The utopian work of Philosophy for Children

Emma and I were honoured to be invited by the Philosophical Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) to give a keynote at their annual conference at New College Oxford on 22-24 March.

Our talk focused on the Community of Philosophical Enquiry (CoPE), which as many of you will know, is the pedagogy associated with Philosophy for Children and Communities (P4C) and describes a collection of overlapping approaches to philosophical education in and beyond the classroom. These approaches share a vision of philosophy in education as a dialogic, reason-governed, democratic, and wisdom-seeking practice. We argued that CoPE also offers a utopian philosophy of education, one that reimagines who can philosophise and how they should do it, the meaning and purpose of education, and the relationship between school and society.

Utopian thinking has a bit of a bad reputation. For many it connotes daydreaming, nostalgia or naïvety, but Angelika Bammer disputes this view arguing that ‘the utopian is powerfully real in the sense that hope and desire (and even fantasies) are real, never “merely” fantasy. It is a force that moves and shapes history.’

Providing we think of utopia as an ongoing process, rather than as a clear goal or perfect endpoint, then utopian thinking can be very useful in education. Especially when education itself is understood as a process, which is how Dewey conceives of it.

The founders of the P4C approach (American academics Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and others) set out an ambitious vision for the practice which our conversation summarised. We also traced the development of this utopian thinking through contemporary theoretical and empirical research that looks at the role of CoPE in achieving epistemic justice for children, helping them to navigate the challenges of mass media and misinformation and helping them to participate as democratic citizens. Examining recent meta analyses of P4C, we then set out how many of these grand ambitions are evidenced in empirical research that shows how P4C develops intellectual, social and emotional skills that bring personal and public benefits.

The aim of our discussion was to defend and to revive this utopian thinking which, in a climate of chronic uncertainty and underinvestment in education, still offers many educators hope. In the spirit of Philosophical Enquiry, we presented our thinking as a dialogue weaving together arguments, evidence, and personal stories including the following:

In 2009 I (Grace) was a philosopher in residence at a nursery in Leeds. Together with the teacher we had organised an event for parents of pre-schoolers, to share the philosophical work we had been doing with their children. Parents gathered on chairs behind a circle of cross-legged children and their teacher surrounded by a collection of objects.

Taking one object at a time, the teacher asked the children to decide if the object was safe. The first few children sheepishly suggested that small teddy was safe because it was soft, and the teacher encouraged others to propose further reasons. Then she showed the children the scissors. ‘Are the scissors safe?’ she asked one little girl who answered confidently ‘yes’. Behind her, her mum flinched with embarrassment and nudged her sharply in the back, as if to warn her that she had said the wrong thing.

The child was unflustered. Even though several little thumbs pointed down, meaning other children disagreed. 

‘Why do you say ‘yes’?’ said the teacher calmly. The child responded ‘Because you can hold them carefully – and don’t run! A grownup might help you and then you can make lots of pictures.’ The teacher simply said ‘interesting’ and several children’s thumbs turned upwards, suggesting they’d been persuaded to change their mind.

The anxiety drained from the mum’s face and the child smiled before the next speaker chimed in to suggest that teddies are only safe if you don’t try to eat them.

What I saw in this vignette and thousands like it was the utopian work of Philosophical Enquiry manifest in its power to liberate even the youngest of children to think together and to think for themselves about issues, like safety, that are both philosophically rich and deeply relevant to their lives and learning.

I also saw what Philosophical Enquiry can do to adult-child relationships. Teachers become more curious about how children really see the world and how their beliefs and values take shape and are responsive to reason. Their status as an epistemic authority figure is called into question – which is emancipatory for everyone. 

Parents may have memories of school as a place where all the questions have answers and children are divided into those who know and those who don’t, but they can be liberated too when they appreciate that knowledge is sometimes contested, and can be co-constructed, and that their child has a serious stake in what is real, what is true and what is right.

There are so many stories we could have shared about the utopian project of Philosophical Enquiry. Some reveal the impact of philosophising on individual students and their teachers, some show what philosophical education can do for a whole institution or throughout a whole career, and others help envision what democracies might be like with more philosophically educated citizens. As these stories accumulate, they have strength in numbers.

Our work is a process in which our aspirations and achievements build on and connect with an international community of practice sixty years in the making. Charities are by their very nature utopian. They are established and sustained by people who genuinely want to change the world. Our work seeks to support the skills people need to flourish in schools and society. This is work that has taken us into hundreds of schools as well as museums, galleries, hospitals, prisons, businesses, housing associations, Universities, councils, and community centres to work with people of every age, background and level of experience. As was the case for Lipman, Sharp, Mathews and others, this work is a journey not a destination, but as a process it is ‘powerfully real’.