

“I know that fads come and go in education. One day it’s all microteaching and new math, and the next day they have disappeared between the cracks. But philosophy in the elementary school is not a fad. It will haunt the system and give it bad dreams.”