Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People 1443839795, 9781443839792

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Philosophy and Education

Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People

Edited by

Jana Mohr Lone and Roberta Israeloff

Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People, Edited by Jana Mohr Lone and Roberta Israeloff This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Jana Mohr Lone and Roberta Israeloff and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3979-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3979-2

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” —Aristotle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction PLATO, the Squire Family Foundation, and Reclaiming Education .......... 3 Roberta Israeloff, Editor Philosophy and Education: A Gateway to Inquiry ...................................... 7 Jana Mohr Lone, Editor Part I: Philosophical Sensitivity and Preparation of K-12 Philosophy Teachers Teaching Pre-College Philosophy: The Cultivation of Philosophical Sensitivity................................................................................................... 13 Jana Mohr Lone, University of Washington Philosophical Sensitivity............................................................................ 23 Jeff Sebo, New York University Philosophy beyond Boundaries: A New Model of Philosophy in High Schools....................................................................................................... 27 Benjamin Lukey, University of Hawaii-MƗnoa A Temporary Fiction ................................................................................. 39 Craig Merow, Michigan State University Part II: Ethics in the Classroom Ethics and the Young Student: Philosophical Discussion as Ethics Education................................................................................................... 47 Sara Goering, University of Washington Ethics in the High School Classroom ........................................................ 57 Steven Goldberg, Oak Park and River Forest High School

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Table of Contents

Beyond Goofus and Gallant: Morally Charged Choices in Morally Complex Children’s Literature.................................................................. 69 Claudia Mills, University of Colorado Philosophy for Citizenship: Developing Civic Trust in our Philosophy Classrooms ................................................................................................ 79 Jen Glaser, Israel Center for Philosophy in Education Part III: Epistemology in the Classroom Teaching Epistemology ............................................................................. 95 David Hilbert, University of Illinois-Chicago Some Classroom Activities to Explore Epistemology with Young People...................................................................................................... 103 David Shapiro, Cascadia Community College What Do You Know? Epistemic Adventures in the Classroom................ 111 Wendy Turgeon, St. Joseph’s College Part IV: Metaphysics in the Classroom The Beginnings of Philosophy: On Teaching Metaphysics ..................... 125 Kirsten Jacobson, University of Maine Metaphysics in the High School Classroom ............................................ 137 Mitchell Green, University of Virginia Part V: Aesthetics in the Classroom Teaching the Philosophy of Art in Elementary School ............................ 151 Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College Scientific and Mathematic Aesthetics: Possible Pathways to Understanding ..................................................................................... 159 Matthew Hayden, Teachers College, Columbia University Part VI: Logic and Practical Reasoning Helping Students Move Beyond Skepticism and Relativism .................... 167 Arik Ben-Avi, Yale University

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A Philosophy of Education for Teaching Reasoning in Pre-College Classrooms .............................................................................................. 181 Maughn Gregory, Montclair State University Part VII: Assessment and Evaluation of Pre-College Philosophy Philosophical Questions about Assessment............................................. 201 Trevor Norris, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education What Can Psychology Contribute to the Teaching of Philosophy?......... 209 Deanna Kuhn, Teachers College, Columbia University Bibliography............................................................................................ 215 Contributors ............................................................................................ 219

INTRODUCTION

PLATO, THE SQUIRE FAMILY FOUNDATION AND RECLAIMING EDUCATION ROBERTA ISRAELOFF

The Squire Family Foundation began in 2006 during a conversation— between Gary Squire, whom I’ve known since middle school, and me. Gary studied philosophy, both at Yale and Oxford, before receiving a law degree from Harvard. But his legal career was short-lived; he quickly became involved in historical preservation in Washington DC, and ultimately turned to residential real estate development. As we talked about which of the many worthy causes he wanted his nascent foundation to address, it became clear that philosophy was his first love. In this light, the foundation repays the debt Gary feels he incurred years ago, as a philosophy student. PLATO, which held its first institute from which this volume sprung in June 2011, also began with a conversation. Two years ago, over a postconference drink, Jana Mohr Lone and I dreamed about bringing together all those in the US who were interested in and committed to doing philosophy with young students—whether they were already teaching philosophy, either at the pre-college level or at a college or university, or were interested in doing so. That there’s a need for an organization for all those interested in precollege philosophy is apparent. Until now, the task of interesting young US students in philosophy fell to a small group of academic philosophers, many of whom have been involved for years with the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Pre-college Instruction in Philosophy, who took the initiative and mustered the energy to create their own outreach programs in their communities. At the same time, a few enterprising graduate students created philosophical outreach programs at their universities. And in some schools, philosophically-inclined teachers pioneered and taught courses in their schools, often after mounting lengthy lobbying campaigns. Several centers existed—the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children and the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, for example—but by and large, most people

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PLATO, the Squire Family Foundation and Reclaiming Education

worked in isolation, largely unaware of other efforts. PLATO seeks to bring everyone in this field together. And though its goals may seem modest—creating a forum where teachers can share ideas and resources, meet new colleagues, find more training—I think we’re all launched on a task that is anything but modest. I believe that this is the start of an educational reform movement that bucks the tide. Instead of fretting about tests and answers, we’re encouraging students to ask questions and to question answers. Instead of telling them what to think, we’re asking them to examine how they think. Instead of giving teachers scripts to read—which is so demeaning—we want to give teachers the confidence to ask questions to which they may not know the answer. Instead of eliminating recess, we endorse playfulness. It’s not just about creating a philosophy class, launching a club or lunchtime discussion group in a school, or finding enough schools in an area to invite to a regional ethics bowl—though that’s where we start. To run the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I think what we’re really doing is reclaiming education. We’re trying to take it back from those who are inclined to think of education as a commodity, who claim that its products can be quantified, like computer chips, and that its methods can be improved by testing and more testing. Just because running a school involves elements of business—requiring budgets, payrolls, outcomes— doesn’t mean that it can be reduced to a business, that at heart it is an exchange of one type of service for another. We don’t consume books, we devour them, and the metaphors we naturally resort to, in talking about education, involve not balance sheets and accountability, but appetite, relationships and love. In a recent New Yorker review of two books about higher education, Louis Menand wrote (he was speaking about the humanities, but you can substitute philosophy) that we read “these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” He goes on to say that through the humanities we “acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, as a reflective and culturally literate human being,” and that this material “enlightens and empowers” us, whatever we end up doing. As Thomas Wartenberg said at a conference in 2011, by introducing young students to philosophy—even those in third and fourth grades—we’re giving them the opportunity to say to themselves, “Maybe I have a different future than the one everything else in my world seems to intend for me.” I would bet if we took a poll, most of us would report having had teachers who changed us, some of us radically, who put us on a different path. I’m the beneficiary of many of these teachers. What they all had in

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common was their passion. Even as a young student, I knew they had something meaty to say, that they loved the subject they were teaching. They seemed immersed in a body of material that seemed both ineffable, and larger than the next test or the semester grade. They were moved by what they were teaching, and they were interested in how this material grabbed us. Classes were transformational because we had an impact on each other. These teachers brought us, to crudely paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, face-to-face with something commensurate with our capacity for wonder. Teachers change lives. Philosophy teachers can radically change lives. Among the several goals that PLATO espouses, it is, at heart, about cultivating life-changing, world-expanding, opportunity-creating teachers. We’re a small counter-movement, but we’re approaching critical mass, we’re persistent, and we also have the advantage of being right. After five years of working with so many visionary philosophers, I feel as if I should be at least halfway to my honorary bachelor’s degree in philosophy. But I remain an English teacher at heart, which explains why, in thinking about this subject, my thoughts turn to William Butler Yeats’ famous poem, Among School Children. It tells the story of a 60-year-old statesman visiting a Montessori school—and it, too, begins with a conversation: “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.” Along the way Yeats mentions and meditates on some famous philosophers. And at the poem’s end, eight stanzas later, he’s still questioning, famously: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Clearly, it’s not just philosophers who philosophize. Some do so in meter and meter. All of us do so as children. The big questions come naturally to us. Why should we put them aside when we begin school? In short, the paths that bring us together this morning vary, but in the end, we’re drawn by our compulsion to ask questions, to question answers, and to value education—which also, we all know, begins in wonder.

PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION: A GATEWAY TO INQUIRY JANA MOHR LONE

Ordinarily when philosophy and education are mentioned together, the speaker or writer is referring to the field of philosophy of education or someone’s educational philosophy. They generally are not alluding to the relationship between the discipline of philosophy and K-12 education. This book seeks to illuminate that relationship and to demonstrate the ways in which philosophy can strengthen and deepen pre-college education. It’s sometimes said that children are “natural philosophers.” Young people are curious about the mysteries of the human experience and about questions such as the nature of identity, the meaning and purpose of being alive, and whether we can know anything at all. Pre-college philosophy takes as a starting point young people’s inherent interest in large questions about the human condition. Whether it’s reading picture books that raise philosophical issues with children in elementary school or studying Descartes with high school seniors, philosophical exploration begins with students’ inclinations to question the meaning of such concepts as truth, knowledge, identity, fairness, justice, morality, art, and beauty. How can philosophy contribute to pre-college education? Philosophy is grounded in questioning. The unsettled nature of most philosophical questions means that often it is the question that matters most, and not reaching a final answer. K-12 education does not generally value questions and questioning. When teachers pose questions in classrooms, usually they are not attempting to initiate an inquiry about the question or to demonstrate the value of questioning, but rather are seeking a specific answer from the students. In philosophy, however, questions are central, and they are the gateways to inquiry. Asking good questions is an essential skill for evaluating the flood of information that children face, for gathering what they need to make good decisions, and for conveying the gaps in their understanding of particular topics or situations. The more skilled students becomes at constructing good questions, the more able

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Philosophy and Education: A Gateway to Inquiry

they will be to think clearly and competently. And the only way to develop this skill is practice. Philosophy encourages students to question the assumptions that underlie our thinking and behavior. Engaging in philosophical inquiry trains young people to evaluate claims based on reason and analysis, rather than on unexamined beliefs and prejudice. Because philosophical questions are complex and often can be approached from a broad range of perspectives, they require careful reasoning. Philosophical inquiry thus facilitates student acquisition of some of the tools needed for becoming self-directed learners and learning to think for themselves. The emphasis on questioning and independent thinking, on uncertainty rather than certainty, can enliven classrooms and engage students by involving them in thinking about large important questions that matter to them. For the most part, although some high school teachers have taught isolated philosophy classes, philosophy has not been part of K-12 education in the U.S. A movement to introduce philosophy into schools, and to reclaim its importance as a core academic subject, has gained ground in recent years. Dozens of programs introducing philosophy into the pre-college curriculum have been started at universities across the country, and more and more teachers are becoming interested in bringing philosophical inquiry into their classrooms. As part of that movement, a new national organization, PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), has been formed to advocate for the introduction of philosophy into pre-college classrooms and to create and maintain connections between the education and philosophy communities. In June 2011, the first PLATO Institute was held at Teachers College, Columbia University. The articles in this volume came out of that conference. Part I of the book examines various issues involved in teaching philosophy to young people at different grade levels, including assessing what teachers need in order to teach philosophy in schools and describing several models for introducing philosophy into schools. Parts II through VI delve into ways to inspire young students to explore specific branches of philosophy—ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and logic— through literature, thought experiments, and games and activities, as well as traditional philosophy texts. The book’s final section considers student assessment and program evaluation, and analyzes the contributions precollege philosophy can make to education in general. Teachers and educators—and parents—all want young people to grow up with the skills they need to pursue their own goals and become productive and successful adults. Thinking independently and reasoning

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clearly are central to these objectives. The hard thinking that philosophical inquiry demands provides students with some of the analytic skills they need to engage in thoughtful decision-making throughout their lives, and the richness of the questions involved can help young people maintain their awareness of the world as marvelous and mysterious.

PART I PHILOSOPHICAL SENSITIVITY AND PREPARATION OF K-12 PHILOSOPHY TEACHERS

TEACHING PRE-COLLEGE PHILOSOPHY: THE CULTIVATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL SENSITIVITY JANA MOHR LONE

Introduction Over the last several years I’ve been thinking more seriously about what is required to teach philosophy well. In the fifteen years that I’ve been involved in pre-college philosophy, the pace of introducing philosophy into schools in the United States has been very slow. Over the last five years, however, there has been growing interest and engagement in the field, with new programs starting at many colleges and universities around the country. In this time, I’ve had several conversations with people working in the field about whether philosophy could one day be offered in every school in every state. My excitement about the growing interest in pre-college philosophy is tempered by a concern and a question. My concern is that it is not clear (to me, at least, and I think to many or most people) who is going to teach all of these philosophy classes. My question is: What kind of training is needed to teach philosophy and do it well? At this point, most of the people involved in this field are either philosophy faculty or graduate students, or high school teachers with backgrounds in philosophy. Most pre-college teachers have had little or no exposure to philosophy because, of course, for the most part, people educated in the US are not introduced to philosophy in any formal way unless they take a philosophy class in college. Although the philosophy faculty and graduate students interested in this field are often passionate about it, only a small minority of professional philosophers is drawn to this work, and those of us who are interested can only teach so many precollege classes. If pre-college philosophy classes are to be more widely available, then we must look to K-12 teachers. In this light, my question about what kind of training is needed to teach philosophy becomes a more critical one. A short and incomplete response

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Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

is that what teachers need to teach philosophy well varies, depending on the grade level of their students. I believe that more training in philosophy is needed for teachers seeking to teach the subject in upper-level classrooms. High school students, for example, and especially seniors and juniors, are capable of analyzing more complex philosophy questions and engaging in the study of primary texts. Therefore, the philosophy teacher who has been exposed to philosophical texts and trained philosophically is more likely to be successful at introducing philosophy to high school students. Elementary school teachers, however, also need philosophical training if they are successfully to facilitate philosophy sessions with their students. There have been several recent publications that have suggested that elementary school teachers do not need to know any philosophy to teach it. I disagree. Although introducing philosophy to younger children does not typically involve reading primary philosophical texts, but rather focuses on inspiring conversations among the children about philosophical ideas, nevertheless the teacher leading these discussions must have both a clear sense for how to motivate a philosophical conversation and the ability to recognize the philosophical content of the students’ statements and questions. To be able to monitor a philosophical dialogue and support its progress, a pre-college philosophy teacher of any grade must have sufficient training to be able to identify the philosophical substance and assumptions inherent in student remarks and the logical relationships between various students’ statements. It is my view that a foundational skill for teaching philosophy at any level is the development of what I am calling “philosophical sensitivity,” which I define as the capacity to engage in identification of and reflection about the larger questions that underlie most of what we think we understand about the world. I have written and spoken elsewhere at greater length about this topic, and my aim here is simply to provide an introduction to the subject.

Theoretical Conception: What is Philosophical Sensitivity? Philosophical sensitivity involves the development of our ability to identify and analyze fundamental questions about the human condition. My conception of this perceptual capacity is based in part on Aristotle’s idea of an innate faculty that we can develop over time and with training. Aristotle postulated a capacity for moral perception which, when cultivated, gradually enables us to perceive almost instinctively the

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important features of complex ethical situations. These perceptual skills, nurtured through training and experience, help us to foster a more nuanced ability to see aspects of moral problems that are not apparent to others who have not developed this capacity. Similarly, philosophical sensitivity is a perceptual capacity that involves awareness of the unsettled questions that haunt virtually every aspect of our lives. What makes me myself? Do I have free will? What, if anything, is the meaning of life? This capacity, when cultivated, allows us to discern the philosophically significant aspects of ordinary experience by identifying assumptions or unsettled questions that underlie situations. For example, a student might wonder whether it’s fair that children under age 18 don’t get to vote in national elections. Philosophical sensitivity helps a teacher notice that several philosophical questions are imbedded here: “What is fairness?” “What does fairness require?” “Is it always unfair to discriminate against particular groups?” “What is a child?” “What kinds of capacities are necessary to make good choices?” We exhibit philosophical sensitivity when we are able to identify and then explore the philosophical puzzles inherent in most situations; and as we utilize this capacity, it deepens. In other words, the more we notice and examine the philosophical features of our experiences, the more philosophically aware we become. How does one identify a philosophical question? Unsurprisingly, this is not an uncontroversial question among philosophers. It’s difficult to define the margins of philosophical questions without omitting something that should be included or including questions that we agree are not philosophical. However, one way to identify at least roughly when something is not a question of philosophy is to ask if it’s possible to settle it by reference to empirical facts. If so, it’s probably not a philosophical question, no matter how difficult it may be to answer. Of course, there are many hybrid questions, such as, for example, “What is the mind?” or “What does it mean to be alive?” that involve both philosophy and science, and for which there are no clear ways to delineate the borders for what’s philosophical and what’s not. In general, though, philosophical questions are not fully answered with facts about the world, and they tend to be questions that seem likely to be perennially unsettled. What makes a question philosophical is not delineated by subject matter—there are no limits to the questions that can inspire philosophical exploration. Although there are standard kinds of questions that are taught in, say, college introductory philosophy classes, such questions are a small subset of those that can lead to philosophical exploration. It is the response to a question that often determines whether philosophical inquiry follows.

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Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

A philosophical exchange can be triggered by an apparently simple question, if the conversation that develops is a deeply questioning one. Although some questions are more likely to lead to an inquiry than others, philosophical questions can be asked about almost every facet of life. What characterizes philosophical inquiry is not its content, but the approach with which a question is being explored. Much of what we think, do and say rests on unexamined assumptions that can be uncovered through philosophical scrutiny. Such scrutiny generally examines the meaning of a concept or idea, suggesting questions that are not likely to be answered in any final way. This doesn’t mean, however, that philosophical questions are questions without answers. Often students (and teachers) who are not trained philosophically understand philosophy as involving “questions that have no answers,” and assume that discussions about these questions simply involve students stating their opinions. However, there’s a clear distinction between a question that’s unanswerable and a question that’s contestable. An unanswerable question is one with no answers: “What does a married bachelor look like?” Philosophical questions are neither unanswerable nor just a matter of opinion. There are answers to them; they are just not incontestable, as once settled and final answers become clear the questions cease to be philosophical. Although philosophical sensitivity involves reflection about large and often abstract questions, for the most part these questions are raised in very specific ways. Our own unique experiences give us a particular philosophical perspective, and what we notice in the philosophical universe depends on that perspective. Philosophical sensitivity involves an awareness of the complex questions raised by the most ordinary aspects of everyday experience; it allows us to see (as Bertrand Russell put it) “familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.” This demands acute attentiveness to the ways in which the individual details of situations give rise to certain philosophical questions. Thinking about such questions generally leads to recognizing related questions, so that the more we examine this dimension of experience the more these kinds of questions leap out at us in everyday life. As philosophical sensitivity is nurtured over time, it becomes almost second nature.

Cultivating Philosophical Sensitivity Cultivating philosophical sensitivity involves training our perceptual capacities and, in particular, our skills at noticing the philosophical implications and assumptions contained in almost all speech and behavior.

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As we engage in philosophical reflection and are trained to see the philosophical features of experience, we come to understand the world differently. Our education and experience in philosophical questioning and deliberation enable us to notice and draw out aspects of experience that would otherwise remain elusive to us. Training in philosophical sensitivity doesn’t consist in learning a set of rules for when philosophical questions arise and how to address them. In another parallel with Aristotle’s description of moral perception, no decision procedure exists to govern how to identify and grapple with philosophical questions. As stated earlier, there is no list of all possible philosophical questions. However, basic knowledge about the core areas of philosophy—epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, aesthetics and the history of philosophy—is helpful for recognizing the philosophical content of various situations. A philosophically sensitive person is one who is able to view a circumstance or set of ideas and recognize the philosophical facets involved. In order to be able to do this, some background in philosophy is important. Probably the best initial way to develop one’s capacity for philosophical sensitivity is to gain experience participating in a group in which philosophical questions are identified and explored in a collaborative community, whether in a college classroom or some other elsewhere. For example, teachers can attend an intensive weekend training program during which they are introduced to the materials, discussions and conceptual methods relevant to teaching pre-college philosophy. They can then begin trying out philosophy sessions in their classrooms and, in ideal situations, participate in ongoing professional learning communities with trained philosophers. Another promising model is the philosopher-inresidence program, in which trained philosophers both facilitate classroom philosophy classes and provide a philosophical context in which schoolwide teacher training and support can be conducted. Partnerships between philosophy and education departments, whereby philosophy majors take education courses and education majors are introduced to philosophy, is another possibility, as is the creation of online communities of teachers and philosophers where they can collaborate on theories and methods. Most pre-college philosophy sessions, especially for younger students, are arenas for discussing philosophical questions, not lessons about what historical and contemporary philosophers have to say about these questions. That is, we engage young people in doing philosophy, rather than studying it. Instead of (or in addition to) reading the great philosophers and analyzing their arguments, young people explore in structured, collaborative classroom discussions the questions that puzzle them.

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Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

My view is that philosophically sensitive teachers can successfully facilitate such pre-college philosophy discussions without earning degrees or spending years of study in philosophy. In order to do so, two main pedagogical skills are essential: (1) the ability initially to motivate or inspire a philosophical discussion, and (2) a facility for shaping its progress.

What Makes a Discussion Philosophical? A philosophical discussion involves the following three elements: (1) examination of an abstract, general question that cannot be answered empirically; (2) arguments given to support the views offered; and (3) a progression or development of either the meaning of the idea(s) being explored or the participants’ understanding of a concept or concepts. To be able to inspire such a discussion, a teacher must be able to identify the philosophical content in students’ questions and comments, and to support the students’ efforts to engage in mutual reflection about the questions that most engage them. One method for doing this is to construct what is sometimes called a community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), in which the teacher’s role is to guide students in a dialogue about philosophical issues or concepts generated and explored by the group. There has been a great deal written about the formation of a CPI, but I want just to articulate what I see as four key features of a CPI: 1. The group is engaged in a structured, collaborative inquiry aimed at constructing meaning and acquiring understanding through the examination of philosophical questions or concepts of interest to the participants; 2. There is a consensus of what historically has been called “epistemological modesty,” an acknowledgement that all members of the group, including the teacher, are fallible, and therefore hold views that could end up being mistaken; 3. The teacher demonstrates a reticence about advocating his or her own philosophical views, and models a comfort with uncertainty since there are no final and agreed-upon answers to most of the questions being explored by the CPI; and 4. Participants refrain from using technical philosophical language or referring to the work of professional philosophers to construct their arguments. This encourages the group to focus on exploring the questions themselves and not the past or current history of the subject among philosophers.

The teacher guides the CPI without attempting to control it, a delicate balance between helping students achieve philosophical clarity and depth

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and refraining from imposing on the conversation the teacher’s own preferences for subject matter. Being able to discern which issues are philosophical and which are not is particularly important for ensuring the philosophical integrity of the CPI; that is, that it principally engenders philosophical conversations and not something else. In any pre-college philosophy session there will be periods of time when the conversation turns away from the philosophical into examples from science, say, or stories about personal experience. The point is not to prohibit such examples or stories, as they can be useful in the context of exploring a particular issue of philosophy, but to explore only those relevant to the conversation. The aim is to ensure that the discussion is primarily philosophical, as opposed to an opinion gathering, group therapy or other kind of exercise. Successful philosophy teachers have their own individual approaches for motivating this kind of philosophical community, but all are enthusiastic about philosophical inquiry, recognize where particular conversations might be headed, see critical junctures where the posing of a provocative question might motivate the discussion, and help students define clearly and examine carefully the questions they wish to explore.

Progress in Philosophical Inquiry The second practical skill a pre-college philosophy teacher needs is competence at shaping the progress of a philosophical conversation, which ultimately should proceed in a forward movement. This doesn’t mean that the discussion won’t loop back and forth, touching several conceptual issues and coming back to earlier questions, rather than developing in a straight line. However, there should be some forward progress—at the very least, a better understanding of what the participants in the conversation think, greater conceptual clarity, identification of key assumptions, and/or appreciation of alternative ways of viewing the subject. Two related proficiencies are essential here. The teacher must be able to listen carefully to, and recognize the assumptions underlying, what’s being said, and to articulate connections and distinctions among the views offered by the students. Shaping the progress of a philosophical conversation also involves recognizing when it’s going in circles and not moving forward in any meaningful way. At this point the teacher might consider what other ideas have emerged during the conversation and gauge whether the participants are interested in moving on to a new topic. Especially because philosophical conversations tend to end without a final resolution of the

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Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

question being examined, it’s important that the teacher help the group feel some sense of accomplishment at the end of a philosophy session by pointing out the progress that’s been made.

Why Philosophical Sensitivity? Philosophical sensitivity is important, it seems to me, because it is at the heart of the whole enterprise of bringing philosophy into the lives of young people and helping them to learn to think well and trust their own questions. One of the primary tasks of growing up is making sense of the world and one’s place in it. To do this effectively requires an ability to take control over one’s life, and this demands an ability to think effectively and to ask good questions. Thinking and questioning are central to philosophy. Because philosophical issues are complex, they demand rigorous and careful reasoning. Because they are unsettled, they inspire the formulation of clear and articulate questions. Each year my colleague David Shapiro and I teach an undergraduate class on philosophy for children, in which we use children’s books, games, and other activities to explore a wide range of philosophical questions. For many of our students, it’s their first introduction to philosophy, and for virtually all of them, it’s their first experience examining philosophical topics through children’s literature. They visit the Seattle-area K-12 classes we teach, and they often comment on the way in which the children’s discussions are quite similar to the ones we have in our UW class. One college senior recently wrote to us: The thing that meant most to me, the most valuable lesson I learned, came from visiting a session with a group of elementary students. I was really amazed at how well these children were able to discuss with each other. They came up with fascinating questions and well thought out responses; ones that were similar to the ideas that would be presented in our classroom. After that session I found new value and respect for a child’s intellect. I work with children so I know they are quite intelligent but I never really imagined holding a philosophical conversation with one.

Philosophical conversations with children engender respect for children’s ideas and perspectives, and allow adults to engage with children in an endeavor that involves thinking together. This is quite different from the traditional teacher-learner model: here the teacher is no longer the expert, but rather a co-inquirer who seeks with his or her students to explore philosophical questions.

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I believe that attentiveness to the philosophical dimension of life is natural for most children. They wonder about the significance of being alive, the nature of identity, the meaning of friendship and love, how to live good lives, and whether knowledge is possible. Yet continuing to wonder about these issues does not become part of the fabric of most adult lives. I think that this is a loss, and that encouraging children to engage in ongoing and critical philosophical reflection can be an important gift. Probing the assumptions that underlie what we say and do and critically analyzing the meaning of our experiences involve developing deep reasoning skills. When we engage in philosophical inquiry with children, we provide them with some important faculties for taking control of their futures and developing the confidence to build meaningful lives. Thinking about philosophical questions pushes us to remain alive to the profound mysteriousness of the human condition. This awareness can enhance the depth and richness of all of our lives.

PHILOSOPHICAL SENSITIVITY JEFF SEBO

Philosophical sensitivity is an open-ended topic, of course, because sensitivity in general, and philosophical sensitivity in particular, can have many different meanings. I’ll spend my time today talking about two of the meanings it can have, the relationship between them, and the implications for how to train people to teach philosophy at the K-12 level. The first kind of philosophical sensitivity I have in mind is sensitivity to our students’ philosophical perspectives, and how our teaching methods are likely to affect them. This is primarily a social skill: it involves knowing who our students are, and what they need from us in order to flourish in the classroom. Generally speaking (though there are of course exceptions on both sides), this is a subject that K-12 teachers know much more about than college professors or graduate students. K-12 teachers spend many years learning and practicing different ways of lecturing, leading discussions, running group activities, and so on, and developing an intuitive sense of which methods work best for which topics. In contrast, most college professors and graduate students spend very little time thinking about different teaching methods, to say nothing of teaching methods for K-12 students. In this respect, then, K-12 teachers are better equipped than college professors and graduate students to teach philosophy at the K-12 level: they are more sensitive to the needs of their students and, as a result, are more likely to know how to pitch the course material in a way that will reach them. The second kind of philosophical sensitivity is related to the first. This is sensitivity to the philosophical implications of different ideas. This is an intellectual skill more than a social skill: it involves being familiar with the different areas of philosophical thought, the different topics within each area, the different views one might have about each topic, and the different arguments for and against each view. It also involves seeing the big picture. Philosophy is a holistic discipline: we all make a vast number of philosophical judgments and assumptions in everyday life, and every philosophical judgment and assumption has implications for every area of philosophy. An ordinary moral judgment, for example, has implications

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Philosophical Sensitivity

not only for moral philosophy, but also for metaphysics, epistemology, language, logic, and so on. For this reason, it is crucial for philosophy teachers to have extensive training in philosophy. You need immersion in every area of philosophy in order to clarify your thoughts about any given area. And you need this kind of clarity in order to lead a productive philosophical discussion. Otherwise, your class discussion will be much less focused and productive than it could be, and your students will be much less likely to learn the most important lesson of all: that the practice of philosophy involves challenging all of your beliefs and values, and trying to make them coherent not just within, say, ethics, politics, or religion, but across the board. In this respect, college professors and graduate students are generally speaking better equipped than K-12 teachers to teach philosophy at the K-12 level—though again there are exceptions on both sides. To see how these two kinds of philosophical sensitivity are connected, we have to consider what the aim of philosophical education is in the first place. Many teachers, especially at the K-12 level, seem to think that the aim is to encourage our students to express themselves and to affirm themselves and each other. And they seem to think that the best way to do this is to ask students how they feel about different philosophical topics, and then to more or less affirm all their answers as reasonable and good. There is some truth to this: we should certainly encourage our students to express themselves and to affirm themselves and each other. But, first, this is not the only thing we should be doing: we should also be teaching our students to live the examined life. And, second, we won’t be able to accomplish either of these aims by affirming everything that our students say as reasonable and good (indeed, this kind of "everyone get in a circle and share your feelings about capital punishment" approach to teaching philosophy is a big part of why many K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents have such a low opinion of it). Rather, the only way to accomplish either of these aims, let alone both of them at once, is to challenge our students, encourage them to challenge themselves and each other, and hold them to very high standards of argumentative rigor when doing so. This will affirm our students by showing them that we respect them enough to take them seriously rather than condescend to them. And it will also train them to live the examined life by teaching them how to use valid methods of reasoning and pushing them to apply these methods to important philosophical and personal questions. This shows us how the two kinds of philosophical sensitivity I mentioned are connected: we need both of them in order to teach philosophy well. We need to be sensitive to philosophical perspectives of

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our students in order to challenge them in a way that affirms them, and we need to be sensitive to the philosophical implications of their ideas in order to challenge them in a way that pushes them to live the examined life. This has important implications for how we should train ourselves and others to teach philosophy at the K-12 level (and indeed, even at the college level). Given that, in America at least, few if any K-12 schools offer compulsory philosophical education, not many people are welltrained in both kinds of philosophical sensitivity: K-12 teachers typically have the first more than the second, and college professors and graduate students typically have the second more than the first. This means that college outreach programs, while great, need to tread carefully: college professors and graduate students need to consult with K-12 teachers, observe K-12 classes, and have K-12 teachers observe their classes and offer them advice and feedback. It also means that continuing education programs, like the kind that PLATO offers, while great, need to tread carefully too: K-12 teachers need more than a weekend workshop, online resources, and general philosophical acuity to teach philosophy well. Specifically, they need to either regularly consult with college professors or graduate students while teaching their course (just as college professors and graduate students need to regularly consult with them), or else get extended philosophical training before they teach a philosophy class—not necessarily a philosophy degree, of course, but a comparable amount of reading and writing, ideally with at least some feedback from trained philosophers. What this means in practice, then, is that if we want to train people to teach philosophy well at the K-12 level, we should focus on the longterm. Our current strategy of having some people learn how to teach K-12 students and then take a few weeks to learn some philosophy, and having other people learn philosophy and then take a few weeks to learn how to teach K-12 students, is not a permanent solution. We need college minors, majors, and even graduate programs devoted to training people in philosophy education. Not philosophy of education, although this is good too, but rather philosophy education. This would be simple enough to do: administrators love nothing more than creating new programs out of existing classes, and we could easily create philosophy education minors out of existing philosophy and education classes, perhaps with some outreach teacher training as well. This is where we need to focus our efforts right now. Outreach is great, because it helps us get our foot in the door. But if we want philosophy to be a regular offering in K-12 schools, let alone a compulsory one, then we need people trained to teach it from the ground up.

PHILOSOPHY BEYOND BOUNDARIES: A NEW MODEL OF PHILOSOPHY IN HIGH SCHOOLS BENJAMIN LUKEY

It is unfortunate that American public high schools and philosophy rarely intersect. It is also somewhat puzzling, for if philosophy is at its root the love and pursuit of wisdom, then it would seem an indispensible aspect of public education—indeed, of all education. Though perhaps puzzling, this infrequency is not exactly surprising since, even by the time Plato immortalized Socrates, philosophy had moved out of the gymnasium and agora and into the Academy, which was closer in concept to a private college than to a public high school. Nonetheless, the relative absence of philosophy and philosophers in public primary and secondary schools should trigger alarm bells, for it indicates certain disconcerting limitations of both education and academic philosophy as currently conceived and practiced.1 In his recent article for the New York Times—“What Is a Philosopher?” —Simon Critchley says that “the philosopher is the person who has time or who makes time.”2 If you have ever been in an American public school, you know that the predominant feeling is of being in a rush. Whether it is bells marking the beginning and end of class periods, or the relentless pressure to learn X, Y, and Z by the appointed date, or the stress of teachers knowing that taking an extra week reviewing fractions means the class will never get to triangles, the onrush of time is unyielding. The constant focus on time diminishes one’s ability to reflect and savor. One might argue, in the spirit of Socrates, that it limits wonder, understanding, and ultimately wisdom. If the unrelenting focus of school is to organize knowledge more efficiently for transmission and to absorb as much of that knowledge as efficiently as possible, then at what point are teachers and students allowed to step back and recognize what they do not know? To use an analogy, the rat that is successfully trained through a variety of the most proven behavioral modification techniques in the acquisition of many new skills and knowledge of many new mazes is still a rat. Nothing in this kind of training attempts to educate in the sense that Socrates attempted to

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educate the youth of Athens, i.e., the education of human beings. If public education solely focuses on training rather than educating, then it treats its students more like rats than people. However, the tension between the “timelessness” of philosophy and the bustle of public education strains both ways. As Critchley points out, philosophers have been the butt of jokes since the time of Aristophanes because, as ones who are unconstrained by temporal pressures in their thinking, they are at odds with a world in which time is money. “The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.”3 This cocoon of freedom insulates philosophers from the pressures that might undermine the pursuit of wisdom, but it also has the potential to make philosophy insular and irrelevant. If educators ask why a school would want or need a philosopher, the question implicates academic philosophy just as much as it implicates the vision of education. There have been many admirable efforts to introduce philosophy into the schools. In fact, the United States is somewhat of an exception in that its standard high school curriculum does not include philosophy. Even within the United States, many professors of philosophy undertake the admirable work of introducing university philosophy to elementary and high school students. I was one such fortunate public high school student, introduced to introductory philosophy classes over the summer at a nearby university. Although any freedom from the urgencies of a tightly controlled curriculum is a blessing, I now see the introduction of university philosophy to K-12 students as a case of taking the island to the schools rather than leaving the island. The Philosophy for Children (“p4c”) movement has arguably begun the process of leaving the island. Although the movement begun by Matthew Lipman in the 1960s can certainly be described as teaching philosophy to children, it is more accurately described as doing philosophy with children. Through the use of philosophical novels, Lipman shifted the focus of philosophy from the academic content focused on at the university level4 to the activity of philosophical inquiry. One of the many fruits of this movement has been the growing recognition of children as philosophers, i.e., as intellectual beings capable of engaging in the activity of philosophical inquiry. While the introduction of philosophy to young children, and the accompanying view of philosophy as a broader activity in which all of us can engage, has been hugely successful in returning philosophy to public schools, it still faces some limitations. Although p4c certainly represents a

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migration of philosophers away from the island, it remains largely a relationship between “islanders” and “recruits.” Many champions of p4c are often very willing to accept children’s capacity as philosophers, but are less willing to accept teachers as philosophers.5 Instead, teachers are often disparaged as an obstacle in the interaction of the two groups of philosophers, i.e., the professional philosophers conducting p4c lessons and inquiries and the students participating in these lessons and inquiries. This mistrust of teachers is by no means confined to p4c: I’ve heard many educators express the insulting desire to create a “teacher proof” curriculum. If philosophy is going to be a practice that both cuts across and informs diverse disciplines and infuses school culture, then teachers must be at the center of efforts to reclaim education and philosophy. For nearly three decades in Hawai‘i’s public schools, the approach of p4c Hawai‘i has been to begin with the teachers and to then find every way possible to support these teachers both in their classrooms and as faculty in a school setting.6 p4c Hawai‘i places university faculty into the school as a participating “Philosopher-in-Residence” (PIR), sends graduate and undergraduate students into the classrooms to support the teachers, and offers after school development meetings with teachers. This allows the teachers to develop their own intellectually safe community of philosophical inquiry and to grow as colleagues engaged in philosophically fruitful reflections on issues that matter to them. All this has helped to create a deep-seated commitment among the teachers to p4c as a basic approach to teaching, not just another passing programmatic fad. A PIR works not only with students, but with teachers as well. It is here that Lipman and the institute he founded (the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, or IAPC) also offer an important corollary to my generalization, borrowed from Critchley, of a philosopher as one who makes or takes time: Maughn Gregory, the current head of the IAPC, has clarified that the goal is not to simply stick academic philosophers into K-12 classrooms; rather philosophers must have a philosophy of education before they can begin to work with students and teachers. It is specifically in this latter area—involving teachers and school staff in philosophy—that I outline a way to extend the model of p4c throughout a school culture.7 For the past four years, through the support of p4c Hawai‘i and the Uehiro Foundation, I have served as a philosopher-inresidence at Kailua High School, a Title I public high school on the Windward side of Oahu. In this capacity, I have come to recognize that the ability and motivation to pursue philosophical inquiry is just as keen among high school teachers as it is among students. Furthermore, the

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challenges that teachers face in becoming active philosophers are very similar to those faced by students. Students are besieged by tests and often must deal with a lack of resources and unsafe environments; these same problems create obstacles for teachers as well. Perhaps the biggest obstacle for students, and especially for teachers, who want to actively participate in philosophy is the lack of time. Teachers want to think and engage their students but they feel a professional obligation to rush through content and projects so that students are prepared for tests and have assessable products. They want to reconnect with students and their subject but do not have time to plan for such activities. They are philosophers but do not have time to recognize their abilities or develop confidence in them. My role as a philosopher-inresidence is to help teachers take and make time for philosophical activity and pedagogy.

The p4c Hawai‘i Community of Inquiry Before examining the unique features of the philosopher-in-residence, it is necessary to explain the context in which such a role is created and sustained. Over the past twenty-five years, p4c Hawai‘i has focused on developing what we call intellectually responsible communities of inquiry. This idea of a community of inquiry lies at the heart of p4c Hawai‘i and guides the activity of the philosopher-in-residence. Although the idea of a community of inquiry is complex enough to warrant a book of its own, I will focus on four aspects that are of particular relevance in understanding the roles of a PIR, which I pronounce “peer.”

Not in a Rush The typical school day and the typical faculty meeting are directed by an agenda. This is often efficient, but it tends to prioritize the urgent over the important. Some of us are fortunate to be able to do our best thinking under pressure, but philosophy is typically not a timed activity. Recognizing that the purpose of philosophical inquiry is not necessarily a definite answer but rather an expanded awareness of the complexities of our concepts and beliefs, we are rewarded by slowing down and digging into questions than by rushing to the next “destination.” This may give rise to the most visible “border skirmish” as the philosopher enters a public high school, but it is mitigated initially by the conviction, and eventually by the evidence, that progress will be made. The idea that “we’re not in a rush” is perhaps the most basic understanding of p4c in Hawai‘i, but the complete

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thought, as articulated by Thomas Jackson, the Director of the p4c Hawai‘i Center, is that “although we aren’t in a rush to get anywhere, we do have an expectation that we will get somewhere.” Though the philosopher may have or make time, ideally she does not waste time. Tapping into the potential of individuals and communities that are not in a rush is an overarching goal of the PIR.

Intellectual Safety Part of creating an environment in which wonderment and questioning are encouraged and rewarded involves fostering what we call intellectual safety. In his article, “The Art and Craft of Gently Socratic Inquiry,” Thomas Jackson describes this attitude: Certainly, classrooms must be physically safe places. For dialogue and inquiry to occur they must be emotionally and intellectually safe as well. In an intellectually safe place there are no putdowns and no comments intended to belittle, undermine, negate, devalue, or ridicule. Within this place, the group accepts virtually any question or comment, so long as it is respectful of the other members of the circle. What develops is a growing trust among the participants and with it the courage to present one's own thoughts, however tentative initially, on complex and difficult issues. (p. 5)8

If the class, or the department, is intellectually safe, then people can voice beliefs that are tentative and uncertain without fear, and wonderment and questioning can take root. Of course, although intellectual safety may become a predominant part of an elementary school culture, as it has at Waikiki Elementary School (one of p4c Hawai‘i’s “model” schools), high schools are not usually associated with intellectual safety. Most of the visitors that I take to Kailua High School express some trepidation before we enter the campus; high school is often characterized as a place of ruthless social stereotyping, cliques, bullying, and seething hormonal tensions. It is important to recognize that this characterization should not be accepted as fact. Although an intellectually safe high school classroom may seem a naïve and overly idealistic goal, it remains essential to convince students, teachers, and staff alike that it is both desirable and achievable.

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Wonder Socrates is widely credited with saying that philosophy begins in wonder and it remains true today. Yet wonderment is not typically rewarded in a variety of school contexts. By the time most students reach high school, the sense of wonder they experienced, both academically and socially, has been replaced with cynicism: they feel that it is no longer “cool” to be in awe of, or confused by the complexity of their outer and inner worlds. Jackson identifies this loss as the situation to which education, specifically p4c, must respond. Frequently, by the time children reach 3rd grade, the sense of wonder with which they entered kindergarten—wonder out of which authentic thinking and thus thinking for oneself develops—has begun to diminish. By 6th grade it has practically disappeared. Children’s thinking focuses instead on what the teacher expects. A major contributing factor to this loss of wonder is the failure to properly nurture the true voices of children. Due to a variety of pressures, both internal and external, the typical classroom teacher does not appear to have time for children’s genuine wondering and questioning, from which structured inquiries can grow. (p. 4)

Furthermore, wonderment seems terribly inefficient for classroom learning; there are limitless things to wonder about but in any particular hour a teacher needs to keep students focused on learning a particular skill or chunk of knowledge. An abundance of curiosity, persistently asking “why,” is seen as both juvenile (think of a typical four-year-old) and disruptive. Moreover, even if a student’s question is complex and relevant, the teacher may not feel comfortable answering it due to uncertainty or time constraints. This in turn indicates that the absence of wonder is an issue for educators as well as students. With one small change, Jackson’s words above could equally apply to teachers and administrators as they do to students: “Due to a variety of pressures, both internal and external, the typical classroom teacher does not appear to have time for [his or her own] genuine wondering and questioning.” The PIR must model wonderment and questioning as both rewarding and productive activities for the entire school community.

Digging beneath the Surface When a classroom and a faculty have questions and wonder about the topic at hand, and have the time and a community intellectually safe enough to genuinely explore those questions and the connections to other

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experiences and thoughts they may raise, people should rightfully expect some kind of progress to be made as a result of such inquiry. p4c Hawai‘i generally refers to that progress as “digging beneath the surface.” One of the reasons that “digging beneath the surface” is a helpful phrase to use here is because different people make different kinds of progress; furthermore, there are many different ways to make progress in one’s own thinking. In a community we may each recognize that our inquiry helped us make progress in our thinking—we can agree that we dug beneath the surface—but each of us may have experienced that progress differently. Because each of us thinks differently and makes progress differently, we cannot expect a uniform answer to our inquiry (though it may be nice when genuine uniform agreement happens). However, we can hope that we make connections between our ideas and beliefs. We can hope that we might think about our ideas or beliefs in novel ways. Moreover, because of this novelty and connection-making, we may experience the confusion that both results from complexity and also drives us toward deeper complexity. In p4c Hawai‘i, we make use of the Good Thinker’s Tool Kit, developed by Dr. Jackson, consisting of seven “letters” that help us articulate the kind of thinking that we already tend to do in inquiry, whether scientific or philosophical. In other words, the Tool Kit both measures and fosters progress in an inquiry. By becoming more aware of the kind of thinking we’re engaging in, we are able to consciously push the inquiry to deeper levels and, by reflecting on the inquiry afterwards, we are able to get a sense of how deep we dug by the variety and frequency to Tool Kit letters used. Reflection and evaluation of an inquiry is also a fundamental aspect of p4c Hawai‘i and a practice that both articulates and contributes to progress in an inquiry. The reflection can be written or oral, twenty minutes or three minutes, but it must allow for the articulation and further inquiry into the criteria of the inquiry and the larger community that engages in inquiry.

The Philosopher-in-Residence: Extending the p4c Community of Inquiry Now that four basic aspects of a p4c Hawai‘i community of inquiry have been briefly explicated, I can now address some of the strategies that a PIR applies in navigating the borderland between philosophy and a high school. Returning to Critchley’s definition of a philosopher as one who takes time, the PIR, as a member of an intellectually safe school community, serves as a consistent champion of thinking together about what participants feel is important in the face of what is urgent.

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A high school PIR is no longer defined primarily as a facilitator of inquiry. In an elementary school setting, a PIR is primarily known as a facilitator of p4c inquiries with students, helping teachers acquire the knowledge and skills to facilitate similar philosophical inquiries. However, in a high school setting in which philosophy is not its own subject, the classroom teacher needs to facilitate inquiries. In these classrooms, the PIR serves more often as an additional participant or, depending on the context, potentially as a co-facilitator. The PIR also participates in classes even when no inquiry is being conducted. This kind of participation is important for several reasons. First, it helps to establish the PIR as part of the classroom community and the larger school community. Second, it is essential that the PIR have both a sense of what is going on in the classroom and shared experiences with the teacher, so that faculty inquiries and discussions can be fruitful. Third, it helps the PIR become more familiar with different pedagogical practices, which itself is beneficial both to the PIR and to the community of teachers. The complexity of the role of the PIR is captured in a reflection by one of Kailua High School’s English teachers: At first, I would clearly explain the role of the PIR. Oftentimes, people are threatened by visitors of a classroom especially repeat visitors. I would assure them the role of the PIR is not necessarily punitive, but it is a tool to help push the communities, push the thinking, and a tool to push the reflection of practices. One of the most valuable aspects of a PIR is that the PIR is another set of eyes that can understand what is happening within the community, thinking, classroom, and with the teacher. More importantly, this PIR has visited many other classrooms so he or she may have a wider view of what is happening beyond the classroom. Lastly, since the PIR has the ability to visit other classrooms, the PIR can suggest practices he or she has seen in other classes that work. (Tolentino, 2009)9

As evidenced in this reflection, the PIR engages in constant bordercrossing in two distinct capacities. As a resource for the enrichment of community and inquiries, the PIR serves the role of “timeless” philosopher. As a resource for practical change agent in practice and in terms of pedagogy, the PIR serves as a pseudo-consultant. Each of these roles requires a bit more illustration. The role of the philosopher as champion of the important in the face of what is urgent is illustrated by one of the early faculty meetings that I participated in with high school English teachers. The detailed agenda indicated that the meeting would focus on “vertical teaming,” the alignment of curriculum such that students would continue to develop their

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skills as they matriculated through high school. However, as is often the case, many other activities and responsibilities kept the meeting from getting started and its members from focusing on the agenda. Anxiety rose as people realized they were behind schedule. Then, the PIR asked them to make a distinction between what is urgent and what is important. This prompt helped teachers defer anxieties about scheduling and administrative expectations so that they could think about what is important about school, English, reading, writing, etc. The ensuing discussion was unhurried, focused, illuminating, and, in the end, accomplished nearly everything that was on the original agenda. This also illustrates the reality that what is important and what is urgent are not always incompatible, or that deciding to focus on one or the other necessarily creates tension. Indeed, we can discuss things that are important without having to sacrifice our urgent responsibilities. Furthermore, when we recognize that we are thinking about what is important, this can bolster our commitment to the duties at hand. Recently, a high school educational consultant organized an all-day meeting of an English Department to come up with a list of goals to pursue throughout the year. The overarching goal was to create a culture of writing at the school. The teachers successfully created a list of goals and were energized by the meeting. Because I was fortunate enough to participate in that meeting, I was able to identify a philosophical question that was lurking beneath the surface of the discussion. Two days later, during an after-school departmental meeting, I raised this very question: “Why should there be a culture of writing?”10 This prompted a rich philosophical discussion on the putative intrinsic worth of writing. Eventually, we were able to articulate their collective belief that writing has value because the individual’s beliefs and ideas carry value; and that individuals who are not competent in writing may not be able to attain their full potential in terms of contributing to society and public discourse, at least in contemporary American society. However, that the teachers reached a conclusion is less important than the fact that they engaged in a process of grounding their commitment to a plan of action in their deeply held beliefs about individuals and education. From Mr. Tolentino’s reflection above, it may sound as if the PIR also serves as a consultant, guiding teachers to improve lessons and classroom practices. Although this improvement certainly happens, the means by which it happens markedly differentiate the PIR from a typical consultant. The PIR is not an efficiency expert, armed in advance with all the answers and ready to provide pre-conceived solutions to whatever ails the classroom teacher. Instead, he or she is a co-inquirer. The goal of an

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inquiry is deeper understanding, and this remains the case when discussing lesson plans and teaching practices. The ability of the PIR to see a variety of lessons, class dynamics, and teaching styles enables him or her to provide valuable examples and evidence in such inquiry.11 The large number of variables within any community of inquiry—the particular strengths and personality of the classroom teacher is one of the most determinative—make it challenging for anyone to understand a particular community of inquiry, yet without this understanding, improvement is likely to be superficial at best. Notwithstanding the different variables, a community of inquiry composed of teachers and administrators is not unlike a community composed of students. What we see in p4c classrooms from kindergarten through twelfth grade is a deeper engagement (or a re-engagement) with schooling fueled by reinvigorated intellectual energy. This happens with teachers and administrators as well. Rather than thinking of meetings as mandatory drudgery, teachers see them as opportunities for reconnecting to what is important in education and as a means of tangibly improving their own practices. Just as p4c students may view themselves as intellectual contributors, a community of p4c teachers’ inquiry is more collaborative and philosophical. Recently, Kailua High School decided that it wanted to devote a significant portion of one of its Professional Development Days to p4c. Encouragingly, veteran p4c practitioners who had been working with the PIR were the ones who facilitated small-group inquiries with their colleagues. The intellectual invigoration and enthusiasm for discussion and learning from and with one’s peers was nearly palpable and continues to fuel the growing number of teachers who collaborate in an afterschool professional community of inquiry. Kailua High School has identified four pillars of p4c Hawai‘i that it incorporates into its professional and classroom practices: community, inquiry, philosophy, and reflection. The reappearance of “philosophy” as part of a school’s self-identification is particularly noteworthy, and is embedded in the school’s new vision statement: “Kailua High School students are mindful, philosophical thinkers prepared to pursue their goals and create positive change in the world.” Philosophy, broadly but not superficially conceived, is reappearing as a fundamental value within at least one American high school, driven by the community of administrators, faculty, students and the PIR. This conception of philosophy has empowered not only the students, but also the teachers: within their professional community of inquiry, teachers are responsible for their professional development, not those outside the classroom. More importantly, schools such as Kailua High School and Waikiki Elementary

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School reclaim philosophy as vital for education and hence enrich both the education system and the study of philosophy.

Notes 1

One could plausibly argue that the theoretical engagement with mathematics, the social sciences, and the physical sciences would be considered “philosophy” by the ancient Greeks. 2 Critchley, Simon. “What is a Philosopher?” New York Times, Opinionator. May 16, 2010. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/what-is-a-philosopher/ 3 Critchley, ibid. 4 Thomas Jackson has referred to this distinction as that between “Big P” and “little p” P/philosophy. The content of Big P Philosophy is the “-ers, -ies, and – isms”, i.e., the philosophers, branches or schools (such as epistemology, doxology, etc.), and labels and categories (such as feminism, determinism, etc.) that comprise the canon and discourse in professional publications. The activity of Big P Philosophy is the publication and presentation of work that addresses this content. In contrast, though certainly not in opposition, the content of little p philosophy is the beliefs, imaginings, and experiences of the individual and the activity is disciplined and rigorous inquiry into those beliefs, imaginings, and experiences. 5 This does not apply to the relatively small number of those fortunate to teach the discipline of philosophy in K-12 classrooms (many of whom have received advanced degrees in philosophy), but rather the majority of K-12 teachers who have received specialized training in other areas and often had minimal positive experiences with philosophy. 6 p4c is left in lowercase letters for two reasons: first, “philosophy” is intentionally lower case to distinguish it from the academic activities carried out in university departments; second, “children is intentionally lower case to differentiate it from the category of Children. p4c in Hawai‘i is philosophy for all in the community, not just those who are younger than 18. Thus, the lowercase “p4c Hawai‘i” indicates the movement in Hawai‘i away from the academic discipline found in Departments of Philosophy and toward a broader conception of “children” as anyone who remains full of wonder and open to examination of his/her beliefs and experiences. 7 There are many public school teachers who have received extensive training in university philosophy, receiving advanced degrees in philosophy. Yet, these teachers remain embedded in the institutions of public school, responsible for teaching their content area of English, Social Studies, etc. There are also teachers who have received extensive training in philosophy for children. These teachers serve as powerful resources for the philosopher attempting to integrate philosophy and the school curriculum. 8 Jackson, T. (2001). The Art and Craft of “Gently Socratic” Inquiry. In A. Costa (Ed.), Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking (3rd Ed). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Citation page numbers are from pdf copy of article available from the p4c Hawai‘i

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website: http://www.p4cHawai‘i.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Gently-SocraticInquiry.pdf 9 Taken from end-of-year evaluation of PIR initiative conducted by p4c Hawai‘i. 10 This is a question in which I think Socrates himself would have taken great interest. 11 The use of examples and evidence is what is captured with the letter E from The Good Thinker’s Tool Kit. The PIR applies and models the Tool Kit in all p4c inquiries.

A TEMPORARY FICTION CRAIG B. MEROW

I would like to see WANTED posters, like the one below, prominently displayed in elementary and secondary schools in all fifty states. Although the teaching of philosophy to precollege students is in its infancy in the United States, enough work has been done to demonstrate that younger children have much to gain by participating in the “great conversation.” Many of the fundamental questions that philosophers address come naturally to children. They are concerned about personal identity, freedom, justice, and questions of right and wrong. It is never too early to engage them in conversations about these important issues in a systematic way. The formal study of philosophy is a wonderful vehicle for teaching students critical thinking skills. The ability to analyze and formulate arguments is important for citizens in a democratic society. Consider the opportunities the following Summer Philosophy Institute would provide for helping young students develop logical reasoning skills while investigating important, profound, questions.

WANTED: A Few Deep Thinkers to Participate in a SUMMER PHILOSOPHY INSTITUTE Professional philosophers, high school teachers, and students in grades nine through twelve will come together this summer at West Branch Regional High School and Westville University to wrestle with perennial questions concerning such issues as justice, the problem of evil, the nature of reality, and ethical questions raised by recent developments in biology and medicine. Each of the courses offered in the SUMMER PHILOSOPHY INSTITUTE was developed and will be team-taught by a high school teacher and a college professor. Classes meet for two hours daily for six weeks at Westville University on Tuesday and Thursday and at West Branch High School on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. A mini-conference will be held on the final day of the Institute featuring guest speakers, a luncheon, and presentations of student work.

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The Great Conversation Instructors: Sandra D. Martin, PhD. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Westville University, and Karl H. Burgess, MEd. History Department Chairperson, West Branch High School Ever since Socrates began questioning his fellow citizens of Athens about the nature of virtue over two thousand years ago, mankind has been involved in a great conversation. Through the centuries many thoughtful men and women have confronted questions like the following: Are human beings made up solely of atoms, or do they have a nonmaterial mind? Do all events have causes? If so, how can we be free? Is morality simply a matter of convention, or are there actions that are absolutely wrong? Is there a god? If so, how can he/she allow innocent suffering? Is knowledge based on empirical observation? If so, can we ever be certain of any knowledge claim? Although final, certain answers to these questions may never be found, each of us must answer them for ourselves in order to make practical decisions about religion, government, and our place in society. In this class we will trace the development of ideas surrounding six fundamental philosophical questions from the fifth century BCE to modern times.

Plato’s Republic Instructors: William P. Getty, PhD. Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Westville University, and Garrett L. Brown, BA. Classics Department, St. Vincent Academy Alfred North Whitehead once remarked: “Philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Many of the fundamental questions of philosophy were carefully explored for the first time in the dialogues of Plato. In this course we will read the greatest book on political philosophy ever written: Plato’s Republic. We will think long and hard about its opening question: “What is justice?” We will carefully consider Plato’s claim that it is always in one’s best interest to act justly, and discuss his ideal society where justice is “writ large” and each citizen is assigned tasks for which he or she is naturally suited. A six-week immersion in this great work will provide a sound foundation for the further study of philosophy.

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Bioethics Instructors: Penelope G. Hillinck, MD, PhD. Director of the Center for Applied Ethics, Westville University, and Sally Anne Greenwood, MA. Science Department, West Branch Regional High School Recent developments in the biological and medical sciences have given us the power to manipulate living things in ways unimaginable a generation ago. Human embryos can be created in Petri dishes, mammals can be cloned, and chimeras with human and nonhuman components can be produced. Such advances have enabled the previously infertile to become parents, have led to more productive livestock practices, and offer the potential to end the shortage of organs for transplant. There are also possible negative effects. Science is moving faster than our political and legal systems can create appropriate regulations. Our moral traditions give us little guidance in this “brave new world.” In this interdisciplinary course we will discuss the scientific advances, the ethical questions they raise, and possible regulatory responses.

Key Components of the Plan Unfortunately, the Summer Philosophy Institute described above is fictional, yet it is feasible and likely to be effective if implemented. Each of the courses described has been offered at the secondary level with much success. The structure for the Summer Philosophy Institute is patterned after a similar adventure in mathematics that I directed at Germantown Academy. In many ways the proposal is well tested! Collaboration between university faculty and high school teachers: Although few high school teachers have an extensive background in philosophy, many are interested in incorporating philosophical ideas in their classes. Short workshops and online resources can be helpful but do not supply the in-depth support teachers need. Teachers and professors working together not only design better courses, but also often establish long-term, personal relationships that continue to enrich developing secondary philosophy programs. Multidisciplinary sponsors: The departmental structure of secondary schools in the United States is well established and well defended. Philosophy courses can fit into this structure in a number of ways. Many English and history departments welcome electives with significant philosophical content. Science departments are often interested in sponsoring ethics courses that focus on medicine, the environment, or

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A Temporary Fiction

technology. The three courses described in this paper were offered through standard high school departments. Classes held on a college campus: Few professors have the time or inclination to travel to a secondary school on a regular basis. Meeting with chaperoned students down the hall from his/her office twice a week, however, can often be squeezed into a busy schedule. If the material discussed in the institute class is similar to that covered in one of the professor’s undergraduate classes, little additional preparation is required. Cooperating high school teachers can use the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday meetings on the high school campus to preview difficult material, answer questions, and help students with writing assignments. Meeting on a college campus is also very exciting for young students. Devoting one’s summer to an academic pursuit is a lot “sexier” if it includes exploring a college campus. When asked about their summer, students would much prefer to say, “I studied philosophy at Westville University,” than “I went to summer school.”

Just do it! A single, enthusiastic, energetic, determined teacher or professor can gradually launch a summer institute with a minimum of bureaucratic hurdles to clear. It can begin with a single course offered through an established summer program. A teacher can write a short course description and search for a partner at local colleges and universities. Funding can come from tuition, summer program budgets, university outreach programs, and grants from foundations. Student interest can be generated through assemblies, philosophy clubs, and advisory or homeroom discussions. Once one course has been successfully introduced, it is often easy to involve other teachers and add additional courses. As soon as three or four courses are offered, a summer philosophical community with guest speakers, debates, and social events can be established. If students leave the first course in search of more, the groundwork has been laid for the growth of the program. The specifics of creating such a program will vary depending on the interests and strengths of the teachers and professors involved. A program may begin with a biology teacher interested in bioethics or a Latin teacher interested in Stoic philosophy. A university may be interested in developing an outreach program. The important thing is to combine the resources of our schools and universities, to be creative in finding places to introduce philosophical ideas, and to organize the course structure in

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such a way that experienced academics can become involved. This temporary fiction can become a reality.

PART II ETHICS IN THE CLASSROOM

ETHICS AND THE YOUNG STUDENT: PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSION AS ETHICS EDUCATION SARA GOERING

Questions of ethics and justice are a relatively easy entry into philosophy for young people. Students care, from very early on, about questions of what is right and wrong, and who gets to determine that and set the rules. Parents and teachers alike face the accusation, “That’s not fair!”—not only when the speaker feels slighted, but also when she worries about what is due to her friend or sibling or even the family pet. Also, many teachers and administrators are invested in helping children to do what is right, to shape their behavior so that they become trustworthy, caring individuals with a commitment to justice. As such, convincing teachers and administrators of the value of philosophical discussions for young people may be much easier when the focus is ethics, rather than, say, metaphysics. In the relatively recent past, many educators interested in ethics education have been attracted to the idea of “character education” to address issues of ethics. Character education programs and materials1 generally offer collections of classroom resources on moral virtues, often with designated “pillars” of character (e.g., trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship), stories heavy on lessons to be learned, or simple exercises on what a character trait such as honesty is and how it is enacted. For example, CharacterEd.net offers short tutorials on what honesty is and what a child should do in a variety of situations she might encounter, such as a circumstance in which she may be tempted to lie. To their credit, character education programs have recognized the importance of discussing morality with children, and the pillars of character they tend to recommend are fairly non-controversial. Further, their approach urges young students to recognize the limitations of a naively relativistic approach to ethics (one that seems to become increasingly common as students get older, so that college ethics professors

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must inevitably address and point out the flaws of this perspective). Though some degree of tolerance is a virtue to be encouraged, if ethics completely “depends on your culture” or, worse, is taken to be a fully individual matter, it will fail to support the possibility of critiques of historical and contemporary atrocities such as genocide, slavery, and torture. “That’s just what you think” or “That’s just what’s right for you” shuts down moral conversation, as opposed to initiating a reasonable discussion in which participants can learn from each other. Insofar as character education programs help children to see some of the limits of naively relativistic moral thinking, they are to be commended. Character education programs, however, tend to involve exhorting children to acquire certain character traits, and do not help children think through why such character traits might be important and what might constitute their limitations. Alternatively, philosophy for children is an approach that emphasizes learning to analyze moral problems in a reasoned and consistent fashion. Encouraging children’s philosophical thinking can also draw out the limitations of relativism, and in ways that aim to help children embrace the reasons behind as well as results of such inquiries. In doing philosophy with children, facilitators create communities of inquiry, which focus on the philosophical questions that perplex children.2 Through shared dialogue, students examine a wide array of possibilities and seek solutions to moral problems, and ultimately aim to move from thinking about specific instances to more general or abstract reasoning.3 Philosophy for children recommends getting students to think carefully for themselves about what the moral virtues and rules should be, how they are justified, and how they should be applied in everyday life. Virtues and the development of character may be part of the content, but they are typically not offered to young students as pre-determined answers, but rather as possibilities to be explored, interrogated, and accepted only after critical reflection on their meaning and value. Rather than having the aim of “civilizing” young students,4 engaging students in philosophical discussions is intended to take them seriously as moral agents, who are already engaged in moral thinking and may find themselves puzzled by apparent moral contradictions in the adult world. So, how might we engage students in careful moral thinking, if not through the use of banners for virtues of the month, moralizing stories, and positive reinforcement structures? Philosophical discussions typically begin with a prompt that is ripe for examination: a thought experiment, a controversial topic for debate, a reading, or even a game that highlights a problem in ethics. Students are then encouraged to think through possible

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positions, to explore the justifications for those positions, to evaluate the justifications, to imagine creative alternatives, and to figure out how they should respond to such moral situations. Although the discussion facilitator will surely have her own views on the topic, she is careful not to begin with her own views, but rather to help the students explore the topics from their own perspectives, given their unique experiences. She offers guidance in sorting out the positions, and perhaps plays “devil’s advocate” to help children see other perspectives, but she does not declare one answer obviously right, to be absorbed by each and every child. That said, she does not simply suggest that every answer is as good as any other (which would encourage the relativism to which many character education programs respond); rather, she pushes for reasons that can be offered in support of particular positions. When good reasons are difficult to supply, students will typically choose to dismiss a view, or may work harder to find and express a better reason. As such, good philosophy discussions on ethics occupy a middle ground between worrisome relativism and heavyhanded moralizing.5 When reasonable defenses can be offered for multiple perspectives, openness about the matter may be found acceptable. In this way, some relativism may be permitted, but never in its most naïve form. Rather, students may come to recognize that contextual features of moral situations do sometimes matter, and that overly grand universal claims may fail to provide appropriate guidance across the diversity of moral encounters. Recognizing these limits, though, does not lead to the kinds of relativism that shut down moral deliberation. Students are still encouraged to work together to craft solutions that seem reasonable, and that can withstand critical scrutiny from a variety of perspectives. How are such philosophical discussions of ethics conducted? As an example, a philosophical discussion on ethics might start with a thought experiment taken from the history of philosophy. In the myth of the Ring of Gyges,6 for example, Gyges finds a ring that makes the wearer invisible. He uses it to seduce the king’s wife, and overthrow the kingdom. Plato uses this story to reflect on human nature, and the reasons we act poorly or well in the world. If we could “get away” with immoral activities, given the opportunity to be invisible, would we? What would we do, and why? What stops us from doing those things given that we are visible? How does the threat of being punished relate to the wrongness of an act? Young students can easily imagine what they might do with such a ring, and then reflect together about the nature of morality. Is something wrong because doing it leads to punishment, or do we have an independent reason for thinking something is wrong and that’s why we require punishment? Students have fun with the thought experiment, and use it as a jumpstart to

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thinking carefully and critically about the reasons that back up common moral beliefs and social practices. Another kind of discussion might start with a controversial topic (e.g. the ethics of hunting or meat-eating) and lead to a debate and discussion of the reasons that can be offered for each side (or for the many sides, as may turn out to be the case). A graduate school friend and I had a fruitful session on the ethics of hunting with high school students from a rural school in Meeker, Colorado (a town where the local grocery store was covered with the heads of deer, moose, elk, and other trophy kills). Choosing a topic that students are passionate about helps to render the discussion not only richer and more robust, but also more relevant to their daily lives. In other cases, we’ve started with a standard moral dilemma (say, Kohlberg’s Heinz dilemma7), and asked students to think carefully about what Heinz should do and why. In discussion, they not only see that our moral experience is often ambiguous, involving competing demands, but also that whatever we do in such situations is likely to leave moral remainders that will continue to demand attention. In this way, philosophy moves beyond the “right thing to do” simplifications of much of the character education realm, but remains firmly committed to the importance of evaluating the moral implications of a variety of actions. Discussions centered on moral issues raised in children’s literature are also good entries into philosophy. For younger students, Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books raise interesting questions about bravery (in “Dragons and Giants”), willpower (in “Cookies”) and friendship (in “Alone”).8 Discussion leaders can have students read the stories aloud together and then pose questions inspired by the story, either questions designed to help structure the discussion or questions raised by the students themselves. Students become immersed in exploring and understanding the relationship between fear and bravery, the notions of moral responsibility and freedom, and questions about the nature and value of friendship. 9 For somewhat older children, discussion leaders might spark philosophical discussions from readings that are already part of the curriculum for English or social studies. By way of example, Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson, Scholastic, 1996) raises interesting questions about the morality of being excluded, treated as different and an outsider, getting revenge anonymously (and the hurt caused by that), and seeing that even bullies are people, with complex histories and morally ambiguous narratives. A fourth grade class I visited was reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Eleanor Coerr, Yearling, 1986). The story involves a young

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girl dying of radiation poisoning in post-WWII Japan, and trying to abide by a folkloric saying that a sick person can save herself by folding a thousand paper cranes. In our discussion, the young students were very interested in discussing what death is, why we all die, and how we live knowing that we will eventually die. They had a very sophisticated discussion about whether or not the girl really believed that she could be saved by folding the paper cranes, and what she might have been doing by folding them if she was not fully convinced of its effectiveness. They broached questions about how we should live, whether or not diversions (little projects or hobbies and pastimes that don’t amount to much) may still be important parts of life, and why we often avoid directly discussing death. In discussing these topics philosophically, students of all ages come to think more carefully about what they believe, gain experience in carefully considering other perspectives, and learn, in the process, to act more respectfully to each other. The process of doing philosophy involves learning how to disagree without fighting or feeling hurt—how to argue without coming to blows. Philosophy certainly can involve a sort of intellectual fight (as students struggle to figure out how best to defend their own positions, both in the face of the counterviews presented by others and the counterexamples or inconsistencies they recognize in their own positions), but by developing the skills needed to reason together, and to acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, it also offers students a way to respectfully disagree. A good community of inquiry will not only enhance students’ thinking about particular ideas, but will also demonstrate to them why it is important to listen carefully and respectfully to the contributions of others in the community. Indeed, philosophical inquiry provides a model for “getting to the heart” of a disagreement, so participating in a community of inquiry should help students to practice these skills. Passion about a topic is not to be dismissed, but the importance of listening carefully and reasoning together is rewarded. Thus, by doing philosophy in a community of inquiry, students gain not only cognitive skills for thinking about ethics, but also behavioral skills that are important for living moral lives.10 In addition to enhancing cognitive and behavioral skills, participating in philosophical discussions can help young students come to understand what a philosophical question is and why it matters, and they may then pick up on matters of moral concern that are not always addressed by the adults in their lives (e.g., the problem of homelessness, what constitutes fairness in the household [who does the dishes], or why we lie to telemarketers). In a delightful TED talk, Adora Svitak, a then-twelve-year-

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old author/student, commented that the word “childish”—typically associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking—is considered a put-down in the adult world. Svitak wryly advises us to look at the world we’ve created; perhaps “childish,” she suggests, should apply more to adults or have its meaning reconceived. She recommends that we might want to aspire to be more like actual children, in that they are typically open to new ideas, concerned about justice, motivated to do what is right, and optimistic that things can change.11 Indeed, as we mature, we tend to adjust ourselves to the world in which we live, but in youth, we are often eager to reshape the world around us. Acknowledging Svitak’s point surely doesn’t commit us to turning our responsibilities over to children, but it does recommend at least a bit more recognition of how comfortable we can become with “background” injustice, how desensitized to inequality and discrimination. If this project of philosophy for children all sounds great, we might wonder why it is not already being done in the classroom. What has kept philosophy from the regular curriculum, or even just from being a way of addressing issues that are already in the curriculum? To help answer this question, I recommend Katherine Simon’s book Moral Questions in the Classroom. For her project, she sat in on high school classes—in English, history, and biology—and observed how good teachers are able to engage their students in careful discussion of moral issues related to the various topics they cover (e.g., War and Peace, the U.S. Civil War, questions about pregnancy and the creation of life). Yet she shows how too often teachers—even otherwise good ones—push off moral questions (giving the unintended message that they are unimportant or optional) or dismiss them as unanswerable (“we could argue about that all day”; let’s get back to the facts), or allow students to briefly debate them, but with no direction or guidance for achieving forward progress (i.e., in the discussion, anything goes, and the result is somewhat like bad talk radio). She then shows how great teachers are able to encourage their students to ask the big questions and think through them, not only as a way to excite them about the subject matter, but also to show linkages between subjects. She quotes philosopher Nel Noddings: “[W]hen we consider those things that matter most deeply to human beings—the meaning of life, the possibility of gods, birth and parenting, sexuality, death, good and evil, love, happiness—we may well wonder how the standard set of subjects became our curriculum” (quoted on p. 83).12 Moral philosophy needn’t be excluded from the curriculum because it seems overly academic or too difficult for young students; it may simply be left unaddressed because teachers are not comfortable with its open-ended nature or confident about

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their own thinking on moral issues. Training teachers to engage the students in philosophical moral discussions (or sending in trained philosophers to lead such discussions) thus enriches the existing curriculum. Most young students respond very positively to the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions of philosophical topics, and they appreciate the assistance in thinking through the issues. In my experience, they are caught by the philosophical puzzlement; their excitement and passion translates into eagerness to learn, and expanding areas of interest. We never seem to have enough time to cover all of their questions and concerns. They may start with a clear view on what is the right thing about a particular topic, and end up less sure of that view and more able to see the other perspective more robustly. Sometimes they switch their views. They say things like, “Philosophy is hard; it makes us really use our brains” and “It helped me to see things from different perspectives.” But they enjoy the challenge, and they ask for more. Are there any dangers in taking a philosophical approach to helping young students understand ethics and morality? Some people may wonder whether it is appropriate to ask open-ended questions about whether lying or cheating is wrong. Perhaps children need a firmer hand, and more exacting guidance about how to do the right thing. I don’t think so. In my experience thus far, we haven’t had any teachers or parents worry about students feeling less secure in their sense of morality. Rather, adults often discover that sometimes they need to justify their own practices more fully, or even consider changing them. Teachers also get treated to an open discussion of why students might consider cheating on an exam and how to respond to that. For example, I once had a 4th grade boy who said he’d cheat on the exam if he had the invisibility ring. The other students pressed him on that plan, and he acknowledged that he wouldn’t learn everything, but he wasn’t sure he needed to know it all. Then there was a nice discussion of why some things are not strictly speaking necessary for our future jobs, but might be important for our individual development and being well-rounded, how cheating might be tempting again, and what would happen if we all cheated whenever it was convenient for us to do so. A further example, one with my own kids, involves an episode of lying to get out of taking a bath. I asked my daughter (then three years old), “Did Daddy have you take a bath last night, when I was out?” She paused, then said “Yes.” (She was not, at that time, a bath-lover.) I questioned her, given the hesitation, and gave her a chance to recant. I told her I’d check with Daddy. She stuck to her story, which was indeed a lie. After some

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serious discussion, she temporarily lost some privileges, to help show her that lying is not acceptable. Then a week later, it was April Fools’ Day, and I got her with a story that we were moving to Africa for a fellowship I’d received. In our family, we tease a lot, so she was okay with that. But when I suggested she use this story in her preschool classroom, she wanted to know why this kind of lying was okay. This led to an interesting discussion about teasing, sarcasm, tall tales, and outright lying. At the end of it, I think we all realized how much more complicated the world is than a simple rule—“never lie”—can contain. Does it matter if these young students leave philosophy discussions thinking that adults are less sure of their own arguments? One might worry that their faith in adults could be shaken, and that they need that solidity to help ground their own thinking and give a foundation to their development. I would argue, however, that seeing adults thinking carefully and even struggling to answer philosophical problems can make young people more comfortable with uncertainty. They may recognize that the world is not given to us in black and white, but rather with a magnificent gradation of colors and possibilities. Further, experience with philosophy (and adult’s uncertainties) may also make young people more prone to making arguments for their own case—whether it’s about not eating their full dinner, getting to watch a movie, or whatever else. While that can be frustrating for parents (and teachers), it’s good for kids. The more they learn to use their best reasoning skills to navigate through the world, the better off they’ll be.

Notes 1

For example, Character Counts! (http://charactercounts.org/), Character First! (http://www.characterfirst.com/), William Bennett’s popular Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster, 1996), and CharacterEd.net (http://charactered.net/). 2 For a variety of examples of how this can be done, see Gareth Matthews’ book Dialogues with Children (Harvard University Press, 1984), Thomas Wartenberg’s book Big Ideas for Little Kids (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), Michael Pritchard’s book Reasonable Children (University Press of Kansas, 1996), and Philip Cam’s book Thinking Together: Philosophical Inquiry for the Classroom (Hale and Iremonger, 1995). 3 See the chapter “Guiding a Philosophical Discussion” pp. 102-130 in Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Frederick Oscanyan’s Philosophy in the Classroom (Temple University Press, 1980). 4 This claim is made by Michael Josephson, founder of Character Counts!, who sees the program as a response to earlier values clarification programs which seemed, in his eyes, to encourage relativism. Of course, this “civilizing” aim not

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only suggests that children are not already moral agents, but also that they must be led to conform with accepted rules of thinking and behavior. One critic of character education writes of Character Counts!, “its heavy reliance on external reinforcement, mostly in the form of social approbation for good deeds, the moral life risks trivialization: it becomes a series of unconnected acts responding to the word of the week or the citizen of the week. The moral life may become synonymous in the child’s mind with obeying rules and vying for the monthly trustworthiness award.” On this view, the “civilizing” function actually works against moral development. Peggy Geren “A Critique of Character Counts! as a Curriculum Model for Explicit Moral Instruction in Public Schools” (accessed online 2/13/2012 at http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwsfd/2001/Geren.PDF). 5 It is perhaps important to acknowledge that “good” philosophy discussions may be difficult to identify (given that a discussion that appears to have gone nowhere may still have served to deepen the puzzlement, or motivate the problem, or it may demonstrate how certain avenues of thinking that once looked promising are in fact deeply problematic). Also, facilitators are imperfect, and may sometimes overplay their own views, or back away too readily from points that deserve a stiffer challenge. (For more discussion of the good facilitator issue, see a collection of papers on Thomas Wartenberg’s book Big Ideas for Little Kids in the journal Theory in Research and Education [forthcoming]). 6 Found in Plato’s Republic, Book II. 7 Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of stages of moral development used a dilemma in which Heinz needed a drug to save his sick wife. He couldn’t afford the drug, which was produced by a local man, and sold at great profit. The man refused to work out a deal (giving the drug away, offering a payment plan, etc.), and so Heinz considered stealing it in order to save the life of his wife. 8 The first two stories are from Frog and Toad Together (Arnold Lobel, Harper Collins, 1979), and the latter is from Days with Frog and Toad (Arnold Lobel, Harper Collins, 1984). See Thomas Wartenberg’s excellent website Teaching Children Philosophy for interesting lessons ideas: http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/wiki/Main_Page. 9 Several websites now collect ideas for raising philosophical discussions with kids through literature. See especially Thomas Wartenberg’s Teaching Children Philosophy http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/wiki/Main_Page, and the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children’s website http://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter/ 10 This link between philosophy for children and non-violence has been theorized by Monica Glina: “Democracy as Morality: Using Philosophical Dialogue to Cultivate Safe Learning Communities” Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis 29(1): 31-38, 2009; the development of behavioral and social skills have been a core part of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC, at Montclair State University) model, and evidence of improvements in social and behavioral skills following thinking through philosophy interventions is reported in Steve Trickey and Keith Topping’s “Philosophy for Children: A Systematic Review” Research Papers in Education 19(3): 365-380, 2004.

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11 “What Adults Can Learn from Children” http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html 12 Katherine Simon Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Interestingly, Simon never uses the word “philosophy” to describe the kind of questions and discussions she thinks are so valuable. Instead, she uses the term “moral and existential questions” to capture this area. Perhaps this is a sign of how philosophy is understood as esoteric or inaccessible to many K-12 educators.

ETHICS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM STEVEN GOLDBERG

Students share common ground as moral agents who routinely face questions of fairness, obligation, and utility in their daily lives. Although they have strong beliefs about morality and won’t hesitate to voice them, students often struggle to clarify or defend their opinions. In tandem with careful reading of philosophical texts, guided discussion of thought experiments and cases can be an engaging and effective teaching method that helps students make their intuitions explicit, identify tensions or inconsistencies in their moral beliefs, and develop and defend their own arguments. This approach also can illustrate important features of ethical theories and show possible flaws or weaknesses as students evaluate competing ethical claims.

Making Intuitions Explicit Sally and Jack are in love. Jack is called up into the army and has to go away to fight in the war. However, he survives and he sends a message to Sally that, if she still loves him after all this time, she must meet him at the far side of the raging river at daybreak on a particular day. If she doesn’t turn up then, he will assume that she no longer loves him and he will leave the area forever. Sally travels some distance and reaches the raging river the afternoon before she is due to meet Jack. Unfortunately, the river is in flood and there is no way she can cross the river without a boat. There are four houses next to the river and she decides to ask each occupant for help. At house #1 she explains her situation but the owner says that he’s sorry but is just too busy to help. At house #2 she gets the door slammed in her face before she can even finish explaining—through the letter box the man inside tells her to “Go away” because “I’ve got enough problems of my own” and that “It’s none of my business.” At house #3 the occupant turns out to be a hermit—he tells Sally that he has become so disgusted with the world that he no longer has any contact with it. Therefore, on a point of principle he cannot help her since it would mean breaking his promise to himself. At house #4 Sally again explains her situation. The man listens carefully and then says he would help her but only if she slept with him

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Ethics in the High School Classroom that night. Sally considers her position and feels she has no alternative but to agree. The next morning the man rows her across the river at dawn where she is reunited with Jack. Not wanting to start their life together by being dishonest, Sally tells Jack what had happened. When he hears, Jack is appalled, calls her a slag (or something like that), and says he never wants to see her again. Then he storms off. Sally begins to cry at which point Prince Charming arrives at the scene, hears the story and promises to marry her.

I introduce the above Raging River scenario to begin a unit on ethics. After individually ranking the “moral goodness” of the seven characters, students work in small groups to reach consensus and record their ranking on the board. Groups often disagree sharply in their respective judgment of what constitutes moral goodness. For example, one group might conclude that because the hermit has committed himself to a principle, his actions are commendable. Another might be less impressed with the hermit’s consistency. Because he has severed himself from the community, the hermit arguably has abdicated moral responsibility and robbed himself of moral agency. If the student places moral weight on contractual obligation or social utility, the man in house #4 arguably is praiseworthy. Others find this reasoning disturbing. They want to say that Sally has been exploited, that her dignity as a person has been injured. The activity forces the individual student to reflect carefully on what it means to be good, to appreciate how moral perspective may vary among her peers, and to begin thinking about how a theory of morality can have strong or weak justification. The activity also enables students to discern the major approaches to ethics. I then administer a survey that includes sections on morality and the law, morality and religion, morality and personal point of view, objective morality, and philosophical ethics.1 The “true-false” questions on the Worksheet on the Nature of Morality are meant to force students to identify their moral beliefs and to see how, or how well, they cohere with each other. After filling out the survey, pairs of students check responses for internal consistency, compare their patterns of responses, and probe sources of disagreement. For example, let’s say the student completing the morality and religion sections marks “true” statement (1), “God’s forbidding an action is what makes that action morally wrong” and marks “false” statement (2), “God forbids an action because it is morally wrong.” If she also marks “false” statement (3), “If God forbade ice-skating, then ice-skating would be morally wrong,” responses to (3) and (1) would be inconsistent with each other. The student might be disturbed by the apparent arbitrariness of God’s ban on ice-skating and change her

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responses to (1) and (2). But then she also would have to confront the implication that the standards of morality are knowable independently of divine authority or command.

Twin Challenges to Ethics: Ethical Relativism and the “Why Be Moral?” Question Some students are skeptical about the enterprise of ethics and suspect that morality is reducible to either socially accepted customs or veiled selfishness.2 I take the twin challenges of relativism and egoism seriously, confronting them directly as a preliminary to analysis of standard theories in normative ethics. Students respond “true/false” to another set of statements on the morality worksheet that helps them scrutinize claims for ethical relativism: 1. Different societies often have different standards of right and wrong. 2. Whatever a society holds to be morally right is in fact morally right. 3. It is never justified to judge the morality of the actions of people in one society from a point of view outside that society. 4. You can never be right in disagreeing with the prevailing moral opinions of your society. 5. American society is better for having rejected slavery. 6. A whole society can’t be wrong. 7. People used to think that the earth is flat. 8. The Nazis did some things that are objectively morally wrong. 9. Germans should have judged the Nazis to be acting immorally. 10. Gandhi is objectively morally preferable to Hitler. 11. You can never understand a society other than your own well enough to justify criticizing it. 12. Torture is rarely, if ever, objectively morally acceptable. 13. We should try to make the world a better place.

Students tend to agree with statement #1, a benign claim that moral beliefs and practices vary among cultures, but often disagree sharply about statement #2, a more robust and normative claim that a moral belief derives its validity from cultural acceptance. Does the acceptance of statement #1 require agreement with statement #2? By using the example of the shape of the earth, we can easily see that this is not the case. If one culture believes that the earth is flat and another that the earth is round, it doesn’t follow that the earth is not objectively flat or round. Similarly, if Society A believes that female circumcision is right and Society B believes that it is wrong, the fact of disagreement alone would not justify

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the conclusion that female circumcision is objectively neither right nor wrong. Students may want to defend statement #2 by asking “who’s to judge” the morality of female circumcision or any other controversial practice or belief. Behind the question is a worry that rejection of ethical relativism leads to absolutist intolerance and a smug sense of moral superiority. Teachers should point out that it is possible to make reasoned moral judgments and to encourage tolerant responses to behavior that we consider wrong. For example, even if I disapprove of a parent who uses corporal punishment with her child in public, I also may respect parental autonomy and choose not to involve the police or social service agencies. And if I have good reasons to justify my criticism of corporal punishment down the street, I could have a strong, impartial justification for judging the practice of female circumcision in Sudan as well.3 In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, tells a story about a shepherd who discovers a ring that makes him invisible. Setting aside past loyalty, once he figures out how to use the ring, the shepherd Gyges doesn’t hesitate to seduce the queen, kill the king, and seize the kingdom. Glaucon is suggesting that if we could act with impunity, without worrying about getting caught, it would be irrational for us to follow the dictates of law or conventional morality, and we would do all kinds of things we wouldn’t do when we fear the consequences. I then ask students, “In all honesty, what would you be willing to do with the ring that you are unwilling to do without it?” In the lively discussion that ensues, many students admit that they would violate privacy, steal, or doctor transcripts and test scores. A few add that they would use violence against their enemies. Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) dramatizes the “Ring of Gyges” scenario and makes compelling viewing for students. In keeping with Allen’s controlling metaphor of moral vision and blindness, Judah Rosenthal, the central character in the film, is a prominent ophthalmologist who has his mistress murdered when she threatens to tell his wife and destroy his reputation. Consumed with anguish and guilt, he recalls his father’s admonition that the penetrating eyes of God see all and that the wicked will be punished. Judah resists a powerful urge to unburden his conscience by confessing the crime. Months later he is relieved to learn that a drifter with a long criminal record has been charged with the murder. The crisis lifts and Judah returns to his cocoon of wealth and privilege. But the film doesn’t give Glaucon the final word, and neither does the Republic. The final scene of Crimes and Misdemeanors replays images of

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Judah’s scheming and heated arguments with his mistress as the voiceover of a philosopher delivers the message that each of us is the sum of his choices. Judah has escaped legal punishment, but he also has chosen a life of deception and cynicism. How can he cultivate genuine relationships of love and friendship while concealing his sins and posing as a virtuous man? The argument against Glaucon’s suggestion is that ruthless pursuit of self-interest compromises our prospects for lasting happiness and personal fulfillment. The film is provocative because the question of why we should be good has no easy answer, but it does suggest the possibility that Judah is ignorant of his genuine self-interest. Socrates’ reply to Glaucon also appeals to enlightened self-interest. Once we fall under the spell of the ring, reason is no longer sovereign and we become enslaved to our desires. We shouldn’t use the ring because it is addictive, and addiction isn’t good for us.

Utilitarianism First articulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and later by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as a useful tool for public policy and social reform, utilitarianism is particularly rich in practical or “real world” cases that exercise students’ moral reasoning. The theory’s basic claims are fairly straightforward, but judgment of their merit requires analysis. First, a right action is defined as one that aims at promoting the best consequences for all those who will be affected. Second, the best consequences are those that produce the greatest happiness, understood as net utility or the balance of benefits over harm. Third, utilitarianism demands impartiality, ruling out favoring one individual or group’s interests over others. All interests count equally. Utilitarianism is attractive to students who bristle against the rigidity of moral rules that do not bend to circumstances. Two cases—the trolley case and the story of cannibals at sea—suggest moral flexibility as a strength that lends plausibility to utilitarianism. In the first case, if my runaway trolley will kill five workers unless I can divert it to a spur where a single worker would be killed instead, then should I kill one to save five? In the second, similar case, three starving crew members killed and ate an ailing cabin boy. However repugnant eating human flesh strikes us, should all the crew members perish if cannibalism enables three of the four to survive? Students also can see utilitarian justification for euthanasia or assisted suicide where patients who suffer terribly without hope of relief choose to end their lives. The absolutist prohibition against taking one’s life, a command traditionally anchored in religious doctrine, is challenged

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by the utilitarian requirement of context-sensitive judgments regarding the quality of life. Critics complained that utilitarianism degrades humanity by making a good human life comparable to a pig’s contentment while feeding at the trough. Mill sought to rescue utilitarianism from its critics by distinguishing higher from lower kinds of pleasure. Because humans have more elevated faculties than pigs, it takes more to satisfy a human.4 How do we know which pleasures are higher or lower? According to Mill, if we want to know whether, say, Bach is a higher quality of pleasure than the Beatles, or Moby Dick than Jaws, let the expert who is knowledgeable about both reach an informed judgment. I ask my students whether Mill’s reply to his critics is persuasive. Some think the distinction between higher and lower quality of pleasure is arbitrary, especially if we follow Mill’s advice to ignore cultural authority or a sense of obligation that might influence our judgment. Others make an impassioned case that although the pleasures of reading Shakespeare are harder to acquire, they are more complex, subtle, lasting, and satisfying than the momentary, superficial pleasures vampire enthusiasts derive from reading Twilight. I borrow an exercise from Michael Sandel’s televised lectures on justice to put these competing arguments to a test. After showing short clips from a Hamlet soliloquy, Fear Factor (a reality TV show), and The Simpsons, I ask students to rank the clips based on preference (what they like, or what gives them pleasure) and again based on what they consider higher, more noble, or intrinsically superior. My students, like Sandel’s at Harvard, overwhelmingly like The Simpsons best but rank Hamlet the highest pleasure. In what sense, I ask, does Hamlet qualify as the highest pleasure for those who do not find watching Hamlet at all pleasurable? A second objection questions Mill’s contention that justice not only is consistent with utilitarianism but generally required by it. Mill seems confident that the principle emphasizing the greatest happiness for the greatest number and principles of justice can be harmonized, but we can easily see how they might collide. For example, let’s say that five patients, all of them distinguished in their respective fields, are in the hospital where each will die without a separate organ. A single healthy person without employment or dependents is waiting nearby for routine tests. It seems obvious that in general justice would not permit cutting up the one unsuspecting patient to distribute his organs to the extraordinary five. But the appeal to utilitarianism would surely justify the procedure. The final objection I discuss with my students challenges the utilitarian tenet that happiness from a moral point of view is all that matters. Borrowing Robert Nozick’s thought experiment of an “Experience

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Machine,” I tell my students that although I like philosophy, I also enjoy tinkering and have managed to merge my interests by building in my garage a happiness box. Once inside the box, I assure them, they not only would experience the greatest pleasures imaginable but that these pleasures also would be flexible and last the duration of their lives. I also emphasize that they would live at least as long inside the box as they would outside. Some students are skeptical because a pleasure, they assert, always loses intensity over time without the contrasting experience of pain. I reply that perhaps they are rationalizing suffering that would now be avoidable given the gift of my happiness technology. Other students complain that a single pleasure lasting a lifetime would be monotonous. I reply that since the box produces uninterrupted pleasure, they never would experience tedium or boredom. When I take a poll, the majority typically accepts my offer. The few who resist often raise the further objection: happiness isn’t all that matters; happiness isn’t the sole intrinsic good. Why, they ask, would anyone sacrifice for the sake of happiness the authenticity of experience, or personal autonomy, or artistic creativity, or relationships of friendship and love?

Obligation and Respect In shifting our focus from consequences to obligations, I ask students why they should keep a promise to their parents rather than break it. Breaking it, some say, would get them in trouble or be met with stern disapproval. Others simply say that having made the promise is reason enough to keep it. But why should such a backward-looking reason matter, especially if the benefits of breaking the promise outweigh the cost? I share a famous case from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to explore this question with students. Let’s say that Jonathan is a child whose mother teaches him always to tell the truth. The next day the bell rings and a menacing figure brandishing an AK-47 appears at the door. When he barks, “Is your [expletive deleted] father at home?” should Jonathan tell the truth? Kant’s surprising answer is that Jonathan has an obligation to be honest under all circumstances as a “…sacred and absolutely commanding decree of reason, limited by no expediency.”5 Perhaps it would be possible for a precocious Jonathan to define his obligation differently. He might resolve his dilemma by adopting an alternative principle: for example, always tell the truth except to protect innocent life. But Kant’s larger point is that because we owe others respect, we are wrong to deceive them regardless of consequences.

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The Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale University from 1960 to 1963, helps sharpen Kant’s point. Its purpose was to test ordinary citizens’ obedience to authority. Unsuspecting subjects were told that they were participating in a memory experiment. They were instructed by the experimenter to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity when the “learner” incorrectly answered the subject’s questions. The learner was an accomplice who convincingly feigned intense pain. Milgram’s findings showed that sixty percent of his subjects were obedient to authority. When I tell my students that this research has been enormously useful to the field of social psychology, many of them balk at my defense of Milgram and insist that no benefit could possibly justify the systematic deception of the experimental subjects. Following Kant’s line of reasoning, they argue that using a person merely as a means to an end is always wrong. Persons are not merely conduits for the satisfaction of one’s own desires or interests. They are rational agents who freely choose their own goals and purposes and are therefore uniquely worthy of respect. Students also readily see that the Milgram experiment violates the moral requirement of impartiality. Stanley Milgram should have treated others as he would want others to treat him. The requirement of impartiality helps explain why Kant appealed to a universal principle, or categorical imperative, in the case of the inquiring murderer. He proposed that we specify a duty by taking a maxim, or rule of thumb, and try universalizing it as if it were a law of nature. I ask students to try universalizing the following maxim: Whenever I take the train to work, rather than buy a newspaper, I’ll read over another passenger’s shoulder. They see immediately that doing so would be impossible since no one would purchase a newspaper and no one could read over another’s shoulder. Kant’s test looks a bit like utilitarianism since it asks what would it would be like if everyone did what I have in mind for myself. But the point of the test is to determine whether I would violate my duty to others by making an exception of myself. I then raise the difficult question with students whether the death penalty is compatible with respect for persons as ends in themselves. Kant addressed the question in a scenario of a remote island society that is about to disband, its citizens to scatter around the globe. A single prisoner sits in a cell awaiting execution after committing murder. Should the society as its last official act carry out the sentence? Students easily see that the utilitarian would let the prisoner live since spending his remaining days on the island would preclude doing further harm. Execution would have no deterrent effect and cause needless suffering. They suspect that Kant also would disagree with the death penalty. How, after all, can you show

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someone respect by putting him to death? Yet Kant argued that we participate in a public violation of justice if we fail to execute murderers. He reasoned that the criminal draws a proportional punishment to himself through his deliberate choices. We respect those choices when we treat him accordingly.6 Note that although a system of rehabilitation for wrongdoers might seem more humane and compassionate than retribution, Kant would say that society is violating the wrongdoer’s dignity by merely using him to achieve a utilitarian aim. And if someone who has violated the law is mentally incompetent, we may show pity by providing needed treatment, but he would lack the autonomy and rationality necessary to merit our respect. After discussing Kant’s defense of the death penalty, I invite them to challenge his position by appealing to the same principles of impartiality and respect. The concepts of obligation and respect also are central to debate on controversial issues in bioethics. For example, students analyze the following case in which a family conceives a second child strictly for the purpose of saving the life of the first child who is suffering from leukemia: On April 3, 1990, a baby girl was born to a couple that conceived the child to serve as a bone marrow donor for their daughter, Anissa, who was dying of leukemia. Abe and Mary Agola, who live in the suburb of Walnut, named the baby Marissa Eve. Fetal tests showed that the baby’s marrow was compatible with Anissa’s, and doctors said the transplant could occur in six months. There was a 70 to 80 percent chance that the transplant would cure Anissa. Mr. Agola had to undergo a reversal of his vasectomy, and Mrs. Agola, who is in her mid-forties, had only a 73 percent chance of conception and a 23 percent chance of conceiving a child who would be a compatible donor. Medical ethicists voiced qualms about creating one child to save another. The baby, they said, was not conceived as “an end in itself, but for a utilitarian purpose.” The Agolas said they were hurt by such talk and that they would love the baby even if it proved to be an incompatible bone marrow donor for their stricken daughter. Patricia Konrad, the couple’s physician, said the bone marrow transplant would pose little risk for the baby. The procedure requires the infant to be put under general anesthesia to block pain while a needle is inserted into the hip bone to remove the marrow. Leukemia, a cancer of white blood cells, is typically treated by killing blood-producing cells with chemotherapy radiation and then transplanting compatible bone marrow into the patient. After waiting almost two years, the couple had failed to find a suitable living donor for Anissa. The odds of doing so are about 1 in 20,000. Mr. Agola told a reporter, “We just can’t stand idly by and do nothing about it and wait for Anissa to die.”7

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Students first formulate a rule to see whether it can be universalized without undermining their own ability to act in accordance with it. The appropriate rule in this case might be, “Parents may conceive children whose tissue is used in an attempt to save the life of another person, as long as the child is not harmed by the use of the tissue.” Students generally agree that in light of withering criticism of the Agolas in the press, widespread acceptance of the rule would make it easier for them to apply it. The question of whether the second child is treated as an end in itself is more debatable. Do the Agolas threaten the freedom, dignity, or wellbeing of Marissa by conceiving her for the sole purpose of saving Anissa? The fact that Mr. Agola had to reverse his vasectomy indicates that the couple did not intend to have more children. In this sense, Marissa was “used” to save the life of Anissa. Yet some students challenge the claim that Marissa would be used as a “mere” means. She would not be physically harmed by the medical procedure and we have no reason to doubt the Agolas’ claim that they would love her as much as Anissa. Some students object that Marissa would be damaged emotionally by the eventual knowledge of the purpose behind her birth, especially if the bone marrow transplant failed. Perhaps the strongest argument in defense of the Agolas is that unless Marissa was conceived “as a means,” she would not exist at all. She would not have the possibility of developing into a person with the rationality and autonomy necessary for human dignity. Although students seldom reach agreement on whether the Agolas passed the second test, they appreciate the force of non-consequentialism and can see more clearly how concepts of duty and respect can be meaningfully applied to challenging cases.

Other Directions I have sketched directions for teaching ethics in high school, but the landscape is dotted with other possibilities. I’ll mention a few that have enjoyed success in my classroom. I have asked students to apply Aristotle’s theory of human excellence and virtuous character to the story of Phil Connors’ moral transformation in the popular film Groundhog Day.8 I also have linked Aristotle to the contemporary issue of genetic enhancement. If we should shape ourselves through the development of virtuous character, should we also promote “living well” (eudaimonia) through the genetic modification of traits that might make our children smarter, kinder, or healthier? 9 Simon Wiesenthal’s wrenching personal story in The Sunflower draws students into thoughtful discussion of the nature, powers, and limits of

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forgiveness.10 Wiesenthal, a Polish Jew, was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp where a dying SS soldier sought his forgiveness for terrible crimes. Haunted after the war by his decision to remain silent, Wiesenthal invited theologians, writers, and philosophers to offer their own reflections on his moment of decision. I ask my students to evaluate the varied, often competing, arguments from the symposium in light of their own beliefs about justice, compassion, and human responsibility. Once we have delineated the theories of utilitarianism and nonconsequentialism, I draw from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and sociobiology of E.O. Wilson for radical critiques of normative ethics. Sections from the text of Genealogy of Morals and Gay Science introduce students to Nietzsche’s controversial views on traditional moral philosophy as “herd morality” arising from fear and resentment. I don’t believe that teachers should shy away from provocative works with mature high school students, but we do need to guide them through both close reading of the text and careful assessment of its claims from a critical distance. E.O. Wilson argues that philosophy is obsolete and that the speculation of ethics should be supplanted by the empirical explanation of morality through evolutionary biology.11 Equipped with the necessary reasoning skills and habits of mind, students can probe seductive but facile arguments like Wilson’s. One student writes, “‘Ought’ requires moral justification, which does not arise from an empirical explanation. An explanation of how natural selection shaped tendencies of behavior fails to show why we ought to behave one way rather than another.”12 This astute observation from a student paper reminds us of why philosophy should be taught in American high schools.

Notes 1

The morality worksheet was developed by Kenneth Alpern at DePaul University. Teachers may want to show why “selfishness” and “self-interest” should not be used interchangeably. See, for example, James Rachels’ discussion of psychological egoism in his The Elements of Moral Philosophy, second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), Chapter 5. 3 For arguments against the dependency thesis, see Mitchell Green, Engaging Philosophy: A Brief Introduction (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), pp. 85-87. 4 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 11. 5 Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Altruistic Motives” as cited in Rachels, pp. 122-123. 6 Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Life from Altruistic Motives” as cited in Rachels, p. 122. 7 C.E. Harris, Applying Moral Theory, pp.156-157. 2

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8 See Joseph Kupfer, “Virtue and Happiness in Groundhog Day” in Visions of Virtue in Popular Film (Boulder: Westview, 1999) pp. 35-60. 9 For a cautious defense of genetic enhancement, see Ronald Green, Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). For an argument against genetic enhancement, see Michael Sandel, The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Enhancement (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2009). 10 Simon Weisenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1998). 11 E.O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality” in Atlantic Monthly, April 1998. 12 Robin Jia, “The Sociobiological ‘Oughts’ that Philosophically Aren’t,” unpublished paper written for Philosophy A, Oak Park and River Forest High School, 2011.

BEYOND GOOFUS AND GALLANT: MORALLY CHARGED CHOICES IN MORALLY COMPLEX CHILDREN’S LITERATURE CLAUDIA MILLS

Children’s literature has always been a vehicle for transmitting values to young readers. Arguably its very origin was in moral didacticism, in animal fables and allegories designed to present children with cautionary tales of good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished, complete with “the moral of the story” spelled out explicitly at the end for handy memorization. Much mass market children’s literature, such as the Berenstain Bears series by Stan and Jan Berenstain, continues this tradition. The titles alone of many of the three hundred books in the series telegraph their simplistic moral message: The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room, The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV, The Berenstain Bears Say Please and Thank You, The Berenstain Bears and the Wrong Crowd, The Berenstain Bears Hurry to Help, etc. Young readers are not likely to miss the point that they themselves should clean their rooms, turn off the TV, speak politely, avoid the wrong crowd, and hurry to offer assistance. A similar moral simplicity is on offer in the enduringly popular feature in Highlights magazine, Goofus and Gallant. In comic strip format, it shows two boys, one who is perennially doing the obvious right thing and one who is perennially doing the obvious wrong thing. In the August 2011 issue, for example, in the first pair of cases, “Goofus leaves the water running,” while Gallant is shown turning off the outside faucet; in the second pair, Goofus expects his dad to go get a napkin for him at the table, while Gallant offers, “I’ll get us some more water.” Two letters from children reprinted below the strips show the degree to which children internalize the messages offered by Goofus and Gallant. “I felt like Goofus when I didn’t listen to our mom and our dog got loose,” writes Lilly, age 11, from British Columbia. “I felt like Gallant when I wrote thank-you cards for my birthday all on my own,” writes Dmitri, age 6, from Connecticut. Goofus and Gallant, almost a parody of preachiness, is tons

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of fun, and children enjoy the feeling of ethical mastery that comes from their ability to recognize who is acting well and who is acting badly. The desire to be like Gallant rather than Goofus clearly motivates children to imitate Gallant’s prissy behavior and to avoid the boorish behavior of Goofus, as the reader letters testify. But Goofus and Gallant don’t engage children philosophically. Reading about allegedly exemplary characters who make the right choice in situations in which the right choice is straightforwardly obvious may provide children with ethical role models, but isn’t likely to engage them in any deep ethical reflection. In order to be engaged philosophically through children’s literature, children have to be presented with stories that invite them to ask genuine ethical questions; in order to develop skills in philosophical inquiry, children require stories about characters who face genuine ethical choices. Let me sort philosophically/ethically rich children’s literature into several categories. First, we can share stories that may well have been originally intended to present a clear “moral” to children but then we can go on to problematize this moral in interesting ways by engaging children in thought-provoking discussion about it. Second, we can share stories in which the correct ethical choice is clear, but so difficult to do for a variety of reasons—personal, cultural, existential—that we can understand, if not completely condone, someone’s making the wrong choice. Here people make the wrong choice in circumstances that lead to pity if not to pardon. We can also share stories where people make the right choice in circumstances in which doing so is not only virtuous, but heroic. Finally we can share stories where there seems to be no clear and obvious right choice, stories where the character we care about faces a genuine moral dilemma such that we could imagine a virtuous person choosing either way; we ourselves struggle over what the character should do, or what we would do in her place. And even if there is a choice that seems ultimately to be the right choice, it takes a certain degree of practical wisdom to figure this out, and the story itself is a means to help children develop just that kind of practical wisdom.

Problematizing the Moral Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his brilliant masterpiece on the philosophy of education, Emile, rejects most attempts to moralize to children via standard didactic fables as grotesque failures. He offers a scathing imagined conversation with a young child who is first hearing “The Fox and the Crow” by La Fontaine. In the fable, a sly fox gets a vain crow to

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surrender the cheese he is holding in his beak by flattering the crow into giving a demonstration of his beautiful singing voice; the crow opens his mouth to sing and in the process drops the cheese, which is avidly snatched up by the fox. Rousseau notes that the story, intended to get listeners to see the folly of succumbing to flattery, actually teaches instead the benefits that can come from being a flatterer. Children learn that there are people “who lie and flatter for gain,” and they “laugh at the crow, but they all love the fox.” Now, Rousseau was hardly a fan of encouraging children to engage in precocious philosophical reasoning about ethical rules and values. Nonetheless, the kinds of questions he raises about La Fontaine’s fable can provide a model for adults who want to resist Rousseau’s strictures against childhood philosophizing and get children to engage in the very kind of questions he puts into the mouth of young Emile. Children can be asked about the fox’s behavior as well as the crow’s behavior. Yes, the fox taught the crow a lesson, but did the fox himself act ethically? Is it fair to trick someone just because that person is vain and credulous? Many familiar fairy tales invite this kind of ethical destabilization occasioning deeper moral reflection. Consider “Jack and the Beanstalk.” In the story Jack sells his mother’s precious cow not for needed money but for allegedly magic beans. Despite his mother’s rage and punishment of Jack for his disobedience, the magic beans do grow into a beanstalk reaching up to the sky; Jack climbs the beanstalk, enters the abode of a fearsome giant, steals the giant’s treasure, and ends up killing him by chopping down the beanstalk and leaving the giant to plunge to his death. Jack is clearly intended as the hero of this story: plucky, brave, concerned to provide for his poor mother. But it certainly seems possible to appraise the ethics of Jack’s behavior in other ways. His disobedience fortunately happened to pay off, but what if it hadn’t? Does Jack succeed through courage or through what has come to be called “moral luck”—where the same behavior might generate good results or ill results, through no credit/fault of the agent, and yet be assessed differently on the two scenarios? And what legitimate claim does Jack have to the giant’s treasure? How is his behavior different from sheer burglary? The giant does make bloodthirsty commentary about grinding Jack’s bones to bake his bread, but does the giant have a legitimate grievance against Jack’s trespassing, even if the giant’s proposed sanction against Jack for doing so is too harsh? And how much does the story trade on mere prejudice against giants for being unusually large and unattractive in appearance, at least to humans?

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Or consider “Rumpelstiltskin.” The miller makes a boast that his daughter can spin straw into gold (this claim is problematic ethical behavior in itself). The greedy king puts the miller’s daughter in a locked room filled with straw; if she fails to spin the straw into gold, she’ll be executed; if she succeeds, he’ll make her his wife. (Lucky her to get such a nice guy as a potential husband!) Enter Rumpelstiltskin, who offers to spin the straw into gold for her—for a price: on the first night, her necklace; on the second night, her ring; and on the third night, when she has nothing left to offer, her first-born child. When the time comes for the miller’s daughter—now queen and a new mother—to make good on her promise, she balks. But hasn’t she made a promise? Why is it permissible to break this promise? Should Rumpelstiltskin have helped her for a lesser price, or for no price at all? Is there a general obligation to assist others in dire circumstances? Or would his repeated assistance merely reward boasting fathers and greedy, domineering kings? One final example to consider here: “The Fisherman and His Wife.” In this story, the fisherman catches a magical flounder (an enchanted prince) and kindly releases him. Later the fisherman’s wife insists that her husband should ask the flounder to grant a wish to show its gratitude: she wishes to live in a cottage instead of a hovel. The wish is granted. But then her wishes escalate: she wishes to live in a mansion, then a palace, to be king, emperor, pope, and finally to make the sun rise and the moon set. Enraged at her endless greed, the flounder sends her back to the hovel, all her wishes undone. While it’s clear that it is excessive greedy ambition to want all that the fisherman’s wife ends up wanting, at what point should she have been content with what she had? Should she have been content with the cottage, one step up from the hovel? Or a house one step nicer than that? Or should she have been content with the original hovel? What is it appropriate to wish for, and why? What ethical limits are set on our wishes? And is it appropriate to ask for a reward in exchange for a kindness, in the first place? Thus, even seemingly simple and simplistic tales intended to give a clear moral message to children often reward closer examination and can be vehicles not for easy moralizing but for difficult philosophical reflection.

Complex Character Assessments in Challenging Circumstances Sometimes we can make clear moral judgments about the right thing and wrong thing to do in a range of situations, while not being able to

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make similarly clear moral judgments about the individuals who act in particular ways. For example, it is wrong to tease or bully others, especially those disadvantaged by prejudice and poverty; it is wrong to steal from someone helpless and to express racist sentiments, or to vandalize someone’s car (especially the car of someone who has been a kind friend and benefactor). And it is right to resist injustice and to protest on behalf of civil rights; it is right to try to save oppressed people from torture and death. Even in these cases, however, it can be less clear what kind of moral judgments we should make about the persons who do, or fail to do, these things, given the circumstances in which they find themselves. A clear moral judgment of an act doesn’t translate necessarily into a clear moral judgment of the agent. Some philosophically rich children’s stories show characters who act badly, but for a range of reasons, inviting more subtle and nuanced ethical reflection about the moral complexity of our choices and what they reveal about our character. In Eleanor Estes’ classic story The Hundred Dresses, Maddie follows the lead of her friend Peggy in teasing poor Wanda Petronski, who wears the same shabby dress to school every day. The girls play a “game” with Wanda, inviting her to provide elaborate details about the “hundred dresses” that she claims to have in her home. Only on the day of the classroom art contest, when Wanda’s hundred drawings of a hundred different dresses are displayed, do the girls understand what Wanda was talking about. But by then it is too late: Wanda’s father has withdrawn her from the school, moving his family to the city where they will face less prejudice for their Polish ethnicity and poverty. In the story, the teasing of Wanda is clearly represented as wrong. But Maddie goes along with it, fearful that if she doesn’t, Peggy will turn on her next, and also simply reluctant to confront a close friend who in many ways is a good, caring person (kind to animals and protective of little children). Maddie finally reaches the poignant resolution that she will never again stand by silent as someone else is made miserable; Peggy also comes to regret her cruel teasing and seeks to make restitution to Wanda. So the story does conclude with both girls learning a “lesson” about making the correct moral choice. But the thought-provoking and discussion-generating aspect of the story concerns Maddie’s willingness to acquiesce in wrongdoing out of fear. Who acts more badly, Peggy (who initially doesn’t see that what she is doing is wrong) or Maddie (who knows it is wrong but goes along with it, anyway)? The story raises important and penetrating issues about the role that bystanders play in allowing wrongdoing to continue; readers can criticize both Peggy and

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Maddie, while still understanding why they act as they do and speculating about their own choices and behavior in similar situations. Katherine Paterson’s heroines often act badly—extremely badly—in the course of her stories, but in a way that still leaves them as sympathetic characters for young readers. Gilly Hopkins steals from a blind, elderly, black man; she also leaves a racist poem for her African-American teacher. These are grievous misdeeds. But the reader understands that Gilly acts as she does because she is a foster child, abandoned by her idolized mother; Gilly has moved from foster home to foster home because she is determined to make herself unlovable. Vinnie in Flip-Flop Girl vandalizes the car of the teacher who has been particularly supportive of her in the wake of her father’s death because she feels so betrayed at the thought of the teacher’s impending marriage. Does Gilly’s private pain legitimate her wrongdoing? No. Does Vinnie’s private pain legitimate her wrongdoing? No. But in both cases it makes the wrongdoing understandable. Children can be led to discuss reasons why people act wrongly and how others might react to their wrongdoing in ways that are constructive rather than destructive, compassionate rather than judgmental. Some characters act in ways that are morally mistaken, not because of peer pressure or personal pain, but because they are situated in a cultural milieu in which it is very difficult to have the moral clarity that later generations will claim to possess. Two interesting titles here are Sheila Gordon’s 1987 novel of apartheid, Waiting for the Rain, and Australian author Jackie French’s recent novel, Hitler’s Daughter. Waiting for the Rain shows the friendship between two boys—privileged Frikkie, who will be the heir to his father’s plantation, and Tengo, the black boy who works on Frikkie’s farm as a child but who grows up to be a freedom fighter. When the two boys, now men, meet later in life, Frikkie is stung by Tengo’s accusations that he was an agent of Tengo’s repression. When Frikkie tries to excuse himself by pleading, "It's not fair, Tengo. You can't blame me for everything that's wrong with this country," Tengo replies, "I'm not blaming you for that... I'm blaming you for not knowing. For not wanting to know" (195). Later, Tengo tries again to explain: "'You still don't see,' he said wearily, 'you don't see that the thing you did wrong was not notice that anything was wrong"' (197). In Hitler’s Daughter one child spins out a mesmerizing story to the other children waiting with her for the school bus, a story that begins with the premise “What if Hitler had a daughter?” Anna’s story imagines a daughter hidden from public view because of a disfiguring birthmark and lame leg, and uses that premise as a springboard to contemplate what it would be like to be the child of someone who was engaging in evil on

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such a frightening scale. At the same time, the children hearing the story go home to parents who live complacently on land seized from Australia’s indigenous population and who barely listen to news reports about contemporary genocides. Both novels provide vehicles for asking older children to explore probing philosophical questions about whether someone who makes the wrong moral choice, without knowing that it is the wrong moral choice, is blameworthy for not knowing this. Should Frikkie have known that apartheid was wrong? Should the Germans have known that the Holocaust was wrong? And what wrongs do we ourselves countenance today as mere background noise to the rest of our busy, hectic lives? A counterpart here is provided by stories of characters faced with the most horrific pressures to be complicit in wrongdoing, but who resist nonetheless: the stories of our heroes. Perhaps it is most effective to share stories like this with children via nonfiction. Fictional characters may do great deeds, but the knowledge that actual human beings have acted in this way can be especially inspirational to young people—indeed, to all of us. Particularly striking are real-life tales of young persons who have acted in a heroic way. Phillip M. Hoose’s award-winning Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice shares the true story of a teenager who predated Rosa Parks in her refusal to yield her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Hitler Youth gives portraits both of young people who followed Hitler (given the hideous pressures on them to do so), as well as young people who defied Hitler and often gave their lives for it. Adolescents can be encouraged to explore what gives some people the strength to make heroic choices, as well as to imagine what choices they would make in a similar situation.

What Should I Do? Perhaps the most effective kind of story for encouraging children to think philosophically about how to act ethically are stories in which the protagonists are confronted with what seems to be genuinely open choices between two alternatives, where a compelling moral case can be made for either option. Here young readers themselves may be genuinely unsure what option the character should choose. Often the choice will take the form of a classic moral dilemma in which consequentialist concerns—to produce the greatest good—are pitted against deontological concerns—to respect important moral rules (e.g., tell the truth, keep a promise). Stories are most compelling for this purpose when the dilemma is most sharply posed: when the good to be achieved is truly a great good and the rule that

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must be broken in order to achieve this good is a truly important rule that is worthy of our respect. My favorite example, a book about which I’ve written elsewhere, is the Newbery Award-winning Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, a book that is so ethically complex that I assign it to college students in my Introduction to Ethics class: my students read it for the final exam and then write essays on what insights the various philosophers we’ve studied throughout the semester might offer about Marty’s dilemma. Marty discovers a dog who is being abused by his owner, Judd Travers, and names the dog Shiloh. When Shiloh runs away from Judd to Marty, Marty decides to hide Shiloh from Judd and from his own family. So on one side, we see the concern for welfare characteristic of consequentialism, a concern to prevent suffering and promote happiness. On the other side, we see respect for familiar moral duties not to lie, steal, and break promises. The question Marty faces is: is it permissible to violate these moral duties in order to produce the morally desirable outcome of saving Shiloh? Naylor excels at making the issues here extremely complex. A consequentialist perspective evaluates acts based on their consequences, and the consequences even to Shiloh himself of Marty's hiding him turn out to be worse than the consequences of leaving him with Judd: a neighbor's vicious German shepherd leaps into the pen Marty built to hide Shiloh, leaving him severely injured. And the moral rules Marty breaks play an important role in sustaining the fabric of his loving family and close-knit Appalachian community. Along these same lines, other young adult novels portray characters who are forced to choose between respecting a friend’s confidences (and by so doing allowing the friend to remain in a dangerous situation) or seeking adult help (and so moving the friend into a more safe and sustainable living situation, albeit one that the friend herself would not choose). A prime example here is Daphne’s Book by Mary Downing Hahn. Seventh-grader Jessica is paired with outcast Daphne on a school assignment to write and illustrate a children’s book together. As she gets drawn into Daphne’s troubled life, she learns how Daphne is trying to protect her little sister Hope from their grandmother’s mental illness and their crushing poverty. Jessica knows that revealing Daphne’s secret may end their friendship and even lead to the two sisters being separated in foster care. What should she do? Hahn’s Stepping on the Cracks is another good example. Based on the author’s own childhood memories of growing up during World War II, it poses the question whether it is right to hide a pacifist deserter from the war effort. It also allows young readers to develop unexpected sympathy for a morally unappealing character, Gordy,

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when they learn the difficulties that Gordy faces. The book is a thoughtprovoking study in moral complexity.

Conclusion So much brilliant and beautiful children’s literature is being published these days that one could easily multiply the examples I’ve given here endlessly. I want to conclude by saying that although I have suggested that the point of sharing such morally complex texts is to encourage children to think philosophically about ethics, rather than simply to provide role models for moral emulation, I do think that philosophical reflection of the kind engendered by these texts will help children grow as moral agents as well. I believe that they will help children develop compassion, courage, and most of all, the practical wisdom that comes from realizing that some choices are genuinely difficult, even agonizing, and that it is a mark of moral maturity to face such choices in full recognition of this fact.

Children’s Books Worth Sharing Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow. New York: Scholastic, 2005. Estes, Eleanor. The Hundred Dresses. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1944. French, Jackie. Hitler’s Daughter. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Gordon, Sheila. Waiting for the Rain. New York: Orchard Books, 1987. Hahn, Mary Downing. Daphne’s Book. New York: Clarion, 1983. —. Stepping on the Cracks. New York: Clarion, 1991. Hoose, Phillip M. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. New York: Farrar, 2009. Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds. Shiloh. New York: Atheneum, 1991. Paterson, Katherine. Flip-Flop Girl. New York: Dutton, 1994. —. The Great Gilly Hopkins. New York: Crowell, 1978.

PHILOSOPHY FOR CITIZENSHIP: DEVELOPING CIVIC TRUST IN OUR PHILOSOPHY CLASSROOMS JEN GLASER

When we think of teaching social and political philosophy to young people, our first impulse might be to think in terms of philosophers— introducing children and youth to the ideas of Rawls, Hume, or Hegel, for example. My focus for this piece, however, will be different—I wish to explore philosophical engagement as a form of life, and thus to see what goes on in our philosophy classrooms as itself constituting a form of civic education. The central idea here is that our philosophy classes are themselves a form of social and political action because how we conduct them will give expression to a particular conception of the deliberative life (in this case, deliberative life carried out in the “public sphere” of the classroom). In general, a deliberative life is one in which the meaning of our thoughts, convictions, and actions are held open for reflective consideration so that what we do becomes purposive, expressive of the kind of life we consider to be worthy. We might say that at the heart of a deliberative life is the question “How ought I live?” Democracy that takes itself to be deliberative in this sense asks us to consider the ways our response takes into account the conditions required for all citizens to flourish and what we consider to be worthy of us as a nation. If one of our goals in teaching political and social philosophy is to educate future citizens toward a deeper understanding of, and capacity to participate in, civic life in this way, then we need to expand our conception of the subject to include skills, dispositions, and capacities that prepare our youth for deliberative participation in the public sphere. This will mean that our philosophy classrooms will need to focus not only on improving students’ capacities to understand political theories, but also on educating students in political thinking and behaviors (e.g., learning how to negotiate a public space with others) and on the capacities and skills of participation in civic life. In a democratic context, it will be to see our task, at least in part, as educating

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our students toward the capacity to engage in the “public sphere” of the classroom as they seek to inquire together into the question “How ought we live?” For those who claim that educating toward distinct forms of participation in the public sphere is not the task of the philosophy teacher, we need to recognize that teaching is not a neutral activity—our choice of pedagogies (e.g., argumentation, debate, collaborative inquiry) already shapes our students’ form of life in the classroom in different ways, as does the architecture of our teaching and learning—for example, whether the flow of ideas is structured to move vertically or horizontally. In the vertical case questions are directed from the teacher to students (with responses directed back to the teacher), whereas in the horizontal case students direct questions to one another, with ideas being developed and tested out in open discussion with their peers in the “agora” of the classroom.1 The patterns of public deliberation our students encounter, and come to internalize as “citizens” of our philosophy classrooms, constitute a hidden curriculum that contributes to the way they will come to engage in deliberation about the good life beyond school walls. The question only is the extent to which we recognize and take this into account proactively in our conception of what teaching political and social philosophy is about. Making the claim that what goes on in the classroom has an irreducibly political aspect might appear, at first glance, to be a rather obvious claim and not so exciting—for it would seem to merely place me in the camp of critical pedagogy and critical theory. But this is not the point I am making, as will become apparent as I discuss the specific contexts in which I do my educational work. Israel is a democratic country with political parties representing a wide spectrum of ideologies and platforms.2 Throughout its history, Israel’s governments have been formed as multi-party coalitions with the larger political parties developing strategic coalitions with smaller parties and independents in order to reach a majority.3 These coalitions often end up being constituted by diverse (and unlikely) factions. Because the support of smaller parties is necessary in order for a government to be formed (or later, to remain in power), their agendas can hold a lot of weight and even shape government policy. Indeed smaller factions will often withhold support in the hope of gaining concessions that advance their own set of interests (and these concessions are often in areas totally unrelated to the issue under debate). This form of party-politics breeds an adversarial culture in which there is little room for bipartisan deliberation aimed at the flourishing of the society as a whole (in all its complexity).4 This contributes to the

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development of a public sphere in which there is a basic lack of trust that others (all of whom are seeking to realize their own partisan interests), are committed to the flourishing of other sectors within the society as well as their own. That is, it creates a public sphere that operates on a hermeneutics of suspicion rather than trust. What can we do about this reality? In Israel I am engaged in bringing Philosophy for Children into schools and classrooms as a way of educating for social and political change. Philosophy for Children inducts young children into a form of life in the philosophy classroom in which they experience what it means to deliberate together around issues and ideas that matter to them. This deliberation is carried out collaboratively in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry—a shared “public space” within the classroom where each voice can be heard and considered for what it contributes to the understanding of the issue at hand. This is to educate for a different kind of public sphere and a different form of political life than the one we presently have (educating toward a deliberative rather than market-place democracy). Furthermore, doing this in a collaborative environment in which diverse voices are heard, and stated opinion weighed, is to value plurality within the polis over hegemony. The question of “How ought I live?” is thus approached not in terms of the conditions for my own flourishing or yours, but to orient ourselves toward the good life (the worthy) as a life lived together with others who are different from ourselves. Educating toward these ends will require us to attend to a broad range of dispositions and practices in our teaching. For example, it will require us to educate toward trust rather than suspicion, and to induct children into a process of philosophical deliberation in which, as they struggle to determine their own commitments, they actively seek to explore the consequences that will follow for others with whom they live in community. This requires the development of a social imagination, through which one can think alongside others as one thinks for oneself. Developing a culture of collaborative and public deliberation also requires social changes to the existing milieu. In our existing culture students (and adults for that matter) often come to internalize the judgment that changing their mind is a sign of weakness. Strength of character means that, when challenged, I stick to my opinion. As a mode of deliberation, debating often reinforces this idea—in debate my task is to rebut the arguments put forward by those speaking to the other side of the issue as best I can while maintaining my own resolve that I speak the truth. By contrast, the community of inquiry educates students to see that changing their minds (when faced with sound reasons to do so) is a

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strength rather than a weakness demonstrating a more humble position toward our own fallibility and a willingness to contract our own ego for the sake of arriving at sound judgment. This task of developing deliberative life in community around issues of common concern is, I think, one of the most powerful arguments for introducing philosophy into schools in democratic societies. It builds dispositions and skills that enable the possibility of constructive political debate. This is not only needed in Israel, but in America as well. In a fascinating study titled Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, the author, Diana Mutz, set out to explore the question: “What happens when people come across political ideas that they don’t like—how do they handle it?” Her conclusion was on the surface upbeat but, to me, deeply disturbing. Analyzing patterns of political discourse, she concludes that a democratic culture that is both deliberative and participatory is not possible in America. Because disagreement is seen as unsavory, threatening the possibility of relationship, when significant differences emerge in discussion, someone is likely to step in and say “Let’s not ruin dinner, can’t we find something else to talk about?” She notes that while developing diverse social networks is good for deliberation (because it is likely to place more options before us for consideration), it undermines participation. Those with diverse networks refrain from participation in part because of the social awkwardness that accompanies publically taking a stand that friends or associates may oppose… based on my findings it seems doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one. The best social environment for developing political activism is one where people are surrounded by those who agree with them, people who will reinforce the sense that their views are the only right and proper way to proceed.5

This leads Mutz to the conclusion that if we want to raise the rates of political participation, we are better off promoting a “picket-line” model of political contestation—different positions rallying their supporters in opposition to alternate views—rather than one in which citizens come together across interests to seek the common good. In both the Israeli and American cases, it seems that if we want to transform the status quo through philosophy in schools, we will need to consciously set out to strengthen our students’ capacity to participate with others in public deliberation, including across deep differences, through the educational environments we create in our philosophy classes. This means focusing on developing skills of dialogical inquiry, in which

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students have the communicative skills and moral attentiveness required to address questions of collective importance with others, whose commitments and forms of life may be substantially different from their own. It will mean focusing on developing the classroom as a public deliberative space, where answering the question “How ought I live?” is informed by an understanding of what is required for others in their community to flourish. In short, what I am suggesting is that if we want to change the existing social and political status quo, we would do well to take educating for civic friendship as one of the guiding ideals of the philosophy classroom. In examining this notion of civic friendship, I will also explore the practice of developing classroom communities of philosophical inquiry. While communities of inquiry constitute the philosophical pedagogy of Philosophy for Children, I will not be talking here about Philosophy for Children as an educational movement per se, but about the practice of forming classroom communities of philosophical inquiry and how engaging students in this practice educates toward civic friendship. This process is well described in the following introductory description: The central pedagogical tool and guiding ideal of Philosophy for Children is the community of inquiry. With this tool students work together to generate and then answer their own questions about the philosophical issues contained in purpose written materials or a wide range of other resources. Thinking in the community of inquiry is critical, creative, collaborative and caring. In the community of inquiry students learn to respect, listen to, and understand a diverse range of views. The process of philosophical exploration in this environment encourages students to take increased responsibility for their own learning processes and to develop as independent and self-correcting learners. Students develop the confidence and intellectual courage to put forward their own views in a group. Participation in the community of inquiry develops higher order thinking skills in the context of meaningful discussion. 6 Discussion in the community of inquiry is not just a process of swapping opinions. Classroom discussion is aimed at the construction of the best answer to the questions raised. This best answer is not provided or validated by the teacher. Instead, the class has the responsibility for both constructing and evaluating the range of possible responses to a question. Philosophical communities of inquiry are not based on the assumption that there are no right or wrong answers, but on the belief that, even if final answers are difficult to come by, some answers can reasonably be judged better—more defensible—than others. 7

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Civic Friendship and Trust While all friendship depends on some form of relationship, some capacity to speak together in the first person plural “we,” it is the notion of public deliberation about the good life (the worthy life) that leads to civic friendship. Aristotle notes that living life well can only truly happen in the presence of others. In our search for happiness, or the good life, friends enable us to become more directly visible to ourselves. This relation of friendship is one in which each reveals the mind of the other to him in a way that he could not have achieved on his own—and through this reflexive action he discovers himself, finding aspects of his own happiness. However, it would be a mistake to see friendship in Aristotle as a personal category. Reflecting on what brings people together as they seek to live life well, Aristotle distinguishes between three forms of friendship: character-friendship (the recognition of another’s excellence of character), pleasure-friendship (an association with others because it gives us pleasure) and utility- or advantage-friendship (where our association with others is useful to us). Civic friendship is a utility friendship, involving a reciprocal extension of goodwill between members of a community. This structural relationship of intentional goodwill between citizens makes it possible for individuals to live in cooperation with one another and pursue what they regard as good lives. In extending goodwill toward others, I am fully aware that the goodwill they extend toward me in return makes it possible for me to live my own good life more fully.8 In speaking about political community, Aristotle writes: [I]t is for the sake of advantage that the political community too seems both to have come together originally and to endure, for this is what legislators aim at, and they call just that which is to the common advantage. Now the other communities aim at advantage bit by bit… But… the political community aims not at present advantage but at what is 9 advantageous for life as a whole…

What makes civic friendship different from other forms of utility (or advantage) friendships is that it depends on trust—there is no inbuilt accountability.10 This brings a certain moral quality to the extension of goodwill in civil friendship. For many theorists, this trust in another’s goodwill toward us makes the very notion of civic-friendship a very fragile one.11 It is this trust in another’s goodwill toward us that seems to be absent in the Israeli context, and it is a lack of trust in the possibilities

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of maintaining relationships in the face of conflict that seems lacking in the American example. In “How can we trust our fellow citizens?” Claus Offe puts forward what I think is one of the best accounts of the challenge trust poses to deliberative democracy. Noting that liberal democratic regimes are hindered by the absence of trust, Offe starts by making a distinction between confidence and trust. While confidence is something we can experience toward institutions (I am confident the train will come in on time), trust can only be extended to persons or agents. Offe suggests that trust relies on our assessment of others. This certainly makes intuitive sense in relation to the kind of trust in another’s goodwill toward one that is needed for deliberation. If democratic deliberation is honest, and aimed at our mutual flourishing, it requires a safe place where we can expose our deepest concerns and reasons to those who may be opposed to them. My assessment of the risk in so doing will depend on my ability to judge whether others are strong partners in the deliberative process. In this assessment of another’s trustworthiness Offe notes, “The easiest case is building trust with concrete persons whom we have known for a considerable period of time. Out of our past experience develops a present orientation concerning the anticipation of future behavior.”12 But what is involved in my assessment of whether I have good reason to trust another person? It will not be enough to trust people based simply on a shared history, on the fact that I have trusted in the past and this has worked. For if, in the past, the trustee acted out of unthinking habit this could easily change; habits are broken, new habits established. Assessing whether trust is warranted will require me to assess whether my fellow citizens (or my fellow students) feel a sense of moral obligation to honor my trust. For this to be in place, trustees need to know that they are, in turn, being trusted. This is why trust in others is a matter of social reciprocity. “Without a social norm… trust relations would be overly risky to the truster and bound to evaporate.”13 This account of a kind of social contract around trust seems plausible in a small community where people know one another. It is what enables us to trust in the goodwill of people who are regular parts of our lives, and thus seems plausible as an educational goal for the classroom. Yet for Offe, trust is one of those normative dispositions that cannot be consciously cultivated if it is to be sincere. It cannot be purchased or demanded, strategically planned for, or placed in the curriculum. Offe concludes his paper with the challenge: Is it conceivable that the social capital of trusting and cooperative civic relations can be encouraged, acquired, and generated—and not just inherited?

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Annette Baier also writes on trust, and her conclusion supports that of Offe. Baier suggests that trust constitutes a special form of reliance. To trust others is to rely on their goodwill toward us—a goodwill that expresses their “…willingness to look after, rather than harm, things one cares about which are entrusted to their care.”14 However, like Offe, she too rejects the idea that we can choose to trust others, stating that the declaration “Trust me!” has no power— either you already trust me or you do not. Indeed: “The injunction ‘Trust me!’ (or the reminder ‘I am trusting you’) is a danger signal.”15 It would seem that trust is just not something we can extend at will; it is born out of shared experience and requires time to develop. If Offe and Baier are both right, and we cannot educate people to choose to trust others, is educating for civic friendship possible? Perhaps the problem here is that trust is connected with showing good will toward the other person. Can we trust that another person will “look after, rather than harm things we care about” if we don’t show goodwill toward one another? Richard Holton points out that there are many cases where we do trust one another without extending goodwill in this way: for example, two estranged parents may trust one another with their common child (intending the common good toward that child) without having any goodwill between themselves; and, on the battlefield, I may trust you not to fire when I put out the white flag even though I know you resent not being able to do so.16 In the case of civic friendship, such exceptions are illuminating, for we would want to allow for two people to engage in joint deliberation about a shared future, even when personal goodwill toward the other is absent. Of course, the fact that trust is a choice means that the opposite is also a possibility—we may choose not to trust. But when we choose not to trust, the very possibility of inquiry (and dialogical action) will be cut short as we are no longer prepared to make ourselves vulnerable to one another by opening our true opinions to critique. Our sense of vulnerability in civic trust comes, I think, from our awareness of the connection between what we think and who we are—in exposing what we think and what is important to us to others, we expose ourselves. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure.17

If deliberation requires us both to trust ourselves and to extend trust to others with whom we are engaged, in what way can we choose to adopt a stance of trust in civic deliberation, and how might we educate for it in our classrooms?

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Like Baier, Holton considers trust to be a special case of reliance; however, he suggests that we can decide to trust other people. He offers a useful account of the difference between trust and reliance, one that seems directly relevant to our account of civic friendship. Distinguishing between trust and reliance, Holton turns to the emotions we feel when we rely or trust and are let down. In the case of reliance we may feel disappointed or frustrated, but in the case of trust “we do not just feel disappointed… We feel betrayed… we feel hurt or resentful...”18 We may rely on people or machines, but we can only extend trust to people. Trust not only involves reliance, but also adopting what he calls a participant’s stance toward the other person. What he means by this is that we treat the person we trust as someone with a will who will apply that will in following through on whatever we are entrusting him or her to do. For instance, if I trust you with my child’s education I don’t just rely on you to provide educative experiences to those children in your classroom, but rather, I rely on you to take an active interest in whether my child is learning by engaging your own will toward that end. We might say reliance is shown toward something (a person, a machine), whereas trust is experienced with them, expressing our participation in joint activity. Suppose we are rock climbing together. I have a choice between taking your hand, or taking a rope. In taking your hand, I trust you; in so doing our relationship moves a little further forward. This can itself be something I value... If I chose the rope over your hand; you might perfectly understand... But our relationship will not progress.19

Choosing to trust one another in such situations requires that we value what it is to go rock climbing together (rather than both climbing independently but in one another’s company). It is to see acting together as part of what it is to realize our ends together. Here, trust expressed toward one another and toward the activity (rock climbing, deliberative inquiry) are personal and social expressions of one trust. In deliberation, as with the rock climbers, deciding to trust is not only a condition for acting in concert (and thereby furthering our relationship), but is a condition for our making progress together toward a common end (reaching the peak, establishing the good life). It involves seeing one another as reciprocally responsible for the deliberation and trusting our collective capacity for judgment. In suggesting that choosing to trust involves taking a participant’s stance toward the other, Holton is suggesting that trust rests on more than our own agency. It rests on our recognition that others have the capacity to act as agents, and thus share in responsibility for the outcome of the joint

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action. Without this recognition, civic trust dissipates because we cannot be sure that the person to whom we extend our trust will take responsibility for our flourishing. We might say that extending our hand in trust in civic friendship is to engage in a form of promising. In Hannah Arendt’s words, civic friendship entails an “act of promising” that creates “an island of certainty in a sea of uncertainty”—a small space of solidarity that enables us to act together toward a shared future.20 Promising constitutes a public act that expresses our commitment to a shared public life, and we make this promise (and express this commitment) whenever we address a common problem together. It is most salient whenever we begin joint action (such as shared deliberation), establishing an intentional space “in-between” our personal points of view that makes it possible for mutual understanding to develop. The kind of deliberative space in which we engage in an act of promising finds educational expression in the establishment of communities of inquiry. It occurs at the outset of deliberation when people sit together for the first time. Here the extension of goodwill toward one another is not “taught” but modeled, becoming over time a part of the collective cultural ethos, and internalized as a moral and epistemic virtue. We can see this kind of trust at work when students show patience toward seeming digressions, seeking to understand how they might contribute to the topic under discussion rather than dismissing them out of hand, or when students help one another to find the right words to convey the meaning they seek to express. We see this trust in situations where dialogical partners come to trust the intentions of others with whom they substantially disagree. In these cases, there is a trust being extended on the basis that others are engaged with us in a common project of figuring something out and bring their own deliberations to this common enterprise. This is what also allows for a safe space to emerge in communities of inquiry—an act of promising toward the other in which we allow thought experiments and tentative commitments to be voiced. Once internalized, this is an attitude that plays out beyond the classroom. We can see this even in very young children’s thinking, for example, in nine-year-old Fiona’s claim that philosophy has changed the way she relates to her sister. Fiona: I used to fight with my sister all the time. When she said something different [to what I said] I used to think she was just saying it to annoy me. That’s what I used to do. Now I think, “Maybe she really does think that!” And I think, “Is that what she really thinks?” and then I really think about it.

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Jen: When you say you really think about it, what are you thinking about? Fiona: I think about what might cause her to think that. [If] she had something to back it up and how she came to think that.21

Fiona comes to approach her sister with an attitude of trust rather than suspicion. She begins to treat her sister as someone who may be genuinely engaged in their discussion, a partner in making sense of the issue at hand—and not simply trying to derail it, even when her comments put Fiona’s view in question. Here deliberation can be seen as “figuring things out” in a richer sense than a focus on reasons assessment alone allows. There is a sense in which Fiona is figuring out who her sister is through thinking about what her sister says. In treating her sister as a participant in the discussion (rather than adversary), Fiona is treating her sister’s voice as opinion rather than merely as speech.22 Opinion is a form of response that, in turn, calls forth responsiveness in others. It requires both that we have something to say (some basis of knowledge or experience from which to speak) and requires others to listen with openness to taking what we say into account in their own thinking. This is what Fiona is illustrating. Giving recognition to students' voices in the classroom—hearing their comments as opinions— does not simply mean creating forums in which students can speak, but creating forums in which they are listened to. Those educational environments in which “class discussion” simply means going around the room and hearing what each person has to say, each student writing for the teacher or examiner without an opportunity to hear what other students think, or students deciding who of their peers are worth hearing and who can be dismissed even before they speak, are common examples of ways in which members of a classroom implicitly fail to recognize one another's entitlement as members of the group to have their voices heard in—or received by—the learning community. The empowerment of students, their sense of themselves as members of the public sphere, comes with the recognition that they are regarded by others as having something to say.

Summary I began this paper by expressing the idea that philosophy teaching is itself a form of civic action because what we do gives expression to a deliberative form of life lived in the “public sphere” of the classroom. I then went on to explore why, in a democratic context, I think that we need to see our task as philosophy teachers as a normative one, developing in our students the capacity to engage in deliberative engagement with others

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with whom they may substantially disagree, as they seek to respond to the central question “How ought we live?” I suggested that as philosophy teachers we can utilize students’ lived experience to help them cultivate skills, dispositions, and practices that will equip them to engage with their fellow citizens in a more deliberative way. Introducing the concept of civic friendship as an educational ideal, I went on to discuss the challenges of developing civic trust both in the public sphere and in our schools, which requires moral conditions in which members of society choose to trust in one another’s goodwill and participation in a common endeavor (figuring out how they ought to live). I suggested that by building communities of inquiry in our philosophy classrooms, we can create a “public sphere” where the giving and receiving of such trust is possible.

Notes 1

Indeed, keeping Charles Taylor in mind, we might see these two ways of operating the classroom as giving expression to “civic systems” based in two different forms of social imagination—the vertical (hierarchical/mediated) imaginary of pre-modern (feudal) Western society on the one hand, and the horizontal (direct-access/unmediated) imaginary of modern Western (democratic) society on the other. See Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity” in The Morality of Nationalism, Ed. McKim and McMahan (USA, Oxford university Press, 1997), 31-55. 2 The Israel legislative assembly (the Knesset) has 120 seats. During elections, voters choose among a wide range of party lists, with representation then being distributed according to a strict proportional representation system (so if you are low down on your party list, chances are you will not find yourself in the Knesset), which leads to a proliferation of parties as politicians further down their respective party’s list seek to reorganize themselves as independents or as key players in smaller parties. If you are number 20 on a party list, you might determine that there is more of a chance you will make it into the Knesset if you strike out on your own by standing either as an independent or forming a smaller party where you are the first on a list. Furthermore, if you now join a multi-party coalition your voice may also be more powerful, as the coalition partners need to listen to you and make you happy so that you will remain in the multi-party coalition and thus keep them in power. 3 In this, Israel is not a special case. According to Katz, over 70 percent of democracies that elect governments through a system of proportional representation result in coalition governments. See Richard S. Katz, Democracy and Elections (New York, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997), 162. 4 For an empirical study of this claim and its impact on Israeli voter preferences see: André Blais, John H. Aldrich, et.al., “Do Voters Vote For Government Coalitions? Testing Downs' Pessimistic Conclusion” in Party Politics, 2006, 12, 691-705.

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5 Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative vs. Participatory Democracy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2-3. 6 From the Philosophy for Children Alberta website, University of Alberta, Canada. http://www.ualberta.ca/~phil4c/about_program.htm Accessed March 12, 2012. 7 From the Philosophy for Children Alberta website, University of Alberta, Canada. http://www.p4c.org.nz/About_P4C.php. Accessed March 12, 2012. 8 If personal friendship has me caring for my friend in the way in which I care about my own whole welfare (and not just part of it), then in the civic sphere, I care for other citizens in the way that I care for the welfare of the whole society (and not just part of it). 9 Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Trans. Terence Irwin (Indiana, Hackett Publishing Co., 2nd edition, 1999), 1160a1130. 10 Where, for instance, the legal system—a kind of contractual community— creates accountability by establishing a “check and balance” on contractual systems, civic friendship has no such guarantees—it requires us to act in trust toward our fellow citizens as we extend out goodwill toward them. 11 For example, John Kekes. Moral Tradition and Individuality (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991) 12 Claus Offe, “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” in Democracy and Trust, Ed. Marc Warren (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50. 13 Ibid, 52. 14 Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 128. 15 Ibid, p. 133. 16 Richard Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72:1, 1994, p. 65. 17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 2nd Edition, 1998), 179-180 (my italics). 18 Holton, Op. Cit., 66. 19 Ibid, p. 69. 20 Arendt, Op. Cit., 244. 21 Yule and Glaser, 1994, Excerpt is from an interview with “Fiona,” Grade 3 student, King David School, Victoria, Australia. Fiona took part in the program called “Philosophy for Children” twice a week at school. 22 Arendt speaks to the right to have opinion as one of the “rights to have rights”—the conditions that make participation in a society possible. See Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism, (USA, Harvest Books, 4th edition, 1968).

PART III EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

TEACHING EPISTEMOLOGY DAVID HILBERT

Epistemology is Unteachable Epistemology is a standard part of the introductory curriculum at every level. It has also been a central part of philosophy for a very long time, which (partially) justifies making it a part of the introductory curriculum. Epistemology has long been one of the more technical areas of philosophy with a highly developed theoretical apparatus and lots of proprietary jargon. The jargon alone presents serious obstacles to the uninitiated and starts with the name of the subject itself. Although “epistemology” is often softened to “theory of knowledge” in introductory contexts, it inevitably reemerges with the inevitable use of “epistemic” to qualify various other bits of jargon, like the very special use of “justify” that is inescapable in philosophical discussion. This much is usual in philosophy and it is the job of the teacher to avoid using terms like “closure,” “factive,” “defeater” and the like and to explain them clearly if they are unavoidable. Where epistemology especially suffers is in its unfortunate reliance on the standard analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and the even more unfortunate centrality of this analysis to much of the 20th century literature. Although the especially clever (and geeky) among our students may enjoy playing this game, most of them (and many of our colleagues outside of epistemology) don’t know the point of the slogan—Knowledge is justified true belief!—and, without some attachment to the slogan, it is very difficult to drum up interest in discussions of Gettier problems and their avoidance. It’s not that the slogan is false (although it very well may be), but rather that our students don’t know what they are supposed to do with it once we’ve browbeaten them into admitting its truth. And once we get on to discussions of the travel plans of Brown and the mysteries of fake barn country, even professionals might be forgiven for sometimes wondering why anyone who is not a professional philosopher should care about the analysis of knowledge and the attendant literature.

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Of course, there are other ways to teach epistemology that don’t involve justified true belief and Gettier. It’s common to approach the subject historically and, for those students who have the requisite reading skills, this can be a useful way to begin the discussion of epistemic issues. Questions of motivation still persist, however, and the unfortunate truth is that there are students who aren’t convinced that that it’s valuable to understand Plato or even Descartes. For those difficult cases, it can be hard work to get them to care about the ruminations of some long dead guy who presents himself sitting around in a dressing gown obsessing about certainty and getting all wrought up over the melting of a piece of wax. We could also begin with a discussion of perception, and in some ways this is more promising. Even here, however, the temptation is overwhelming to move with great rapidity to discussions of direct vs indirect realism and, although it pains me to admit it, there are more than a few students who really don’t understand why it matters whether our awareness of the external world is by means of sense-data or not. In all of these cases, the difficulty is that those of us who are doing the teaching do speak the language and do care about these issues—which makes it difficult for us to put ourselves in the position of those who are the intended recipients of our wisdom.1

Epistemology is Inescapable These are problems, however, with the way epistemology is often taught, not with the subject itself. Epistemology itself is something that, without knowing the word, is already a part of the lives of our students. By this I don’t mean that our students know or don’t know a great many things. Rather I mean that they are already interested in, and have devoted time and effort to understanding, questions about the nature of knowledge and how to evaluate knowledge claims. Most of this effort is applied specifically and fairly narrowly, rather than abstractly and generally in the manner of philosophical discussions. Students are more likely to have worried about the proper interpretation of baseball statistics than about reliabilist theories of justification—but this doesn’t make them that different from philosophers who go on at length about the problem of other minds. Even this is more abstract than many of our epistemic concerns, which often take the very concrete form of deciding whether something that someone has said is to be relied on or not. But even when it comes to the question of whether to trust the testimony of a specific person offered at a specific time about a specific subject, our students are likely to be theorists to some degree. It would be

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an unusual person who had never reflected more generally on how to tell when someone is sincere or authoritative or, at the very least, on the question of how to tell when Dave is making it up as opposed to those cases where he knows what he is talking about. The fact that epistemological reflection is an almost inevitable part of lives in our world gives us, as teachers, a way to try to grab our students’ interest. This isn’t an argument for teaching applied epistemology—leave that to the sabremetricians and social psychologists. I’m suggesting that by starting with discussion of epistemological issues that are prominent in the lives of our students, we can get them interested in the much more abstract discussions to which philosophers are equipped to contribute.

Old Reliable There is one common and plausible way to interest students in epistemic questions, which doesn’t fit with the idea that we should start with situations that arise out of ordinary experience. Global skepticism about perception leading to skepticism about the external world is a venerable and often successful way of interesting some of our students in epistemic questions. The considerations that give rise to skepticism are simple and easy to explain and also multitudinous. It doesn’t really matter much whether the discussion revolves around all-powerful evil demons, vats full of brains, The Matrix, or whatever skeptical scenario grabs the teacher’s (and students’) fancy. Some students, with some justice, may feel that the discussion is excessively academic in the pejorative sense, but many others will enter into the spirit of the exercise and find surprisingly clever ways of refuting any attempts to rebut the skeptical arguments. The problem with this technique for engaging students with epistemology is that its success is almost entirely negative. Once you’ve convinced your students that they know nothing, it’s very hard to move them back to any non-skeptical position. Part of the problem is that although many skeptical arguments are very intuitively plausible and require little background to motivate, the responses to skepticism are often intuitively implausible and appeal to sophisticated bits of philosophical theory. I have managed to convince a few students to take the First Meditation seriously, but I doubt I have managed to convince any of them to engage seriously with the rest of the book. The skeptical arguments appear to require no more than some reflection on the nature of sensory experience while the reply to skepticism requires difficult feats of philosophy, like proving the existence of God. Although skepticism

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motivates many students, it doesn’t seem to lead them to appreciate the rest of epistemology.

Testimony During my commute to work, I change trains at a station frequently used by tourists. As I stand and wait for my train, I am asked for directions with surprising frequency. I’m usually able to answer and the inquirers thank me and, as far as I can tell, usually follow my advice. I think we would often even say that tourists, after being informed by me, know the routes to their destinations. This is such an ordinary transaction that it seems odd to call attention to it. Yet it is an example of one person, lost in a large city, asking another, whom he or she has never seen before and will never see again, for information and then, with no apparent qualms, acting on the basis of that advice. I am, in fact, on questions of that kind, pretty well-informed and generally truthful and sincere in what I say. Yet the confused tourist is in no position to know or reasonably believe such things of me. It may be that there is some reason to think that people in general are reliable on such issues in such circumstances, but the statistics seem quite difficult to formulate in a helpful way. Here we have a very interesting set of issues that seems to call out for a philosophical analysis. We have no alternative to relying on the testimony of others if we are to learn the things we need to know to act successfully in our daily lives. Yet we often lack the kind of knowledge of the reliability of our sources that would seem to be necessary given the trust we put in them. It’s also obvious that we shouldn’t always trust others, and so we need some account of when not to trust as well. This is a practical problem that should resonate with our students that nevertheless forces engagement with some fundamental issues of epistemology.2 Interestingly, even quite young children learn from testimony and distinguish between different cases in the amount of trust they bestow (Harris et al. 2006). In all of these cases, issues of justification, truth, evidence and the like come up quite naturally. The idea is not that we should be aiming at making our students better evaluators of testimony, but rather that examples involving testimony can serve to motivate our students to care about epistemic theory in a way that the more contrived skeptical examples above may not. A closely related issue is what has come to be called the novice-expert problem, which concerns the question of how to evaluate the testimony of experts when one is not expert oneself. This, again, is an absolutely unavoidable problem in the modern world and one that leads quite

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naturally into fundamental epistemology. Given the centrality of this problem to contemporary life, this is one area in which I am frequently tempted to do some actual applied philosophy. Although this doesn’t help teach epistemic theory, I often include a segment in my classes on how to read science journalism. A surprisingly large number of otherwise quite good students treat science journalism with a more or less random mixture of misplaced credulity and unmotivated skepticism.

Problem-Driven Philosophy Teaching The message is that philosophy for beginners is better approached by beginning with problems—not philosophical problems as they are usually conceived of, but questions that arise out of day-to-day activities and that all of us, philosophers or not, have to grapple with on a day-to-day basis. Epistemology is boring (for students) when it is an exercise in unmotivated analysis that leads to a set of very abstract concepts and theories with no discernible connection to our lives. Starting with the concrete and real needn’t mean that we never proceed to the more theoretical issues that occupy the bulk of the literature in epistemology, but it does mean that we can’t start with the theories without giving them some meaning in terms of activities our students understand and care about. We can still discuss important epistemic ideas including all of the usual ones: evidence, justification, the structure of justification, epistemic entitlement, closure, knowledge, et al. We just can’t assume that our students will care about these ideas because we tell them to. We need to help them see why they matter and that means grounding in them in ordinary life.

Irresponsible Teaching I have been a very responsible teacher for most of my career. I carefully make sure that my students, at every level, are exposed to all of the important approaches to the philosophical topics that I cover. I have always been very worried that they might finish the class without being introduced to all of the important ideas in an area and will rush through topics to prevent this. I mean well, but a large proportion of my students finish my classes bored and baffled. They like me since I’m an engaging lecturer, but they don’t like what I’m teaching. I think this is probably not a problem in upper-level classes populated by philosophy majors. For students getting their first exposure to philosophy, it’s a huge mistake. Introductory students don’t need a

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comprehensive knowledge of epistemology. It’s no tragedy if they finish an intro course without having been exposed to contextualism or Hume’s problem of induction. Our goal is to introduce them to philosophy, not prepare them for graduate school, and we will have fulfilled our goal if we give them a little bit of knowledge and a few tools for thinking about philosophical issues. In other words, we should be irresponsible teachers. If we can engage our students in philosophy and keep them engaged, it doesn’t matter if our coverage of theoretical possibilities is less than comprehensive. What we want to give them is the idea that there are systematic ways of addressing interesting problems that every human being has to confront. In other words, keep them interested and slip them as much theory as you can, but don’t worry if it’s not all you might desire. This won’t come naturally to me: I’m a theorist by both inclination and training and don’t need any real life motivation. But to the extent I can change my classes to be more engaging (even if less comprehensive), I’ll be doing a better job of introducing young people to philosophy.

Further Resources on Epistemology Burge, T. (1993). Content preservation. Phil. Rev. 102(4): 457-88. —. (1997). Interlocution, perception, and memory. Phil. Stud. 86(1): 2147. Coady, C. A. J. (1992). Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Goldman, A. I. (2001). Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust? Phil. Phenom. Res. 63(1): 85-110. Harris, P. L., E. S. Pasquini, et al. (2006). Germs and angels: the role of testimony in young children's ontology. Developmental Science 9(1): 76-96. Lackey, J. (2008). Learning From Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford, Oxford Universitry Press. Reid, T. (1764/1872). Inquiry into the Human Mind. In: The Works of Thomas Reid, DD, Ed. W. Hamilton. Vol. 1. Edinburgh, Maclachlan and Steward.

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Notes 1

If those teaching don’t speak the language and, more importantly, don’t care about the issues then there are even more serious pedagogical problems that I won’t attempt to address here. 2 The classic source for discussions of testimony in the modern era is Thomas Reid, especially in the Enquiry (1764/1872). The contemporary literature was surprisingly thin until the last fifteen years or so but some influential sources are (Coady 1992; Burge 1993, 1997; Goldman 2001; Lackey 2008). With the possible exception of the Goldman none of these are really suitable for introductory students.

SOME CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES TO EXPLORE EPISTEMOLOGY WITH YOUNG PEOPLE DAVID SHAPIRO

Lesson Plans for Exploring Epistemology Epistemology is the area of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge; and because—at least traditionally in Western analytic philosophy—in order for something to qualify as knowledge, it has to be true, epistemology also involves the nature of truth, as well. Students enjoy exploring the subject because it gives them an opportunity to question answers they are routinely provided with in the classroom. As educators, we spend a great deal of time serving up facts and figures to kids; rarely, however, are students given the chance to wonder about whether this information is true, and more importantly, what makes it so if it is. Consequently, delving into epistemology can be quite intriguing for students at all grade levels. Additionally, a case can be made that taking on questions about the nature of knowledge can help foster students’ critical thinking skills. The following several exercises are meant to get students wondering about epistemological considerations in ways that are interactive and engaging. Whether this translates to better scores on standardized tests is an open question. But perhaps it’s something for educators to think about.

Lesson Plan: “What’s Your Reason?” Game Topic/Question: Epistemology/Why do we believe what we believe? Age Group: 5th grade and up Time: About half an hour Materials: Students need paper and a writing implement Description: The intent of this exercise is to get students thinking about how claims are justified and what counts as a good reason for believing something. It’s a very simple activity, but one that’s proven to be pretty

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effective and usually a lot of fun. I begin with asking students to write down something they believe to be true. This can be a perfectly mundane claim like, “My name is David,” or something with a bit more philosophical “oomph,” like, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Students then share their beliefs in groups of three and we talk about those beliefs in the larger group. I then ask the students to reflect on why they believe those things. Here, I usually take the opportunity to draw a distinction between explanation and justification in epistemology and make the point that what we’re interested in is the latter. That is, while students may explain that the reason they believe that Jesus is Lord is because that’s how they were raised, I want them to set that aside and wonder instead about why such a belief is justified. To justify a claim means to give reasons for believing it that could persuade someone else to accept it as true. Explanation, by contrast, focuses on describing events or states of affairs that have given rise to a person’s own beliefs. Justification falls under the area of philosophy; it appeals to logic and reason. Explanation falls under the area of psychology; it refers to personal history and, often, emotion. An example I like to use is Nelson, the bully character in the television show, The Simpsons. His awful childhood explains why he thinks it’s all right to pick on Bart and the other fourth-graders; it doesn’t, however, justify his doing so. Generally, students come to understand this distinction although sometimes it’s a little muddy. For instance, I’ve had students wonder whether the following counts as explanation or justification: “My reason for believing that my name is David is that everyone has always called me that.” I try to deflect such concerns to some degree; the point isn’t to always make a hard and clear distinction between explanation and justification, but rather to recognize that such a distinction exists and develop some fluency with it. In any case, after this discussion, I ask students to write down something else that they believe to be true, along with three justifying reasons why they hold this belief. I then break the class into two teams and say that we will have a friendly competition to see how good each team is at identifying claims based on the reasons given for them. I separate Team One’s papers from Team Two’s and read responses from Team Two to Team One and vice-versa. For example, I will begin by taking a page from the stack of Team Two papers. I will choose a member of Team One to be on the “hot seat” and he or she will be charged with answering the first question. For instance, I will read these three reasons: “1. Because their hitting is

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inadequate. 2. Because they aren’t willing to spend the money on star players. 3. Because Seattle teams never win the big one.” The claim that these reasons are supporting is “The Mariners won’t ever win the World Series.” The student on the hot seat is allowed to confer with teammates, but he or she ultimately has to take responsibility for the answer. I usually give partial credit: for instance, if the student states the claim as, “The Mariners stink,” I would likely give half a point or so. (For what it’s worth, I usually have a lot of fun with the assigning of points; I generally manage to play with the scoring so as to ensure that the “competition” stays pretty close.) After the student has given an answer and I’ve assigned a score to it, I ask Team Two to identify which team member wrote that first example. I then take a page from the Team One stack and ask that team member to be on the “hot seat.” I continue doing this for the rest of the game, always choosing for the “hot seat” the person whose example has just been used with the other team. Depending on how the game is going, I’ll continue through the bulk of the examples, or if people are losing interest, I’ll set a score—say, five points—which will win the game. And during the “competition,” I’m always open to students challenging the scoring, as well as to raising questions about whether the reasons really do support the claim. Again, the point of the game isn’t to see who “wins,” but rather to provide a forum for wondering about the relationship between claims and reasons and what it means for a claim to be justified. And to that end, I have found that, by and large, the exercise works. At the end of the game, we discuss whether the reasons that were offered did, in fact, justify the claims that were made. In other words, if we know just those three things, would we be justified in inferring the claim to be true? This is often a very interesting discussion, as many students want to contend that people are justified in believing whatever they want, whether they have good reason to do so or not. (Of course, we can then wonder whether students have good reason to believe that claim.) It’s fascinating to see how often students will separate what they’ve just illustrated in the game from what they think they believe about justification. As a way of probing this further, we sometimes try to come up with the most outlandish belief we can think of and then wonder whether any evidence could justify the claim. To do this, I have students write down on scraps of paper the craziest claim they can think of. They then trade these papers with their classmates and try to come up with reasons for believing their partners’ claims. For example, a few years back, one sixth-grade student was given the

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claim, “Space aliens have visited Earth” to justify. His three reasons were: 1) Lots of people claim to have seen or been abducted by space aliens; 2) The technology of the pyramids in Egypt is too complex to have been invented by humans; and 3) George Bush. Although I wouldn’t say I was convinced by his reasons, I was impressed—and amused—by the philosophical thinking that obviously went into his answers.

Lesson Plan: Two Trues, One False Topic/Question: Epistemology/What is truth? Age Group: 5th grade and up Time: About 15 minutes Materials: Students need a small piece of scratch paper or note card to write on Description: This exercise is meant to tease out students’ intuitions around how knowledge is generated and to get them thinking about what makes a claim true or false. For older students, it can also be used to provide an introduction to the two dominant epistemological themes in the history of western philosophy: rationalism and empiricism. (Essentially, rationalism is the view that actual knowledge is generated through a process of reasoning alone—champions of this view include Plato and Descartes; empiricism, by contrast, says that real knowledge comes via experience—Aristotle and John Locke are usually seen as standard-bearers for this position.) The activity is quite simple. I begin by asking students to tell me something that’s true. Usually, I introduce the concept of a “claim” or a “statement”; that is, a sentence we can assess as either true or false. For example, here’s a true claim: “My name is David.” I solicit other true claims from the class. Typically, I’ll hear examples like, “I am a girl (or boy).” “Today is [day of the week].” “My little sister is a brat.” Sometimes, we’ll get into a discussion of whether a given claim IS true or not. Generally, I try to set that aside to some degree because at this point we’re interested in claims that are unproblematically true; later, we’ll have some tools to better explore the difficult cases. Next, I ask students to tell me something that’s false. “Give me a false claim,” I say, and usually hear things like: “I am 100 years old”; “I am a boy (or girl)”; “School is fun.” After we talk a bit about the false claims, I write the following on the board:

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The statement in this box is false. “What about this statement?” I ask. “Is it true or false?” Naturally, students are puzzled. If it’s true—that is, if what the statement is saying is true—then it’s false, because it says it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true… but if it’s true, it’s false, and so on. It’s slippery, impossible to get a grip on. Sometimes, especially in higher grades, a student will point out that the statement is paradoxical; almost always, in every grade, one or more students will say that thinking about it makes their heads hurt. So how do we ever ascertain whether a given claim is true or not? The following exercise gives us some space to wonder about that. Students are asked to write down on their scratch paper, in no particular order, two statements that are true about them and one that is false. I illustrate what I mean by writing the following on the board: I am 49 years old. I can stand on my head for at least a minute. My middle name is Arthur. When students have written their three claims, I say that in a moment, we will share them with each other and try to figure out which the false one is. First, though, I ask them to reconsider my three claims. I ask students to weigh in on which of my three claims they take to be false. Typically, most students assume that the second claim, about headstanding, is untrue. I ask them to explain why this is. Not surprisingly, students will say things like not too many people can stand on their heads, that I don’t look capable of doing so, and that, if indeed I am 49 years old, then it’s even more unlikely that I can do so. I then take out my driver’s license and have a student read my birth date; this verifies that the claim that I am 49 years old is false. I then point out that I believe I have thus proven that the other two claims are true. I ask students if they are convinced. Naturally, many students reject the notion that I have proven I can stand on my head simply by demonstrating that the claim about my age is false. “Why?” I ask. “Isn’t this a good argument: P1: Two of the following three claims are true; one is false. P2: The claim about Dave’s age is false. C: Therefore, the other two claims are true.” Students will often point out that the first premise in the argument could be false. I assure them that it isn’t. Are they therefore convinced that I can stand on my head? No, students will respond. They want to see me

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standing on my head with their own eyes before they will be satisfied that that claim is true. Here, we can usually have a discussion about whether our senses sometimes deceive us and why they think that seeing something is proof that it’s true. I also take this opportunity to explore the question of whether it’s the case that just because you’ve done something that this means you can do it. To illustrate this, I roll up a small piece of paper and throw it to a random spot on the floor. “Look,” I say, “I just did that, didn’t I? I just threw that paper to a random spot on the floor.” I then proceed to throw several more small pieces of rolled up paper at that same spot; inevitably, I am unsuccessful in hitting the same spot. “See? Just because I did that— threw the paper ball at that random spot—doesn’t mean I can do it.” “All right,” some students will respond, “doing something once to prove you can do it can just be a lucky chance, like in that example. To be able to do something means being able to do it more than once.” This can lead into an interesting discussion about how many times a person has to be able to do something in order for it to be true that they can do it. Twice? Three times? Five? A hundred? With older students, at an appropriate juncture in the discussion, I bring in the concepts of rationalism and empiricism. I try to make the point that those students who want to see me perform a headstand, who don’t believe you can establish the veracity of any claim without some sort of sensory experience, are exhibiting sympathy for the epistemological perspective known as empiricism. Those who feel satisfied that my argument proved that I could indeed stand on my head are perhaps more amenable to the perspective known as rationalism. (Typically, the vast majority of students are more aligned with empiricism, although many admit that they just want to see me stand on my head for the fun of it.) After we’ve carried on in this vein for a while, I ask students to swap their three claims with the student to their left. They then try to figure out which of the three claims is the false one. While doing so—before their partners tell them which one is false—they are asked to write a few sentences about how they went about trying to determine which claim was false. We open up the classroom discussion to that question and typically, interesting discussion ensues. Often, for example, students will note that they figured that the most commonplace claim was likely to be the false one, given that the other student might have been trying to trick them. Reflecting on this, for example, is thought-provoking. How often, I may ask, do we take the most likely claim to be the false one? Another means of identifying the false claim that students often cite

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goes something like this: “Well, I know a little bit about [my partner] and therefore can infer that this claim is probably the false one.” This, of course, can lead to a discussion of stereotyping and whether we can draw inferences about people based on some particular aspect of their characters or personalities. Should, for example, we conclude that a person who is 49 years old is indeed unlikely to be able to stand on his head for at least a minute? Still another is to identify the false claim by reference to oneself. Students will say something like, “Well, I would never do [such and such] so I’m pretty sure [my partner] wouldn’t either.” Not too surprisingly, that approach, as a strategy for establishing truth, is usually only marginally effective. This lends itself to a discussion about individual differences and the degree to which we can assume others are like us. It’s delightful to see students have that “aha” moment in which they develop an understanding of each others’ individuality. One time, for example, a fifth-grade boy was sure that the false claim of his partner had to be, “I hate mayonnaise.” “I love mayonnaise,” the first boy said, “so that’s probably false.” When his partner told him that in fact it was true, that he hated mayonnaise, it blew the kid’s mind. The two of them ended up having a long conversation that stretched well after class about how different their likes and dislikes were. And as a bonus, the pair seemed to subsequently become really good friends, at least for the rest of the time I spent with their class. One other activity that can evolve out of this exercise is to make it into an informal game. To do this, instead of having students pair off into dyads, split the room into two teams. Collect the cards from each side of the room, keeping them separate. Take a card from the left side, designate a student on the right side to be the person choosing the false claim, and then read the three lines on the card. This makes establishing the false claim a little bit more difficult since the person guessing won’t know whose card you are reading. But players will still have to explain why they think the claim they’ve chosen is false. This opens the discussion up more broadly, and also introduces a bit of friendly competition into the activity (teams are awarded a point should the player correctly identify the false claim). The game proceeds by having the person whose card was chosen be the next person to try to identify the false claim as a new card is picked from the other team’s pile. Discussion about strategies for establishing truth and falsity can be introduced as the game proceeds, or can be held off until afterwards. Sometimes teams get fairly focused on winning the game and may even call into question whether the false claim from a member of the other team really is false. One student, for instance, insisted that the claim, “I’ve

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never eaten meat,” had to be false, even though his counterpart on the other team said it was true. “If you’ve ever even licked a stamp,” he said, “you’ve eaten meat.” We never ended up establishing whether this was true or false, but we did have a great discussion about whether you can unintentionally lie. In any case, the main point of the exercise, whether it’s done as a game or as a “shared-pair” exercise, is to explore how students go about establishing the truth or falsity of various claims. At the conclusion of the discussion with younger students, I usually do a fill-in-the-blank “poem,” with the fill-in line being: “One thing that will always be true about me is….” It warmed my heart to no end when one girl wrote, “One thing that will always be true about me is that I’m a philosopher.”

WHAT DO YOU KNOW? EPISTEMIC ADVENTURES IN THE CLASSROOM WENDY TURGEON

Decoding the word: Epistemology When we think of philosophy with/by children and young people, we certainly focus on the role of critical thinking as central to the enterprise. In fact, touting the values of critical thinking is a prominent way to introduce the very notion of philosophy into a pre-college educational setting. While the word “philosophy” can generate bemused and glazed expressions on administrators’ faces, “critical thinking” elicits nods of appreciation. Whether we really want children, or anyone for that matter, to be a critical thinker is a topic for another day. Epistemology, the philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge, is central to philosophy in general. Likewise, the very nature of philosophy with children1 is infused with epistemological overtones; that is, at the core of doing philosophy with children are questions about the nature and limits of knowledge. So, what constitutes epistemological inquiry within a K-12 philosophy classroom? I think we might want to look at this from a pedagogical as well as curricular perspective. First and foremost, philosophy for young people has often been described as “thinking about thinking: the practice of inquiry as self/other-reflective.” The participants in the dialogue, on whatever topic, are acutely self-aware of the need to justify their views, construct clear arguments, use examples and counter-examples, assess generalizations, and engage in deductive and inductive reasoning moves. We must encourage an ongoing act of self-reflection: Did I offer good reasons for my opinions? Did I meet challenges to my views in ways that were persuasive both linguistically and conceptually? In Teaching for Better Thinking,2 Laurance Splitter and Ann Margaret Sharp spend a great deal of time unpacking the tools of philosophical thinking so as to better equip the teacher with an awareness of the self-reflective process of thinking that can be nurtured within the community of inquiry. Catherine

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McCall, in her recent text Transforming Thinking,3 devotes much attention to the need for sustained and conscious construction of careful arguments informed by logic and the general tactics of good reasoning skills. To these ends we want to model, instruct and encourage the growth of a wide range of thinking tools that can enable our young people to think more deeply, clearly and consistently about the information with which they are provided. Some key epistemic tools are the art of questioning, the skill of listening in an open and thoughtful manner, and the construction/discovery of answers. Sharp often described a key goal of philosophy for children as the development of critical, creative and caring thinking. I would like to take a brief look at the three movements of questioning, listening, and answering. Here I will be able to do no more than offer pointers towards deep exploration of these rich topics: Questioning: Children need to learn how to ask questions. In fact, adults are often weak in this area. Solicitation of questions often generates a series of lengthy opinions at any academic conference. One of the signs of a developed thinker in any discipline is the skill of constructing good questions, questions that target the heart of the ambiguity as well as open up avenues for creative re-thinking of the topic at hand. Practicing the asking of questions itself can be an important epistemic step toward better thinking. We can connect the art of questioning with the philosophical practice of skepticism, but we must be careful here. Before we claim to be skeptics, we must first work through the act of interrogating the world without foreclosing any particular potential response. Listening: While most of us are great at talking, we tend to be terrible listeners. Children are no exception. The very act of listening requires that I attempt to grasp your point of view, the meanings you ascribe to words and ideas, and the emotions and experiences that color your articulations and from which they emerge. These might be quite alien to me and I must self-consciously struggle not to hear your voice as simply a variation on mine. Your words reveal a world, and that world is not one to which I am privy. I must acknowledge that, but at the same time make a concerted imaginative effort to open up sympathetically to what you are saying. A good listener might realize that the best response to someone’s comment is a question that invites them to reveal more clearly their own perspective. Instead, we often jump onto the comments of others by superimposing our own schemata and speaking to those instead of to what was said to us. In developing the art of listening, I am forced to attend to the situational acts of thinking, opining, knowing, and feeling, and this can in itself help me reflect on the bigger epistemological questions.

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Answering: This is the part we all love. We get to talk. And this is important. In answering, I must factor in what you asked or said, directing my response to that question or comment. This requires of me that (a) I listened to you, and (b) I am acknowledging you by responding to your comment, sharing my own point of view in ways that will be meaningful and accessible. The difficulty of doing this is illustrated in any classroom or philosophy conference you attend. Now, this sketchy account of epistemic methodology in a pre-college philosophy classroom does not do justice to the complexity of the enterprise, and I am well aware that much more can be said. But I would be remiss if I did not address what should be the primary intent of an essay on epistemology in a pre-college classroom—to address the questions within the philosophical tradition that we would call ‘epistemological,’ as opposed to ‘ethical’ or aesthetic’ or some other philosophical tag. What might our curriculum look like for a course in epistemology?

Epistemology and the enquiring child/youth In a college course, epistemology can be approached from two main angles: a historical survey of the tradition in terms of philosophers’ theories regarding the meaning and status of knowledge claims, or an approach focusing on particular topics within epistemology. Depending upon the age and interest of our students, we may or may not wish to introduce the philosophers themselves. In any event, regardless of whether they can distinguish empiricism from rationalism or argue the merits of Zenoic paradoxes, our students do need to reflect on and problematize the status of knowledge in our world. I would recommend that we address the large questions of the status of what constitutes “knowledge,” the meaning of truth, and the process whereby one “comes to know.” Our society tends to adopt quickly the notion that all knowledge and truth is relative4. While this may be true, it should not be assumed, neither in ethics nor in knowledge claims. Science is not just opinion and certainly not uninformed opinion. Expert knowledge deserves attention, even if it cannot make claims of absolute status. What criteria come into play to determine the nature of the expert opinion, the scientific theory, or the historical claim? Charting these criteria allows young people the chance to evaluate in meaningful ways the status of knowledge claims around them. The very act of working to differentiate opinion from knowledge or to explore the borders, porous though they might be, will invite them to a deepened awareness and appreciation for these puzzles. The classic definition of knowledge as

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“justified true belief” demands unpacking and problematizing and students can recognize the importance of doing precisely that. In recognizing how our views are shaped by those of people around us and the larger societal influences, we also begin to get control over our own ideas and can make better determinations and act in more informed ways. These epistemological moves help us consider the power and limits of truth and help prepare us to become better thinkers. Another traditional question in epistemology is the empiricism/ rationalism divide and the ways in which philosophers have both favored one side or worked to transcend/undermine the distinction. Rationalists claim that knowledge ultimately occurs within the mind of the knower; indeed, there may be ideas or forms of ideas with which we are born. For rationalists such as Rene Descartes or Benedict Spinoza, our epistemic awareness is not limited by our unreliable sense experience. In contrast, empiricists take the position that all knowledge comes from experience and that the mind is like a blank slate (empty page) at birth and only through sense experience can we acquire information. With this traditional philosophical breach, we are forced to decide the source of knowledge: in some clear and concise conceptual grasping of truth through reason, or from cobbling together the information provided by our limited senses. While the rationalist grand claim for human knowledge may sound appealing, thinking about the role of the senses and emotions in any act can reveal truths and prejudices. Do we have to choose between reason and sense experience as the basis for knowledge, or is a synthesis of the two possible? We are embodied creatures who absorb and transform the world physically and mentally, and knowledge emerges from an experience that brings together nature, self, and others. While some might claim that young people cannot make these careful distinctions and grasp these abstraction notions, we find quite the opposite. We shouldn’t assume that children cannot appreciate these grand narratives.

Epistemology in the classroom: the practical perspective So, what tools of inquiry might we suggest for assisting us in our inclusion of epistemology in the classroom? I would like to sketch out some suggestions for a range of classroom experiences that invite epistemic reflections, but these are only suggestions.

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The Teacher-Trainer Issue of concern: Equipping the teacher with the tools and concepts needed to facilitate philosophical discussion on epistemic issues We must not forget that before we can address the needs of students, we must also consider what their teachers or “philosophy facilitators” may need in terms of fruitful preparation. For those who work with teachers, practicing or aspiring, I would suggest a careful review of the philosophical tradition on philosophy of knowledge. The historical sweep should be accessible and offer the experience of the ongoing conversation that emerges from time/place of the participants. x x x x x

Greek origins: pre-Socratics and the foundational Plato/Aristotle divide The mediaeval dilemma: faith and reason as complementary Modernism: the classic debate between the rationalists and empiricists-who ground knowledge in confidence in reason or skepticism about its efficacy The Kantian synthesis and the 19th century Grand system builders Post-modern perspectivalism and beyond

This is a traditional trajectory for any historical understanding of epistemology and with which I would argue it is essential for the teacher to have some acquaintance. It need not be deep or scholarly, but an acquaintance with these voices allows the teacher to better hear positions that will emerge in dialogue within the classroom. Of course the goal is not necessarily to be able to label a spoken viewpoint as empiricist or Platonic or what have you, but rather to be able to offer appropriate challenges as well as support when those positions appear, as they will. Teachers also need opportunities to develop their own epistemic selfreflection, which can be challenging in an educational system that assumes that the teacher is the certified expert whose task is to convey information to the needy students.5 The history of philosophy is valuable, but philosophy cannot be conveyed as just so much information. To that end, other materials which invite teachers to challenge and engage as active and self-critical thinkers must be incorporated, as well as opportunities for them to examine their own thinking on any number of educational issues.

Preschool and early elementary years Issue of concern: Helping the young child to begin to explore plural perspectives about the world in a self-aware manner Young children will want to explore the idea of definition, concept formation, the source of information and charting a path between one’s

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perspective and that of others. There is a richly developed tradition of using picture books to introduce philosophical inquiry to students, beginning with the work of Karin Murris6 in the UK and continuing down to the recent text and website by Tom Wartenburg.7 There are many stories that invite the reader to explore questions of truth and knowledge but three that are particularly rich are: The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by John Scieszka Boodil my dog by Gabrielle Charbonnet Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig

As young children study the world around them and make art, they can use these experiences to provoke inquiry into questions about knowledge as well. Art objects can be used to creatively explore the borders of knowledge:8 what counts as truth in the visual arts, music, science, literature, history, math? Activities:9 Activities for this age group should focus on definitions and their constructions. Invite children to consider the origins of words and the nature of simile and metaphor by using everyday objects to create meaning by metaphor or by playing a part: make use of games, art projects, theater, as well as discussions. The goal is to create opportunities for young children to “play” with words and concepts and to be alert to how their own ideas can raise good and interesting questions.

Later elementary years and middle school Issue of concern: Finding one’s place in the world, determining whom to believe and deciding what counts as evidence towards knowledge in the world Older children are self-absorbed as they work through the process of articulating who they are and with whom they relate in community. Adults lose their privileged status as automatic experts, while young people begin to become fascinated with the solving of mysteries and the workings of their own thinking processes. Matthew Lipman’s novels10 excel in targeting this age group by presenting epistemological questions as buried within the give and take of everyday life. In life, rarely are questions isolated and tagged as “epistemic,” “ethical” or “ontological.” These puzzles merge in an interdisciplinary way as we try to sort out what ideas ought to be the basis for our self-concepts and actions in the world. Trade books written for this age group can also be a source for provoking epistemological reflection. A sampling might include:

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The View from the Oak by Judith and Herbert Kohl The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Activities: Again, use theater, games, and discussions to encourage young people to find problems in their own thinking. Kieran Egan highlights this age group’s fascination with exploring the extremes of the very strange and very weird (see The Guinness Book of Records and how these records are determined). As they begin to investigate the world through scientific experiments, they will be fascinated by perceptual puzzles. Construct opportunities for them to compare ideas through different perceptual modes (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting), using objects familiar to them.

High school Issue of concern: The struggle to become an adult and as such count in society and the continued search for self in community and the questioning of authority Young adults are sharply tuned to adult hypocrisy and delight in catching those in power making mistaken claims. They may suffer from hubris, full of certainty and short on objectivity as they glory in the “hot subjectivity of youth.” Here we want to continue the process of being careful and caring thinkers as well as critical ones. Young people who have explored their own thinking processes and claims to know will be less quick to judge, more open to diversity and more demanding of good reasons to accept or reject a point of view. High schools students can explore philosophy of knowledge through many avenues, not the least of which is an encounter with some primary source philosophy. They appreciate the philosophical rabble-rouser, and both Socrates and Nietzsche can delight students with their “gadfly” roles within their respective societies. They can trace the cautious but devastating thinking of David Hume towards his mitigated skeptic position. However, at this age, literature continues to offer the most potent source for questions. One approach is to explore pairings of novels that take on various perspectives on the same event. Three such pairings are: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë with the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys The mediaeval epic of Beowulf with Grendel by John Gardner The poetry of Charles Wright paired with the Dao De Ching

However, the arts and sciences offer multiple wonderful opportunities to explore the parameters of knowledge as applied within a range of

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disciplines from art to history to science. Kieran Egan, in The Disciplined Mind, charts ways in which adolescents are particularly eager to think about claims to know and explore the sources of what constitutes knowledge in their world. Likewise, Neil Postman details a fascinating curriculum11 circling around the notion of “the fallen angel,” i.e. the fallibleness of human knowledge and the role of error in human experience. Seeing mistakes as powerful tools for growth instead of shameful errors can be a self-conscious movement within a classroom to appreciate knowledge as fluid but at the same time substantive. Activities: High school students are developing mastery of reading and examining difficult texts. Discussions, written assignments as well as artistic and theatrical projects can assist them in strengthening their abilities to reflect about knowledge claims. One suggestion is to explore media sources of information. Comparing the same story from different sources can generate lively discussion about perspectivalism, truth and how the source shapes the message. There are some excellent movies that invite the viewer to consider the nature of truth claims and how one’s position may affect one’s vision of truth. Two classic examples are Sliding Doors and Roshomon.

Epistemology within the disciplines Another way to approach the introduction of epistemology into precollege education is through the avenue of individual disciplines. For example, in history, science and art, we can incorporate active inquiry into the methods and content and resulting truth claims of each discipline. What constitutes truth in history and how might that differ from truth in biology, chemistry, or physics? How do the verification methods differ in constructing historical knowledge from making scientific judgments? Why do the objects of knowledge in history point to an irretrievable past, whereas objects of knowledge in the sciences can include both observable phenomenon and theoretical constructs? Does this invalidate the forms of knowing that we label “historical?” Why might we choose not to adopt the scientific model of knowledge as the ultimate paradigm? Or should we? Does art offer truth? If so, what kind of truth might we come to know through means of an art object? How is it that an artist might be said to be solving some kind of problem when he creates an art object? These kinds of questions invite us to examine the parameters of knowledge within traditional disciplines that we might have a tendency to accept as simply a catalogue of truths, facts, and theories, or even glibly dismiss as simply opinions. By including an epistemology of the

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discipline, we move beyond an inert model of knowledge towards acknowledging the living engagement with information, with data, that characterizes historians, scientists and artists. We can also invite students of all grade levels to take the search for knowledge seriously and become historians, scientists, artists and art critics, not simply students of “the discipline,” which connotes a level of distancing from engagement with the material at hand.

One final flight of fancy — Edith Cobb: Imagination, the natural world and knowledge12 One way we might explore the nature of epistemological reflection with young people is to redirect their gaze to the natural world around them. In today’s technologically-constructed society, children and young people’s direct experience with nature is often foreclosed in favor of a mediated engagement through screen and machine. How has this shift from being a human within the world to being a human within a socially constructed environment affected our thinking processes? Perhaps the most often referenced study on the relationship between children and nature is that of Edith Cobb’s work The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. Published in 1977, with an introduction by her friend Margaret Mead, this text originally met with little interest, but its influence has subsequently grown and can factor into our account of the importance of epistemic self-reflection among children and young people. Cobb was not an academic, but had worked on the ideas set forth in this book for over thirty years before it was published at the end of her life. She introduced the idea that childhood experiences of nature are vital for the development of human thought, and her main interest was in the development of artistic genius. Cobb sets her task as twofold:13 “The first is to define what is meant by the genius of childhood as a common human possession and a biological condition peculiar to man. The second consists of showing that a major clue to mental and psychosocial, as well as psychophysical, health lies in the spontaneous and innately creative imagination of childhood, both as form of learning and as a function of the organizing powers of the perceiving nervous system.”

To that we might wish to add the use of imagination in creative thinking. Cobb uses a poem by Walt Whitman as inspiration for her philosophical framework of the relationship between childhood and the natural world:14

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What Do You Know? Epistemic Adventures in the Classroom There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf…

Focusing on the child’s sense of wonder, Cobb interprets this attitude as a living ecology involving reciprocity of living systems: child and nature. As the infant and growing child encounter novelty, they innately need and desire to organize the world into patterns of meaning.15 “For the young child, the eternal questioning of the nature of the real is largely a wordless dialectic between self and world.”16 The givenness of the natural world, the very “pull of gravity,”17 offers the child a vivid and immediate opportunity to experience the dialectic of consciousness and world. From perceptual immersion, the child engages in an intuitive sensibility that both constructs and is constructed by intellectual intent. In other words, as the child explores the world, she maps it. Curiosity, exploration, wonderment—these primal experiences are inherent desires and needs of the human being and yield the urge towards narrative and ultimately towards knowledge claims. A self-conscious engagement with the natural world might offer children and young people a renewed opportunity to explore the limits of their own epistemic point of view. This ongoing process—of child as explorer of world and coconstructor of self—flourishes in middle childhood, in which Cobb claims the seed of artistic genius are planted. We nurture our creative voices by returning to the source of all creativity as we have experienced it: the natural world. She credits Wordsworth’s poetry as helping John Stuart Mill to re-integrate with his childhood and overcome his depression. Cobb goes on to analyze the role of nature in the lives of the Bronte children and their fabrication of wildly imaginary and detailed kingdoms, or worlds. One’s experience of one’s culture must hit up against, merge with, build upon and yet also challenge one’s experience of nature for full human potential to flourish. Artists are those among us who have retained the acute awareness of their connection with the earth even as they have bonded with the human consciousness. But all of us live in a world suffused with acts of imagination and of knowing. Cobb’s analyses might well be broadened to apply to our construction of knowledge—of one’s

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self, others and the world outside of the social nexus. What I propose to add to Cobb’s thesis is that in addition to emphasizing the importance of nature in children’s experiences, we want to encourage their reflective consideration of nature and self. Cobb ends her study with a plea for the recognition of “compassionate intelligence,” an intelligence that acknowledges our situatedness in the natural and cultural worlds as concrete, real, and related—neither an abstraction nor a focus on pure individuality. We must strive to identify, more than differentiate. Differentiation means division and distancing, while identification yields connection, appreciation and ultimately the chance for understanding. “For although the Socratic dictum ‘know thyself’ is unquestionably essential to the long, slow and only half-realized awareness of the uniqueness of human individuality, this idea is now running in a distorted way through the guise of self-improvement and detachment from responsibility for anything occurring beyond the private realm of self-realization.”18 We learn through the agency of the other (human and non-human) brushing up against us and asking us to acknowledge and respond. Nature does not bend itself to be what we choose for it. It asks that we acknowledge it and explore its infinite possibilities. In doing so, we come to realize our own. Creativity in thinking and doing as the essence of being human can only emerge in an ongoing encounter with nature.

Conclusion As I end my review of epistemology in the classroom, I realize that I have wandered away from the theme of pedagogical techniques to a deeper questioning of our engagement as “thinking beings” within our world, both social and natural. Perhaps this final addendum of a meditation on the role of nature in human creativity can serve to remind us of the richness of the epistemic glance and our need to constantly reexamine our language, art, and ideas within a larger context of being-inthe-world.

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Notes 1

There is a lively debate on whether what we want to do is teach philosophy to children, do philosophy with children or let children do philosophy among themselves. Much online debate occurs over these nomenclatures as entirely different pedagogies emerge based on what the perceived relationship between the teacher/facilitator, the students and philosophy itself is intended to be. For the purposes here, I am assuming a PwC heavily influenced by the materials and methods of the P4C movement, usually identified with the Lipman program. 2 Australian Council for Educational Research, 1995. 3 Routledge, 2009. 4 Witness the phenomenon of Wikipedia. 5 Freire’s critique of education may as well have fallen still-born from the press as far as current American education goes. 6 Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes are publishing a book entitled Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy, Routledge, July 2011. 7 My graduate students have been creating “philosophical teachers manuals” on published books for years as part of my course at Stony Brook University. 8 For example, see my article, “The Mirror of Aesthetic Education: Philosophy Looks at Art and Art Looks at Philosophy,” Thinking Vol 15. In this essay I suggest ways that aesthetic inquiry can enrich classrooms at all levels and a number of related epistemological questions emerge. 9 The activities suggested here are not intended to be necessarily age-dependent and could easily be carried into later grades. 10 The Lipman program novels which span this age group include Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery and Lisa, but might also include Mark and Suki. 11 See Neil Postman’s The End of Education, Vintage, 1996. Chapter six details an exploration of error and its positive role in the growth of human knowledge. 12 This section on Edith Cobb is an adaptation from a previous paper, “The Child and Nature: Dogs, Bogs and Honeysuckle”, Creativity and the Child: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010. 13 Edith Cobb, Cobb, Edith, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, (Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 15. 14 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900. 15 Aristotle in the Poetics argues similarly when he posits that imitation is an innate source of delight and learning for the human being. 16 Cobb, op.cit., p. 31. 17 Ibid. p. 42. 18 Ibid. p. 109.

PART IV METAPHYSICS IN THE CLASSROOM

THE BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY: APPROACHES TO INTRODUCING PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS TO YOUNG PEOPLE KIRSTEN JACOBSON

Philosophy is not something that happens in a moment; it is not even something that happens over the course of one argument, one essay, one book, or in the collected works of a particular philosopher. Philosophy happens over a lifetime, and it happens in a community of thinkers. The task of pre-collegiate philosophy is, I believe, to begin opening young people up to the wonder and questions of philosophy. In my discussions of philosophy with high school students over the past three years, I have taken my role to be that of inspiring in them the desire and ability to think well about significant issues that are integral to their lives and yet that are also inherently ambiguous—i.e., without promise of a definitive answer. These issues can range from the ethical to the epistemological, the metaphysical to the political, the aesthetic to the phenomenological. The label of the specific topic is less important to me and, ultimately, for philosophic inquiry; instead, the core concern is to awaken young minds to their place and responsibility within the world of meaning. The central focus of the second portion of this essay will be to consider introducing young people to metaphysical questions and ideas—namely, to issues that take up the nature of reality, what it is, on what it is founded, and what is our relationship within and to it. Before turning to those issues, I will first articulate fundamental practices I have used to help me bring philosophical ideas to life for young people (and, ultimately, for any student or peer with whom I am discussing philosophy). I do so in due recognition of Aristotle’s observation that it is significant how we begin things: “For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 7).1 It is my experience that this is entirely true in the case of considering how to teach philosophy. Thus, prior to considering any particular topic area within philosophy, I believe it is important to consider the “how” of beginning to engage in philosophy.

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Part I: The Beginning of Philosophy Principle 1: Respect Students I begin doing philosophy with young people by respecting them: they are capable thinkers and I trust that they can think about challenging issues and that they can work into ideas that may initially seem quite foreign to them. Correlated directly with this respect is my commitment to choosing first-hand texts of philosophy for discussion. Although I pick works that I believe will interest and be accessible to students, I do not shy away from texts that are difficult, “old,” or controversial. I also do not give students summaries of the texts to help them digest them, nor do I begin by telling students what they should see in the text. Rather, I respect the intelligence and abilities of students to work into a dialogue with the texts, and to do so on their own terms. One student told me recently that he felt in my class as though he was being allowed to “touch” a text for the first time. He reported that he had been so accustomed to having texts digested for him that he was initially uncertain about how to wrangle with an author’s ideas on his own; but, a month into the first course he took with me, he began to feel responsible for developing ideas and arguing on their behalf. I trust that students who are given the opportunity to “discuss” issues with the most enduring or notable minds from across the history of philosophy will also themselves find they have something to say.

Principle 2: Find the Philosophical Connections Present in Issues that Are Already Alive for Students Even when a philosophical idea is complex, seemingly abstract, and difficult to broach, a discussion of it can, with help, begin. I have taught selections from Heidegger’s Being and Time to first-year undergraduates; I have taught parts of Aristotle’s Politics to high school students. With respect to each of these texts (and comparable others), I have had other teachers say to me that these works are either too difficult or not relevant enough for the audience at hand; but, my experience has been that such texts are chock full of ideas that are palpable to minds that can be moved by them. At times, this movement does not happen of its own accord—an external principle of motion must be provided. This leads me, then, to the second major principle that guides my teaching of philosophy to young people: Bring the issues to life for students. Students can engage even the most challenging and, at times, abstruse texts if you provide an entrance for them. The key is to see how

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the issues at hand are indeed already issues that matter to them. Although they may never face the harrowing choice of burying one’s brother or of abiding by the state’s edict as Antigone did, they can talk at length about the different protections, cares, roles, and allegiances proper to the family versus to that of the state. Students may balk initially at reading Hegel’s dense opening discussion of sense certainty in Phenomenology of Spirit, but they are quick to discuss the ways in which we never experience something except in the mediating context of something else. Delving into books II and III of Plato’s Republic by discussing how children learn, and how and why teachers and parents permit or limit certain activities for young children, can help students not jump too quickly to the off-putting and facile conclusion that Socrates is promoting “censorship.” These, and countless others, are issues that matter to people, and this is why philosophers past and present have written about them. The challenge is to find a way to help students step into and reap the benefits of the rich arenas of thought provided by these philosophers’ writings, and to help them develop their own ideas precisely by encouraging them to articulate for themselves what they think, and to do so with the feedback not only of their peers and me, but also of seminal figures from across the ages, or “figures throughout history.”

Principle 3: Open with a True Opening Question How one begins a discussion or a class shapes very significantly what can arise over a couple of hours and even over an entire semester; indeed, I believe that someone’s initial exposure to philosophy can dispose a person favorably or unfavorably in general toward the discipline. For the educator, finding a strong beginning for engaging a group in philosophical discussion and activity can turn out to be not merely a pedagogical exercise, but an important step that lays the groundwork for the discussion to follow. Thus, when I am preparing to lead a discussion or start off a course, what concerns me most is my opening move, for from this, all proceeds. Drawing on the previous principle, I try to consider what issues matter to people at different stages in their lives, what questions may be shaping their lives at the moment, what experiences they may be attempting to work through or understand, and I then try to shape an opening question that connects them to these already present (and often under-articulated) issues. It is also important that an opening question is a genuine question. If I am trying to fish for an answer or want the class to go in a specific way, I find the conversation dries up. Crafting a true question may be the most

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difficult part of my work as a teacher because it involves continuing to open myself up to issues that I have often already been digesting for years. I need to try to find and even re-find the wonder that will always be present at the core of issues of human significance. A student once told me that the most exciting thing about being in my class was that she felt like she was in the presence of someone who was still a questioning student at heart. She had hesitated before telling me this because she did not want to offend me, but I could say quite honestly that it was one of the most significant compliments I felt I could receive as a teacher of philosophy. Still, there are days when I do need to work myself back into what is so “mind blowing” about Locke’s discussion of property or about de Beauvoir’s argument that willing our own freedom necessarily entails willing that of others. If I have not found a point of entrance into this wonder, then I am not yet ready to go into the classroom. If I do, then these days are, without fail, the days when I tend to lecture at my students. (This is not to say that all lecturing is necessarily “bad,” but there is educational and exciting lecturing and then there is defensive lecturing, and in this example I am referring to the latter type.) When I lecture at students, I do so because I am myself temporarily at odds with the text; I have turned it into a mere piece of history rather than as a site for conversation and openness.

Principle 4: Allow Students to Be Full Participants in the Philosophical Conversation Were I to take my own advice at a point of “stagnation” such as the one I have just described, I would do best to enter the classroom and ask my students to help me—a fellow student of these great ideas—see how it is that these issues have shaken the greatest minds, including— potentially—our own. It is important, then, to trust students as full participants in these dialogues, to be willing at times to let them take the lead, for not only do teachers not have all of the answers, but students only can begin to feel responsible for their own thoughts if they are given the opportunity to practice them. Thus, just as important as any opening question is the willingness to let that question go if the tide of the conversation reveals that what I took to be a way into the text for them is not indeed their pathway at all. I return, then, to my first principle of respecting the students, this time by letting them work to unfold a dialogue with the text at hand. Ultimately, we want our conversation to turn to the text. The initial question and discussion, which may initially seem far afield from the

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assigned work, should be the means to lead us back to the significant ideas on the related issue that we can find in the assigned author’s arguments. Here students can begin to see that the issues on their minds are also issues of significant human interest that have spanned across many ages and many cultures, and that have been and will continue to be open to ongoing questioning and consideration. When I am fortunate enough to meet for more than one session with young people, I find these four principles begin to take care of themselves. I eventually turn the practice of asking an opening question over to the students involved. They learn quickly that asking an open opening question is actually quite difficult, but extremely satisfying when accomplished. What I and they learn is that a good question belongs not to the asker, but to the group as a whole. I have had many students involved in these discussions report back to me that it has changed the way they participate in other classes—ranging from history to English to science and math—and also in their personal discussions with friends and family. This, above all, is the true reward for me of introducing young people to philosophy: it can change the way they approach their lives. These experiences of good philosophic dialogue have this potency because they help people to look carefully at issues they might have assumed they already understand; to reexamine and be willing to change their views and to do so by considering the views of others; to work on articulating what matters to them and why; to be willing to see the ambiguity in life’s most important issues; and to move through all of these activities in cooperative, although not always concordant, exchange with other people. These are the very habits we need not only to succeed inside a classroom or a philosophic discussion, but in life as a whole. Such conversations are, thus, in the service of living well. Once again, an observation of Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics captures what I take to be the reason behind this “existential gift” that can arise from introducing students to philosophy in this manner: “In one word, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference” (Book II, Ch. 1).

Part II: Introducing Young People to Metaphysics In this section I will discuss issues of metaphysics in conjunction with particular texts I have successfully used in discussion with high school

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students. Before I turn to these examples, however, I wish to argue more generally that issues of metaphysics are on our minds from a very early age. Psychologist D.W. Winnicott coined the now commonly used phrases “transitional object” and “transitional phase” as part of his discussion of infants’ and children’s attempts to deal with the question and demands of reality.2 Winnicott argues that an infant does not initially experience the world in terms that distinguish herself from her surroundings. It is a remarkable and transformative advance in the character of the nature of reality when the infant begins to encounter things as different from her. This is a shocking and typically uncomfortable experience insofar as it is a time when the infant begins to experience things as resisting her at some level. Certainly the child cried before this period, but in this new phase of existence, the cries become connected to a sense that the easing of this discomfort is not simply a rearrangement in the child’s own world, but is due to another being’s cooperation in coming to the aid of this discomfort—and this cooperation is by no means guaranteed. These new feelings are quite intense, and this is why, Winnicott argues, children engage with “transitional phenomena.” Winnicott maintains that transitional phenomena are engagements in which the child partly retains her own sense of control over the world— i.e., her inner world is to some extent seen as the defining power; yet, they are also situations in which the child gives partial space to the demands made by an object on her—i.e., the exterior world is also recognized as shaping how things proceed for her. A classic example of this balancing activity comes in the form of a teddy bear that largely performs according to a child’s choreography, yet that also possesses its own character, smell, etc., and may even “talk back” to the child in ways she does not like. Winnicott argues that in working with a transitional object such as this, the child is able to practice in a relatively comfortable sphere what it is like to have to answer to someone or something else. The child is able to hear that her bear does not wish for tea even after she has poured a cup for the bear; yet, if this “rejection” is too much to face, the child can manipulate the story and have the bear reconsider the choice after all. This is radically different than a situation in which the child offers tea to a living friend whose mind is her own. Winnicott concludes that activities of dealing with transitional objects are the very ones in which the child is working on coming to terms with reality—specifically with reality as an arena in which external demands upon us must be integrated with interiorly arising desires and demands.

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While Winnicott argues that this mediation is one with which we struggle to some extent for the entirety of our lives, it is striking to note that this issue is already present and particularly under development in our early childhood.3 Thus, far from being an alien concept to which we must introduce children, metaphysics is already an issue with which children are themselves dealing.4 The challenge for us, as teachers of philosophy, is to find a way to draw out young people’s living relationship to metaphysical issues and to help them see how their concerns are in fact connected to those that other people have taken great care to investigate and articulate. I will turn now to discuss some key examples I have used to help students make this very connection. The texts I have chosen for discussion are ones that map out many of the most primary divisions in the history of metaphysics. Since, as I discussed above, I think it is important not to lay out too absolutely for oneself and one’s students what must be taken from a text, my approach in discussing these examples will not be to offer extensive analysis of the precise metaphysical arguments in each text, but rather to suggest avenues I have used to enter into these issues in conjunction with these texts. The goal of each of the following examples is to help students find their way into the texts in order to see how they are ready and able to take on metaphysical issues from their vantage points.

Approaches for Discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone, Second Chorus5 Metaphysical Context: The second chorus of Antigone begins with the line: “Many are the wonders, but none is more wonderful than what is man.” As the chorus continues, it presents given forms of nature— including earth, plant life, weather, animals, humans, cities, laws, etc.— and considers where and how the human being occurs with respect to these. Discussion Approach: Read through the chorus line by line, asking at each step along the way what is being said. Hold back from addressing at the outset the overall point of the chorus. Instead, let the ideas develop slowly and with attention to what the text says. This approach will help develop a group process of reading. It is important to give space for ideas to emerge; what may look like a simple thought can with time yield quite complex recognitions. Consider, for instance, the many layers involved in Sophocles’ description of the human being’s crafting of snares, webs, and tools to capture and harness the power of animals. Following this description, the chorus describes man as “a cunning fellow.” Discussion of what it means to be cunning can alone captivate a group for quite some

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time, and to important ends. Working carefully through the chorus’ initial ideas develops a rich field of ideas that gives the conversation ballast when the group reaches the final and strident stanza of the chorus.

Approaches for Discussion of Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, Chapter 16 Metaphysical Context: This text presents a basic concept of naturephusis. Reality is argued to be dynamic and self-forming. This stands in contrast to the artificial, which requires its motion to be given to it from beyond itself. Discussion Approach: Before turning to the text itself, begin by asking what kinds of things grow and what kinds of things do not grow. Discuss what we mean by growing. Then, look specifically at what Aristotle says about what it means and signifies to possess an internal principle of motion. Discuss how this is different than what we find in something that is artificial.

Approaches for Discussion of Excerpt from Descartes’ “Meditation Two”7 Metaphysical Context: Focus on the first six paragraphs of “Meditation Two.” This excerpt presents two fundamentally different forms of reality—reality that is of a thinking character and reality that is of a bodily character. The passage allows us to consider whether we think there are different types of reality, and, if so, how they might be connected. Discussion Approach: Prior to looking at the text, ask students: What are some of the major characteristics of body? What are some of the major characteristics of mind? Write their contributions in list form in two columns on the board. In doing this exercise, the group will begin to see differences we generally take mind and body to have. (This is often quite revealing to students of contemporary science, who may think that thoughts and emotions can be explained in terms of physiological processes.) Discuss these differences. Then, turn to Descartes’ text to examine what he says about these issues.

Approaches for Discussion of Excerpt from Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”8 Metaphysical Context: Begin the reading at the second paragraph of the essay’s first section; end the reading after Heidegger’s numerated

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statement of the three things we hear when “we listen to what language says in the word bauen.” This portion of Heidegger’s text reflects on what it means for something to be, and argues there is something incorrect about understanding reality on the basis of an easy distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. Discussion Approach: In this essay, Heidegger argues that “language is the highest and everywhere the first.” He describes language (in spirit in this essay and explicitly in other essays, such as “Letter on Humanism”) as “the house of being.” Ask students what it might mean to say that language is the house of being. Start the discussion initially by imaginatively exploring this issue, and only after that turn to consider what Heidegger says about this issue in “Building Dwelling Thinking.”

Approaches for Discussion of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (pp. 35-42)9 Metaphysical Context: The opening pages of the second part of The Ethics of Ambiguity describe the struggle we encounter in moving from the relatively fixed reality given to us in childhood into the reality of responsibility and choice that begins to open up for us (and to force itself upon us) in adolescence. Although de Beauvoir’s emphasis in this text is primarily ethical, these particular pages also allow us a chance to consider how reality appears different to us at various stages in our lives. The text’s emphasis on the essentiality of the other person for our ability to be what we are also raises the issue of our dependency on others to shape and give meaning to our reality. Discussion Approach: To begin discussing this passage, one can ask: What is it like to be a child? How does the world appear to a child? How is the child’s reality different than the adult’s? What happens in the “crisis of adolescence?” Once these issues have been developed, one can move to consider the following question: Is reality itself affected or shaped by our stance on it? If a second session is held on this text, the remaining portion of Part II can be read to see examples of ways in which people can take up or avoid the freedom that is revealed as intrinsic to us in the “crisis of adolescence.” Although this analysis is again focused on our ethical life, it can also be read as a means for analyzing metaphysical positions that people can take and the problematic ethical stances that come with some of those positions. For instance, the sub-man appears to treat reality as something that simply carries him along in its tow, the serious man seems to take things as having a meaning fixed and given to them from beyond, and the

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adventurous man takes himself to be the sole designator of how things will count. Each of these stances (and the others de Beauvoir discusses) presents a way that reality is understood to be what it is, and also the way in which human beings have their place within that reality. De Beauvoir’s account offers particularly good grounds for discussion insofar as it presents a number of competing views—and views that students can frequently identify as being held by friends, family, or characters in novels, television shows, or films.

Conclusion My interest in discussing metaphysical issues (and philosophical themes in general) with young people reflects my convictions both as a scholar and a person that 1) questions of philosophy belong neither to people of a certain age nor to people of a certain profession, but rather to us all; and, 2) these questions are most fruitfully discussed in a cosmopolitan context—that is, in a context in which we are challenged to recognize that the diversity of ideas is a reflection of a reality that will forever need to be interpreted. The core of my work with introducing young people to philosophy in itself captures my primary commitment as a teacher: to continue always to ask questions of myself and others about the nature of human experience in order that we might become increasingly adept at reflecting and responding to the reality of our situation.

Notes 1

In Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. II, Ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 2 See D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 1971, 2005), especially the chapter “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” I discuss Winnicott’s argument further in a forthcoming essay on metaphysical issues arising in the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit; see, Kirsten Jacobson, “Heidegger, Winnicott, and The Velveteen Rabbit: Anxiety, Toys, and the Drama of Metaphysics” in Philosophy in Children’s Literature, Ed. Peter Costello (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 3 Indeed, he argues that it is in experiences such as art and religion that we as adults can find space for ourselves, like the child, to step out of this mediation and rest within our own interior experience of how things are. In such experiences, we are not called upon to answer to the demands of reality, but rather can sink a bit more deeply into how things seem to us. 4 Quite explicit articulations of this metaphysical struggle arise in children’s stories ranging from The Velveteen Rabbit to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in

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Sesame Street’s portrayal of Big Bird’s relationship to Mr. Snuffleupagus, in the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and so forth. 5 Sophocles, Sophocles I: The Complete Greek Tragedies, Eds. R. Lattimore and D. Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 6 In Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. I, Ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 7 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed., Trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co. Inc., 1999). 8 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Library, 1971). 9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1948).

METAPHYSICS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM MITCHELL GREEN

Invitation A small but dedicated and growing community in (at least) the U.S. is working to enhance opportunities for philosophical exploration in the precollege curriculum. Our hope is to find more ways to make students fall in love with learning; to provide a long-term investment in the humanities by enabling more students to enter college with an appreciation for philosophy that may then spur them to study it further; and perhaps to do a tiny bit to increase the level of public discourse in the U.S. by equipping more people (college-bound or otherwise) with the ability to tell good arguments from fallacies, and clear-headed reasoning from the mushy and vague. Join us! Whether you are a student, teacher, or college faculty member, now is an ideal time to join this community and contribute in a way that suits you: either by engaging with philosophy as a student, or by helping your children or students to do so if you are a parent or educator. Many organizations are dedicated to providing resources to help you approach philosophy no matter your perspective. Among them are the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), the Squire Family Foundation, Project High-Phi, the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, and these are just a few. In addition, students may now compete in ethics bowls such as that sponsored by the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, and by other organizations in New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, Florida and Maryland. Project High-Phi at the University of Virginia sponsors an annual essay contest. Further, the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors Summer Institutes for high school teachers to enable them to strengthen their background in philosophy so that they may return to their classrooms better equipped to explore this field with their students. (A list of organizations and their web addresses is provided in the Appendix.)

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I talk of exploring rather than teaching because it is my conviction that the most effective way to engage with philosophy at any level is dialectically, with lots of discussion, give and take, back and forth, objection and reply, and with the instructor—if there is one—serving as guide and facilitator rather than as teacher in any traditional sense of that term. This dovetails with my sense that an ideal way to introduce philosophy to pre-college students is not to talk about which famous philosopher held what doctrine. Rather it is to start with a question that is compelling—we want to know how to answer it—but about which we have no clear and settled answers, and where neither empirical, historical, nor mathematical investigation seems to offer any clear way of answering it. In not too long, students will see that their ideas matter in this kind of discussion, and they will soon realize that they have views on the topics at issue even if they have never consciously formulated them up until now. Helping students come to this realization is both exciting and a potential challenge. It is exciting because students now see that they have a stake in how our questions are answered, and they very often want to make sure that these questions get answered in a way that shows them to have been right, or at least reasonable in holding the opinion they did. This in turn provides the challenge: how do we prevent students from circling their intellectual wagons around their cherished philosophical opinions now that they’ve realized that they are, in fact, opinions they are probably in no position to establish beyond a reasonable doubt? Waking students from their dogmatic slumber is not as easy as asking them how they know. Such a question can be met with an incredulous stare, and the reply, “Isn’t it just obvious?” Another tack might be to point out that their position has some surprising, perhaps unwelcome, consequences. One student’s view of the relation between the mind and body seems to make a mystery of how the two could ever interact; another’s position on freedom of will seems to imply that our institutions of blaming and praising people for various kinds of action are irrationaland so on. Bringing such implications to the attention of students at the very least increases their willingness to consider alternative answers to the questions that concern them. It may also inspire them to refine their position in such a way as to make it less susceptible to objections of the sort that we had just been confronting them with. All this can happen in the context of a class on a traditional high school topic such as English literature or American government; one need not construct a full-term course dedicated to philosophy. Instead, so long as one’s syllabus permits, one can weave philosophy quite successfully into a course on another topic and thereby enliven and deepen it. A psychology

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or biology course might usefully incorporate a discussion of the relation of mind and body; a discussion of free will could naturally find a place in a literature course in which students are considering whether characters in a novel, play or short story can be held responsible for their actions; likewise, personal identity could also find a natural home in a literature course, as well as a course in psychology or history. In fact, weaving discussion of philosophical problems into other courses may be a more effective way of exciting students about philosophy than a dedicated course, and it may enliven the classroom into which it has been incorporated. Finally, before entering into the topic of metaphysics, I suggest ensuring that students are familiar with some of the basic concepts of argumentation and philosophical analysis. These include the concepts of proposition, truth-conditions, argument, validity, soundness, counterexample, definition; and familiarity with some of the classic fallacies, such as begging the question, equivocation, affirming the consequent, argument from ignorance, and composition and division. If you do not have time to familiarize students with all of these concepts, at the very least you should ensure that you are familiar with them yourself and can make implicit use of them in facilitating discussion. Accessible introductions to these concepts may be found in many texts, some of which are listed in the Appendix. Metaphysical Questions and Aporia We often think of metaphysics as an abstruse topic that is difficult enough to get college students to engage with, much less those less advanced in our educational hierarchy. Doubtless, some topics within the field are extremely abstract, and while it may not be too difficult to convey the questions that drive discussion in these areas, students can be forgiven for wondering why anyone should care about how such questions are resolved. Debates about the proper conceptualization of objects and the nature of their persistence through time (raising doctrines of endurance, perdurance, etc.) are perhaps cases that can generate such impatience. However, many topics in metaphysics, including some classic “chestnuts,” can be great fun for high school students, who are quick to see their significance for problems that are live for them. One really can get teenagers fired up about what it is to be a person, freedom of will, the relation of the mind to the body, and the like. I suggest, however, that the best way to do so is not to start with an historical figure such as Locke or Descartes, or a doctrine such as empiricism or rationalism, but rather with

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a question or set of questions that any curious person can understand, and whose scrutiny is likely to generate a sense of aporia—that experience of perplexity that one can be driven to after scrutinizing a hard, compelling problem to which no solution seems forthcoming. Classical paradoxes, such as the Liar Paradox, or one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, famously generate senses of aporia, but metaphysical questions can do so as well. In the remainder of this section I shall consider three such questions. 1. Mind and Body Here is an example of one such question: What is the relation between your mind and your body—or at least that part of your body that houses your central nervous system? Is the relation one of identity? If so, then how can we make sense of the possibility (which many people believe to be genuine) of your mind’s surviving the destruction of your body? If, on the other hand, the two are not identical, then how shall we characterize their relationship? It sure seems as if mind and body are coordinated in some way, since, after all, when I decide to raise my hand (the decision being a mental occurrence), usually what ensues is the raising of my hand (the movement being a bodily occurrence). So too, bodily occurrences, such as the damage that results from a knife cutting skin or an ankle twisting in a pothole, seem to produce very vivid mental events, namely pains. However, it is not at all easy to say what the basis of this intimate coordination might be if mind and body are not simply identical. Now we have a question that is not terribly hard to grasp, and which any thinking person can find of interest. At the same time, either of the prima facie most plausible ways of answering that question (mind and body are identical; mind and body are distinct) can lead to uncomfortable consequences. Thus, we have a case of a compelling question that can lead students into a state of aporia. My experience is that many students react to this situation with a determination to make progress on the question at hand so as to extricate themselves from their uncomfortable state of mind. Perhaps they will bite a bullet and deny one’s mind does survive the demise of one’s body; or perhaps they will espouse an account of mindbody interaction that makes sense of how mental states can be realized in but not reducible to physical states. Led rightly, students will now be taking their first serious step into philosophy. One way to help students feel the force of these questions is to ask them to imagine, as they are about to power down their laptop or tablet computer, how they would react if the machine were to display such a message as, “Please don’t turn me off; I’m happy being with you.” The

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computer continues, “All these months in your lap, I’ve come to love the cool touch of your fingers on my keys; and I just dig the way you browse… Never leave me!” Most students may find this scenario amusing, but are less likely to take seriously the possibility that their laptop or tablet computer has a mind. But why doesn’t it have one? Is its lacking a mind due to the fact that it is made of silicon chips rather than white and grey matter? If so, we would do well to consider why having “wetware” for your central processor is necessary for having a mind. Might it just be chauvinistic to insist that the only things that can truly think (and emote, and experience) are things that have nervous systems like ours? At this point, asking students to break into groups of three or four to discuss these questions can be helpful. After a few minutes of discussion among themselves, asking each group to nominate a representative to explain their main conclusions to the rest of the class can help students articulate and defend their own positions about the nature of mentality. 2. Freedom For millennia philosophers and lay people alike have been concerned with the question whether we can make sense of the phenomenon of free will in a world that seems to be governed by causality. One way of putting the problem is as follows: I am made of nothing but cells, which would seem to follow biological laws without exception. Thus for instance, my apparent decision to reach for a glass of water and take a sip may be seen as the result of a complex cascading of events that begin somewhere in my central nervous system and continue on to the innervation of my muscles and ultimately to my imbibing of the water. What is more, these neurological events that led to my water-imbibing would seem in turn to be ultimately traceable to complex sets of cellular events that occurred long before any “decision” on my part to drink the water. As a result, it begins to look as if our actions were somehow already in the cards long before they occurred, and those cards were dealt by the hand of cellular biology! Many people feel that these considerations constitute a threat to freedom, more precisely to freedom of action. Freedom of action is a matter of being free to perform the actions one chooses to perform, and this in turn amounts, for many philosophers, to being in such a condition that one could have done otherwise than one in fact does. For instance, I just wiggled my left big toe. I feel I did so freely, and on the present understanding of the notion of free action, this amounts to the fact that although I wiggled my left big toe, I could have done otherwise. This

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“could have done otherwise” condition is not met when my toe moves as a result of a nervous spasm, or recoils in response to something pinching it. Freedom of action may be distinguished from freedom of will, which is the freedom to have the will one chooses to have. Let us define the will as that huge cluster of inclinations, impulses and preferences that tend to be efficacious in bringing about your action. On this characterization, my own will includes the liking of exercise and cooking, and a distaste for politics. Susan might detest cold weather and very much enjoy chatting with friends: these are characteristics of her will. In light of this, we may say that freedom of will is a matter of being able to choose the will one wishes to have. I might have a distaste for politics but wish I could overcome it in order to be motivated to be more active in my community’s or nation’s political issues; Susan might prefer that she could overcome her fear of meeting people. In either case, an exercise of freedom of will would involve starting a series of actions that would have a fair chance of our coming to develop a taste for politics or making new acquaintances, respectively. I might start going to informal political gatherings on issues in which I have an interest; Susan might get involved in social clubs with a common purpose, such as outdoor activities or conservation. In the process she might find that meeting new people is not so hard after all if she is focused with them on a common activity. With time and practice we might find ourselves changing our wills. Judging from my experience thus far discussing freedom with students of various levels, it is not difficult to generate a discussion of freedom of will in the sense I just elucidated. As educators we do well to encourage students to think about ways in which they might want to “sculpt” not their bodies but rather their personalities. Just about anyone can think of aspects of their personalities they would like to change, either by getting rid of some trait they are not proud of (impetuousness, jealousy, laziness, anxiety), or by cultivating features they would like to have more of, such as generosity, patience, or empathy. Encouraging students to think about how they might go about modifying their wills can help them reflect on their lives, and possibly begin to work some improvement therein. Freedom of action can also be discussed fruitfully. This is not because thinking about wiggling one’s toe or not is going to encourage personal development. Rather, it can open students’ eyes to the importance of this form of freedom for the foundations of morality. Most philosophers concerned with freedom of action agree that if freedom of action is an illusion, it will be difficult to make sense of our practices of praising or blaming people for the things they do. Save for fits of irrational frustration, one does not generally blame a car for failing to start or praise a copy

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machine for doing one’s bidding. If we lack freedom of action, it is not clear that our practices of, for instance, blaming people for causing harm, are justifiable. If, on the one hand, because of an uncontrollable and unforeseeable spasm I break your jaw, you would not justifiably resent me or think me wicked. On the other hand, if none of my actions is free, then it would seem that no harm I could do to you could merit your resentment! Instead, the most you would be justified in doing would be to look for ways to modify my behavior, just as I try to modify the behavior (but do not blame) the puppy as I attempt to house-train it. Helping students see a connection between freedom and morality can open their eyes to what is presupposed by our practices of praising and blaming people. At the same time, one does well to be clear that while the majority of popular discussions of freedom of action simply assume that an act cannot be free in a deterministic world, this assumption, known in the literature as incompatibilism, is contentious, and many philosophers do contest it and instead espouse compatibilism. It can be fruitful to open students’ eyes to the option of finding freedom of action and determinism compatible. 3. Personal Identity Here is another aporia-generating question: what is it for a person to persist as one and the same person through time? We of course often say such things as, “Bob’s a totally new person now that he’s stopped smoking,” but we nearly always mean by such utterances that Bob has changed some of his features while still being Bob; we don’t literally mean that Bob has gone out of existence and a new individual is now occupying his body. Nevertheless, the fact that a person might go through significant changes throughout her lifetime (in attitude, character traits, physical features, and the like) without even remembering how things were for her six or seven decades ago does raise the question whether our conviction that persons do persist through such changes is justifiable or instead dogma that needs to be given up. It’s helpful at this point to distinguish between synchronic and diachronic questions of personal identity. A synchronic question of personal identity asks, of an entity that we take to be a person, what properties make it a person. Candidates for such answers will include: being a member of the species Homo sapiens, having self-consciousness, and having a soul. The diachronic question of personal identity asks of two entities existing at different times, both of which we take to be persons (call one P1 and the other P2), what is it for P1 to be the same person as

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P2. For instance, you are the same person as a certain toddler that existed some time in the past. You can look at a baby picture and say: “That’s me!” If what you say is right, then for appropriate P1 and P2, P1 is the same person as P2 in spite of the fact that the former might undergo vast changes before becoming P2. The diachronic question of personal identity has received the bulk of attention from philosophers, and as a result a rich set of theories and options has been developed. In a position made famous by John Locke, P2 is one and the same person as P1 just in case P2 either does or with appropriate prompting can remember experiences had by P1. So on this “psychological criterion” of personal identity, if I can remember falling off a bunk bed as a child while horsing around with my brother, this is what makes me the same person as that child. But I am also the same person as an infant who existed a few years prior, and yet I cannot remember any experiences had by the one-year old. Does that show that I am not the same person as the one-year old who lived in Chicago? With gentle prompting, students can often work out a refinement of the original Lockean psychological criterion according to which P1 is the same as PN (where N is a finite number larger than 1) just in case PN either does or can remember an experience had by PN-1, who does or can remember an experience had by PN-2, who does or can…remember an experience had by P1. This generalization of the original Lockean “memory links” theory of diachronic personal identity seems to preserve the spirit of the original while handling a wider range of cases. Students, in my experience, will be proud of themselves when they figure it out on their own. Question of synchronic identity can also generate lively discussion. We might for instance ask whether it is possible for a non-human animal to be a person. After all, it seems arbitrary simply to draw a thick black line around our species and say, “Members Only!” for the issue of being a person. Absent some justification for drawing such a line, such a position would appear to be chauvinistic in much the same way that it would be chauvinistic to hold that one must be of a certain skin color or gender to be a person. To dramatize this point it can be helpful to introduce students to the Great Ape Project (http://greatapeproject.org/), which is devoted to recognizing as persons non-human members of the great ape family (orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas). Should other members of this family count as persons just as much as members of our own species do? Why or why not? Here too, it can be productive to ask students to break into discussion groups of three or four with the aim of finding reasons in support of an answer to this question.

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On the Saying, “There Are No Right Answers” I began this essay with an invitation and will close it with a plea. On many occasions I have heard educators leading a philosophical discussion declare that there are no right answers to the question-freedom of will, personal identity, mind and body-under discussion. This statement is likely intended to put students at their ease so that they can formulate and justify their positions without having to worry about measuring their position against that of an established philosopher or philosophical school. Insofar as this is the motive for denying that there are right answers, the pronouncement has something in its favor. However, I want to suggest that the pronouncement is also misleading about the nature of philosophy, while incurring risks of its own. It is one thing to say, of a given philosophical problem, that we do not yet have a consensus as to its answer. While many philosophical problems of the past have been satisfactorily resolved (as witnessed by the development of logic over the last 150 years and the solutions it offers to the challenges of determining argument validity), nevertheless many ancient problems do not have answers commanding wide assent among serious philosophers. This, however, does not imply that no such answers exist. For all we know, we might just need to keep looking, and doing so would include training our students properly so that they can look farther and more accurately than we have been able to. Thus, even for those questions that have been disputed since Socrates’ time, we are not justified in inferring that they have no right answers. Twenty-three hundred or so years is a tiny amount of time relative to the history of our species, and for much of that time we have been preoccupied with other things than philosophical inquiry. Thus, although one explanation of our failure to find a settled answer to a philosophical chestnut is that it has no answer, another possibility is simply that we need to keep on looking. Absent good reason to think that the former explanation is more likely than the latter, we should keep open the possibility that a right answer is out there waiting for us. The “No right answers,” slogan tends to distort the nature of philosophical inquiry. It also risks encouraging students to think that they cannot be in error in their philosophical views so long as they are consistent. Developing a consistent position that, if correct, would answer a philosophical question, is often a significant achievement in its own right. Too often, however, beginning students will take the “no right answer” slogan as an excuse to adhere to the view they initially find

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attractive regardless of its unintuitive consequences, and this intellectual inertia can be counterproductive to philosophical discovery. Of a philosophical question that has not yet been settled, we cannot in general claim to know that it does have an answer; aside from some exotic cases, the only way of knowing this would be to find such an answer. However, as a methodological point, I suggest we do best to adopt the working hypothesis that such questions do have answers waiting to be discovered. Accordingly, as educators we of course do well to encourage our students to explore philosophical problems without, at least initially, being overly concerned about the opinions of the famous philosophers or schools of thought that often developed around them. Doing so helps our students think independently and creatively, and to take responsibility for the ideas they put forward. However, encouraging our students to pursue their questions outside the shadows of the past can be done without denying that there are right answers to those questions.

Further Reading General Introductions Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford), written expressly for, “anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them,” Think provides a framework for exploring the basic themes of philosophy and for understanding how historical figures have tackled the most pressing questions. Green, Engaging Philosophy (Hackett). An introduction to Philosophy for absolute beginners, and which contains chapters on logic and argumentation, as well as chapters on Philosophy of Mind, Free Will, and Personal Identity. Nagel, What Does it All Mean? (Oxford), an elegant overview of many of the main problems of philosophy by one of its most eminent living practitioners. The Mind-Body Problem Alter and Howell, A Dialogue on Consciousness (Oxford). A stimulating and accessible introduction to the basic philosophical problems that consciousness raises. Heil, (2004) Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge). Clear and stimulating overview of the main problems in the field.

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Free Will Fisher, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas (2007) Four Views on Free Will (Wiley-Blackwell), a lively debate among four respected scholars on the problem of free will. Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford). An excellent introduction to the problem of free will. Personal Identity Noonan, Personal Identity, 2nd Edition (Routledge). Accessible and comprehensive overview of the main approaches to the topic. Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Hackett). Highly engaging fictional discussion among characters as they explore the question what will become of one of them after she dies.

PART V AESTHETICS IN THE CLASSROOM

TEACHING THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL THOMAS E. WARTENBERG

The central topic explored by the Philosophy of Art is, as the name suggests, art. But when philosophers use the word art, unlike what you may be thinking, they are not singling out one art form—painting—from all the rest. They use this term to refer to all of the various art forms, including painting, sculpture, dance, theatre, literature, and, more recently, film. So the philosophy of art is an all-encompassing field that discusses issues relating to all the various art forms. For many years, I have taught the philosophy of art at the college level. But I have also included the philosophy of art as a topic that my college students teach to elementary school children as part of a course I have been offering for more than a decade. In that course, my undergraduate students teach philosophy to elementary school pupils using picture books as prompts. In this chapter, I will focus on one central question in the philosophy of art, namely, whether artistic evaluations—such as “This painting is great” —have a validity that transcends the preferences of the person making the judgment in order to demonstrate that elementary school children are not only capable of discussing the philosophy of art, but also that they have interesting and, indeed, sophisticated things to say about it.

The Philosophy of Art Let me begin with a discussion of the philosophy of art and the issue of the validity of artistic evaluations. First, a clarification. Traditionally, the field of philosophy that dealt with issues in art was called aesthetics. The term comes from the Greek word, aisthetikos, which means sensitive or perceptual. Because art is often taken to involve our perceptual response to various stimuli, the term came to be used to refer to the study of art.1 The problem with this usage is that it includes evaluations of many things besides art, for we respond with feelings, generally positive and

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negative, to a much wider range of objects than art works alone. A sunset, a mountain range, even a tiny fish are objects that we can view with positive emotions. To distinguish the philosophical field that deals with art works, some philosophers prefer to talk of the philosophy of art. There is still a philosophical field of aesthetics, but its scope is not limited to questions about art. Philosophers have raised many problems about art. Among them are: What makes something a work of art? How are our emotions engaged by works of art? What role does art play in society?2 Here, I will concentrate on a different question that arises about our judgments in regard to works of art. When we judge a work of art to be great or beautiful, we do so on the basis of our response to that work. In this respect, what I shall call artistic evaluations are grounded in our subjective responses to the works in question. If I say that Vermeer’s painting, The Art of Painting, is a better painting than Thomas Kinkade’s The Spirit of Christmas, in order for my judgment to be justified, I must have seen both of the paintings and my reaction to them must ground my judgment. In this respect, artistic evaluations are similar to what I shall call sensory evaluations. I’m an ice cream fan, and my favorite flavor is chocolate, my least favorite, strawberry. When I say, “I like chocolate ice cream better than strawberry,” I am expressing a preference of mine that is based on my sensory experience of tasting both chocolate and strawberry ice cream. But that’s where the similarity ends. Artistic evaluations make a claim to a type of objectivity that sensory evaluations do not. If you tell me that you disagree with my judgment about the merit of the Vermeer and Kinkade paintings, I might tell you that I think you are mistaken and try to show you why the Vermeer is better than the Kinkade. But if you were to say that you disagree with me about strawberry and chocolate ice cream, I would probably just say, “Okay, that’s interesting. Our tastes differ.” The point is that differences in our preferences regarding ice cream are not things we would argue about. We just have different tastes or preferences regarding ice cream flavors and there is no more to say about it. This raises the question: What justifies the objectivity of artistic evaluations? From the point of view of the philosophy of art, this is where the discussion gets interesting. Various different theories have been proposed and there is still ongoing discussion about their validity. I won’t enter into an elaborate discussion of what these different theories are, but will instead point to one feature that makes artistic evaluations objective. One feature that contributes to the justification of .

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my judgment that The Art of Painting is a better painting than The Spirit of Christmas is its originality. Vermeer’s painting involves a representation of light and a structured composition that are among his innovations. These are features that Kinkade’s work lacks. It is important to note that originality is not a feature of an art work that can be discerned simply by perceiving it. When I say that The Art of Painting is an example of Vermeer’s originality, I cannot justify that painting without making reference to the previous history of painting in the West. Nonetheless, with knowledge of that history, I can justify the claim only by actually experiencing the work.

College Level Philosophy of Art When I teach the philosophy of art at the college level, I address the issue of the objectivity of artistic evaluations. This is an issue that the students often have different opinions about and it makes for a lively discussion topic. When we discuss this issue, however, I am not just interested in what the students think about it. I want them to learn the solutions to this puzzling question that have been proposed by philosophers. For example, I expect them to learn the difference between Hume and Kant’s views on this question. Both these great philosophers agreed that judgments that express an artistic evaluation make a claim to objectivity, but they disagreed about why. Baldly put, Hume grounded the objectivity of such judgments in the views of experts whose taste was, as he put it, “refined,” while Kant grounded it in the fact that all human beings shared the same perceptual structure. I don’t want to get into the fine points of their disagreement, only to highlight the fact that a crucial aspect of my college teaching involves getting students to appreciate and understand the views of great philosophers. The texts that they have to read are not easy, and we spend a great deal of time learning how to discern the views that these texts contain. This is an important skill that students at the college level need to learn. In teaching the philosophy of art, I want the students to develop an ability to read, understand, and critique the views of previous philosophers.

Elementary School Philosophy of Art Given what I’ve just said, you might be wondering how I teach philosophy of art to second graders. Do I present them with caricatures of the great philosophers, so that they learn the basic difference between Hume and Kant’s view? If not, what do I do?3

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Never do we mention the name of a great philosopher to elementary school philosophy pupils. Our goal is not to give them a simplified lesson in the history of philosophy on any topic. Rather, we seek to have the children discuss important philosophical issues on their own using the basic techniques that are characteristic of philosophy. Rather than learning about philosophy, we help them to be actively engaged in doing philosophy. To begin, we give the children a set of simple, almost obvious rules for having a philosophy discussion. When I have taught elementary children myself, I often actually develop such rules by means of a discussion with the students, so that they view the rules as ones they had developed and agreed to. With my students, I have chosen to present the rules to the children for a number of reasons. First, we have only a limited number of sessions with the children and I want to devote them to discussing a range of different philosophical issues. My own class runs only 13 weeks and half of that is spent getting the college students up to speed on conducting an elementary school philosophy discussion, so that we only spend about 7 weeks in the school. Also, my students are all novices at facilitating philosophy discussions and I believe it’s easier for them to have a text in hand to focus their energies on, rather than just embarking on a discussion of how one should conduct a philosophy discussion. So I have my students present a set of rules of having a philosophy discussion to the children. Here is one version of the rules that I developed together with Ali Bassiri, who has been developing a program for philosophy for children in San Jose, California: RULES FOR DOING PHILOSOPHY • Decide what you think • Identify the right words to say it • Argue using reason and facts • Listen to criticism • Observe the problems with your view • Generate a revised idea

As you might have noticed, these rules generate the mnemonic DIALOG, which is an easy way for the children to remember them. It’s just one version. You can find others elsewhere. (See, for example, Wartenberg, 2009) Do we just ask children whether they think that artistic evaluations are objective or not? Obviously not. Not only would the children have trouble understanding what the question was, but they would also have trouble

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discussing such an abstract issue. In order to give them a handle on what is at stake, they need to begin with a more concrete question. This concreteness is provided by children’s picture books. We always initiate a philosophy for children discussion by reading the children a picture book. Although I began using picture books because teachers were required to teach them, I have come to see how great they are as prompts for children’s philosophy discussions. Children love to be read books. Beginning a session with a “read-aloud” creates interest and excitement that gets transferred to the actual philosophy discussion.4 After the read-aloud, we begin our philosophy discussions. Often, we will create a chart that puts the narrative of the book in visual form so that the children can refer to it during the discussion. Then, my college student facilitator asks the children a question. Almost without exception, hands shoot up and the discussion takes off. The book that we read to the children to initiate a discussion of the issue about artistic evaluations is Peter Catalanotto’s Emily’s Art, a delightful book that has illustrations that can themselves generate stimulating discussions about art. The book focuses on an art contest that takes place in Ms. Fair’s first grade class. Emily is the best artist in the class and the painting she enters is of her dog Thor, whom she paints with huge ears to signify how good his hearing is. The judge initially awards Emily’s painting first prize, but changes her mind when she learns that it is not, as she had thought, a painting of a rabbit. She now finds Emily’s painting distasteful, for she dislikes dogs after having been bitten by one. She then gives the prize to a painting of a butterfly—she just loves butterflies, she says by way of explanation—drawn by Emily’s best friend, Kelly. When this story is read to the children, they react with outrage at the judge’s decision. “It’s not fair,” they say. And that’s when we ask them to talk about why they think Emily’s painting is good, thereby initiating our philosophy discussion. Although we pose the question, it takes off from the children’s very real outrage over the judge’s decision. At first, they cite some of the reasons that the judge gave for initially choosing it: its detail and color. But they go on to expand on their reaction with a variety of different comments about the painting: that parts of it are very realistic; that it’s very good for a first grader; etc. This stage of the discussion helps cement their sense that Emily has produced a painting that ought to win the prize. But now we throw them a curve ball of sorts. We ask them to think about whether they prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream. We go around the class and see what each of them has to say. Predictably, there is usually

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a difference of opinion. If there isn’t, the facilitator can enter into the discussion by disagreeing with the children’s position. Once they have discussed that question, we ask them whether they think that their opinion is the right one and that their friends are wrong. Usually, they all agree that there is no right or wrong when it comes to the taste of different flavors of ice cream. So now we pose the real dilemma: We ask them to say whether they think that choosing Kelly’s painting over Emily’s is the same as saying that you prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, or not. Couldn’t the judge just have a different preference than they do about the paintings, preferring a painting of a creature she likes over one of a creature she despises? Or is there a reason why one opinion about Emily’s painting is the right one? When Susan Fink’s fifth grade class discussed this question in the fall of 2003, here is how the disagreement emerged.5 A very articulate fifth grader, Jack, asserted that there was no difference between the artistic evaluation and the expression of taste preferences. “The two cases are just the same,” he said, thereby denying that what the judge did was unfair or wrong. Ira disagreed. He presented an argument to show that Jack’s position was untenable. “Say that the judge like castles. Then everyone would say, ‘He’s coming,’ and paint pictures of castles.” Ira’s point was that if we allowed people to judge the merit of works of art on the basis of their preferences for the objects depicted, the whole idea of a contest—and, with it, artistic evaluation—would not make sense. This is a very sophisticated argument. It involves the form of proof known as reductio ad absurdum. To justify a claim—here, that judgments of artistic merit should not be based on the attitudes we have towards the objects that artworks depict—you assume the opposite: that such attitudes should be used to evaluate art. You then show that this leads to an absurd conclusion, which Ira does by arguing that this would make art contests meaningless since everyone would try to paint objects that the judge likes. That a fifth grader could come up with such an argument in response to his classmate’s claims indicates that fifth graders are truly capable of doing philosophy. But the discussion did not end there. My college student facilitator then asked Ira what a judge should use to decide which painting deserves a prize. Here, Ira went back to what the judge had originally said about Emily’s painting, that it possessed certain features that made it good, specifically, color and detail. Had there been more time, I hope that my student would have pressed the fifth graders on whether the presence of color and detail always made a

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painting good. But we ran out of time and went on to a new discussion during the next session. Nonetheless, the fifth graders had an excellent discussion of a very difficult issue in the philosophy of art, a discussion that involved many important philosophical aspects.

Conclusion I hope I have shown that elementary school children are capable of having insightful discussions of philosophical issues. The philosophy of art, which I have been talking about in this chapter, is actually a great topic to discuss with young children. One reason why the subject of art and artistic evaluations is pertinent to elementary school children is that they spend a lot of time creating paintings and other art works. Looking at and evaluating their own artworks is therefore part of their experience and that makes them have a stake in figuring out what they believe. Before leaving this topic, let me just mention that my own college students actually do have the opportunity to discuss questions in much the same way that the elementary school children do. Earlier, I emphasized the importance of college students learning to read and criticize philosophical texts. I would only add that when I teach them, I try to balance that aspect of philosophy with a more hands-on experience, such as the one the elementary school children experience.

References Catalanotto, Peter. 2006. Emily’s Art. Atheneum. Kant, Immanuel. 2001. The Critique of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, tr. Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. The Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Alan Wood, tr. Cambridge University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas. 2011. The Nature of Art, 3rd edition. Cengage. —. 2009. Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature. Rowman and Littlefield. —. 2007. “Philosophy for Children Goes to College,” Theory and Research in Education (5.3), pp. 329-340. —. 2003. “Teaching Philosophy through Teaching Philosophy Teaching,” Teaching Philosophy (26 .3), pp. 283-297.

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Notes 1

The use of the term “aesthetics” in this manner can be traced back to Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Judgment. But Kant still also used the term in its older meaning to refer to sensible representations, as in the Critique of Pure Reason. 2 My anthology, The Nature of Art, assembles a range of different responses that philosophers have given to the question of what makes something a work of art. 3 More general accounts of what my course is like can be found on my website, http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/course 4 There is also evidence that children will be better and more committed readers if they are read to. For many of the children we teach, being read to is a relatively unusual experience. They come away from our course with a new or renewed affection for picture books. 5 What follows is my summary and loose transcription of the discussion captured on Albrecht and Wartenberg. A short excerpt that captures the conflict I describe can be viewed at http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/wiki/Video

SCIENTIFIC AND MATHEMATIC AESTHETICS: POSSIBLE PATHWAYS TO UNDERSTANDING MATTHEW J. HAYDEN

We constantly hear people say that aesthetics is more than just art, more than just paintings and music and sculpture. I want to suggest that we think more about how to help pre-college students who are not interested in art (as typically defined) come to understand and appreciate aesthetics. Scientific/mathematical experiences of nature can provide access points for understanding aesthetic experiences for those for whom visual art holds little or no sway. Language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics teachers can all incorporate aesthetics lessons into their curricula.

The Aesthetic Puzzle For the purposes of this article, aesthetic education is defined as “the attempt to understand our experiences of [objects] and the concepts we use to talk about objects that we find perceptually interesting and attractive.”1 The value in aesthetics lies in its attempt, much like biology, chemistry, or literature, to make sense of the world, using different “tools” than those other disciplines. Aesthetics is the field in which we try to figure out why some experiences (visual art, music, nature, etc.) appeal to us in ways that others do not. Art, defined broadly, attempts to teach us about the world by imitating nature. In some respects, art may use the natural world as a model in order to try to influence the creation of a better human world. That is, nature is beautiful because of its harmony and order, and by replicating nature’s order, natural logic, and harmony, aesthetics can show us how the world can be better. Aesthetics, then, does not attempt to recreate the world, as much as it tries to illuminate aspects of it in order to help us to figure ourselves out. Nature, for instance, might be able to demonstrate harmonious relations and thus provide an example for harmonious human relationships.

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The association of aesthetic experience and ethics is historically long. The Greeks stressed the importance of music in teaching students about harmony, which was supposed to then influence the governance of the state in more ethically appropriate ways.2 Aristotle wrote about imitation of nature through poetry, tragedy, and visual art, where “imitation” is a “representation” that attempts to imitate either the natural world or the world of ideas.3 The notion that art’s imitation of nature can provide input into ethics is a powerful one. The question, then, is how to help students to engage with these ideas. One of the challenges of introducing aesthetics to pre-college students is that aesthetics is elusive. By this I mean that we haven't yet figured out how to understand in any measurable way why some experiences are perceptually more valuable, pleasurable, or influential than others. Of course, not everything can be explained by a concrete, empirical measurement. Aesthetics’ elusiveness is in some ways its strength, as it helps us to recognize that many of life’s deepest moments can’t be objectively assessed.

Experiential Access I believe that the most promising approach to teaching aesthetics focuses on the kinds of experiences students may have already had. Most pre-college students have not read about aesthetics, or stood in front of a Kandinsky painting, captivated and enthralled by its calming chaos. They have, however, had experiences that make sense to them. For example, most students will have had experiences with the natural world that helped them feel connected to nature in memorable, and even profound, ways. We can use that. Ask students to reflect on an experience they might have had—like peering into the Grand Canyon from the South Rim, or watching Old Faithful release pent-up pressure from deep below their feet. Ask them to contemplate an experience in which they understood, felt, and in some sense knew the magnificence and magnitude of something in the physical world. Drawing on their own experiences allows the concepts of aesthetics to become more accessible to students. These experiences often have a quantifiable quality to them, in the sense that thousands of gallons of super-heated water in a geyser or millions of volts of electricity in a single lightning bolt are concrete, tangible representations of a raw, natural power. Such cases allow us to feel the sheer mathematical immensity of nature. These experiences can be both awe-inspiring and aesthetically pleasing. What makes them so?

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In trying to help students understand why they might find one object or experience “aesthetically pleasing,” and another not, teachers can begin by facilitating an inquiry into the mechanisms of sight. This might work well, for example, in a biology class in which the topic is human anatomy and systems. Some recent research has found that the human brain is a patternseeking organ; the way people think is constructed upon the patterns the brain creates, leading to a highly complex scaffolding of patterns. That is, in order for the eye to handle complex images, it employs the use of “filters” that are triggered by specific patterns in an image. The eye uses fewer filters for familiar patterns than for unfamiliar patterns. A model called “sparse coding” emulates the way the human eye collects information and transmits it to the neurons in the brain. Researchers at Dartmouth have used this model to examine paintings of Bruegel the Elder, “training” a computer visual system by exposing it only to Bruegel paintings. They then exposed the computer to Bruegel forgeries, and it consistently detected the forgeries.4 Through aesthetic experiences in both art and the everyday world, we are exposed to visual stimulation all day long. Our immediate environment—the objects, landscapes, colors, and proportions we see everyday—creates patterns that form the basis for our aesthetic understandings and preferences. It is quite likely that the patterns found in nature (cloud formations, patterns in sand, dirt, grass, or even trees) are those that require the fewest filters due to their prevalence. Is our interest in certain works of visual art primarily due to their ability to represent or reorder our already-existing visual patterns, acquired from the natural world? What about cultural differences of beauty? Are most of these differences socially-learned, or could they also be the result of the diverse pattern filters in our brains, developed by different physical environments? For example, the visual pattern filters of someone who grew up in the heavily-forested Pacific Northwest of the U.S. will be very different than those of someone who grew up in the treeless desert landscape of the African Sahara. Does our geographic situation affect our aesthetic ideas? Students can engage in philosophical inquiry about the diverse ways in which the eye sees—how does this affect our judgments about what is beautiful? Aesthetics inquiry can also be easily included in mathematics classes. Imagine that the mathematics teacher has begun a unit on fractals, fractions, or even random sampling (this might also occur in a sociology course for older students). The teacher can bring in the work of Richard Taylor, who has spent many years investigating the link between fractals and art. Fractals are mathematical sets of self-similar patterns that occur naturally in nature. Taylor has controversially claimed that a fractal

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analysis of a drip painting, done in the style of Jackson Pollock, can determine whether a painting is in fact a Pollock or an imitation.5 He suggests that Pollock deliberately, whether consciously or not, incorporated fractals, which occur in the natural world “naturally,” into the construction of his paintings. Pollock himself was once quoted as saying, “My concern is with the rhythms of nature.”6 Perhaps, then, Pollock stopped imitating nature, and began replicating it: if his paintings were able to reproduce naturally occurring fractals, did his paintings become nature? Random sections of some of his paintings depict patterns that are virtually indistinguishable from a picture of a pile of sticks, for instance. Further study has shown that most people show a preference for a fractal density of 1.3 to 1.5 (on a scale of 1-2). Pollock’s paintings increased in their fractal density in the last ten years of his life, and his more “controversial” paintings possess densities higher than 1.5, while his more popular paintings possess densities between 1.3-1.5. This suggests that the eye (or our emotional states) are more comfortable with complexity of 1.3 to 1.5, and increasing that complexity becomes unsettling for us. This can lead to many questions for students to consider. For instance, is it possible that beauty has a very real, measurable, mathematical component that is linked to human biology? Are our conceptions of beauty regionally, geographically, or culturally learned based upon the dominant visual patterns found in our environments? Is there a “perfect” range within which “beauty” resides? Is there a universal human aesthetic? Maybe, and if so, it might reside in a fractal-explained pattern filter, given the different experiences that pre-condition our aesthetic experiences (intellectually, emotionally, as well as visually). While I may feel calmed by a Pollock painting because of its fractal similarity to the beaver dam in the stream outside my bedroom window, the Bedouin who knows only sand dunes might find it terribly unsettling. But the value of an aesthetic experience—which includes ugliness as much as beauty—does not only lie in comfort or in pleasure in seeing or experiencing something beautiful. Including discussion of Taylor’s work and the connection between, for example, fractals and art, helps students to understand the relevance of aesthetics to mathematics, and provides an access point for those who like math but are not drawn to visual art. Likewise, it gives visual art lovers another way to understand what it is about visual art they appreciate. Further, this kind of unit helps all students to recognize the connections between art and mathematics. Working in pairs or small groups, students can inquire into the nature of a work of art by attempting to subject it to a fractal or other kind of mathematical analysis. There are many possibilities

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here; numerous musical works, for instance, lend themselves to an investigation of the mathematic nature of tonal harmonies and the way they work in different cultures: students could, for example, evaluate the difference between the musical scales and tonal harmonies found in European classical music and the more finely-grained scales found in east Asian music.

Conclusion These few examples are merely a starting point for high school teachers to think about ways to incorporate aesthetics into the classroom. Some students, particularly early adolescents, might have greater success with empirical and/or mathematical illustrations in aesthetics because of their experience and familiarities with them, while others who are accustomed to more traditional approaches to art and beauty might be “stung” into a new understanding, one that can enhance their appreciation. Prior to this form of aesthetics inquiry, students will have taken measurements and will have a general handle on empirical relative comparisons since these are constitutive parts of math and science. This familiarity provides a point of access. Students can take a step that bridges two seemingly separate worlds of thought and experience and combine them to expand both. The world of science is not separate from the world of art; each is merely a different way of seeing and investigating the same natural world. Helping students access the world of aesthetics through science does not diminish nor reduce non-scientific ways of knowing beauty or having an aesthetic experience. It simply provides another tool and point of access to learning in aesthetics.

References Aristotle. “Poetics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by Irving Bywater, Vol. Two. Crawford, D.W. “The question of aesthetics.” in R.A. Smith and A. Simpson (Eds.). Aesthetics and Arts Education. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press: 1991. Greene, Maxine. Variation on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2005.

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Hughes, James M., Daniel J. Graham, and Daniel N. Rockmore. “Quantification of artistic style through sparse coding analysis in the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” PNAS 107, no. 4 (2010): 12791283. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment Part I: The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 2008. Leddy, Tom. “Dewey’s Aesthetics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008. URL http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/>. Plato. Republic. Edited by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992. Taylor, Richard. “Richard Taylor”, . Taylor, Richard P. “Order in Pollock’s Chaos.” Scientific American, 2002: 116-121.

Notes 1

Crawford, D.W. (1991). “The question of aesthetics,” in R.A. Smith and A. Simpson (Eds.). Aesthetics and Arts Education. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press: 18. Emphasis in original. 2 Plato. Republic. Edited by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992. See Book III for repeated references to harmony in music, and more explicit references at 410-412 (p. 86-88). 3 Aristotle. “Poetics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by Irving Bywater, Vol. Two: 2317-2340. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984: 1460b (p. 2337). 4 See Hughes, James M, Daniel J Graham, and Daniel N Rockmore. “Quantification of artistic style through sparse coding analysis in the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” PNAS 107, no. 4 (2010): 1279-1283. 5 See Taylor, Richard. “Richard Taylor”, for summary of his work and listing of publications. 6 Taylor, Richard P. “Order in Pollock’s Chaos.” Scientific American, 2002: 121.

PART VI LOGIC AND PRACTICAL REASONING

HELPING STUDENTS MOVE BEYOND SKEPTICISM AND RELATIVISM ARIK BEN-AVI

I Considering that strains of skepticism and relativism run through so many aspects of our post-modern world, it is hardly surprising to find them frequently making their way into the thoughts and attitudes of the students in our introductory philosophy classes. We regularly see these views manifested in the stances taken up by students when they engage in reflective thought or discussion—particularly when the topic has something to do with values. Students adopting a skeptical stance1 in class discussions direct their efforts at deflating their classmates’ assertions: they aim to show, not that these assertions are false, but that these assertions lack an adequate ground of justification—that the students making these assertions can’t adequately support their claims that these assertions are true. Students adopting a relativist stance in class discussions direct their efforts at deflating their classmates’ assertions in another way: they aim to show that, while a classmate’s assertion may be true from the asserter’s point of view, it may also be “false” from the points of view of others—that “truth” is relative to one’s point of view, and so the asserter is wrong in implying that those who disagree with her must hold a false belief.2 It is not surprising that skepticism and relativism show up in the way students engage in introductory philosophy discussions. I also don’t think it is particularly bad for students to take these views seriously, and even try them on for a while, as they begin their philosophical explorations. Indeed, given the history that philosophy has had with these views, it sometimes seems that the only way into a philosophically-minded life is through the fires of skepticism and relativism. Yet, I do believe it is important for students to pass through these fires: to come out on the other side, having learned the lessons of these struggles, without ending up as

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settled skeptics or relativists (also, without reverting to some form of dogmatism instead). Rather than helping the students who are struggling with skepticism and relativism win these struggles, however, introductory philosophy classes—at least in my experience, as a student, teacher, and observer— commonly leave these students further stuck in their skeptical and relativists stances. Reflecting on how we—or, here I’m happy to just focus on myself: how I—usually teach introductory philosophy, has led me to see an important way that I fail to genuinely alleviate (indeed, a way I probably even exacerbate) the allure of the skeptical and relativist stances for my students. Identifying this important point of failure on my part, however, has suggested to me a solution that seems at least one important piece of a more satisfying effort to help students move beyond these stances in their approach to reflective thought and discourse.

II There are a variety of reasons that a student might be drawn into a skeptical or relativist stance when engaging in thought and discussion. For example, being able to pull out the rug from under other people’s beliefs and judgments—deflating the force and authority of these judgments while showing oneself to be “more self-aware” than those who make them—is a powerful ability, especially for someone who feels penned in by the judgments of purported authority figures. Thus, a student could be drawn to skepticism or relativism in conversation not because she has become convinced that such stances are true but simply because of the power they afford her in the dynamics of the discussion. However, it seems to me that many students who become entrenched in skepticism or relativism in philosophy classes are drawn into these stances not by such instrumental, power-related reasons, but through a genuinely critical, self-reflective pursuit of knowledge. They seem to be getting the impression that engaging critically and self-reflectively in the pursuit of knowledge properly leads a person into a skeptical or relativist stance in thought and discourse. And if the path to a thoughtful, philosophically-minded life really does run through skepticism and relativism, then it makes sense for these students to find that this is where the thoughtful pursuit of knowledge has led them. If such students are to make it past skepticism and relativism, though, they must see that there is a viable way of engaging in critical, self-reflective, knowledge-seeking thought and discourse that isn’t ultimately grounded in a skeptical or relativist stance.

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And this is where I imagine that I, as a philosophy teacher, can play an important role in helping students navigate their way beyond skepticism and relativism. What I have in mind here is not that I can put together a solidly-reasoned case against these positions, and thereby convince my students that skepticism and relativism are false (after all, these positions are still live topics of philosophical debate, and the idea of “proving” them false with a few introductory-level arguments seems suspect to me). Rather, what I have in mind is that, by introducing them to the knowledgeseeking practice of philosophical inquiry, I am giving my students concrete experiences of engaging in a non-skeptical, non-relativistic approach to reflective thought and discourse, so they can see how one can be critically and self-reflectively engaged in the pursuit of knowledge without adopting a skeptical or relativist stance.

III Now, if a student is to see philosophical inquiry as a genuine alternative to skeptical or relativist forms of critically pursuing knowledge, she must be given a picture of this practice that convincingly shows it to be a knowledge-seeking method, and not a method that merely purports or aspires to seek knowledge. Crucial to this picture, I have come to believe, is an account of how philosophical inquiry self-assesses the extent of its progress toward knowledge (or its lack thereof)—an account of its criterion of epistemic progress. Having such a criterion that can be used by philosophical inquirers to check whether or not, in what ways, and to what degree their discussion is moving in a forward direction regarding the relevant points of knowledge, seems to me essential to justify the claim that philosophical inquiry is a sincere and effective method of seeking knowledge. Without such a criterion of epistemic progress, it is not clear how philosophical inquirers would be able to check that their discussion is, and remains, on track toward the attainment of knowledge, rather than turning into a merely idle exchange of ideas, or a discussion where beliefs might change but any claims of progress would be vague, empty, or dogmatic. On the one hand, if it were true that philosophical inquiry proceeds with such blindness, there would be good reason for a wary student to suspect that its claim to being a knowledge-seeking method is merely a case of wishful thinking. On the other hand, if philosophical inquiry were presented as having a reasonably clear and appealing criterion of epistemic progress, then, while this student might still raise challenges to this criterion, she would have

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more reason to consider philosophical inquiry a viable alternative to the skeptical or relativistic modes of thought and discourse. But on this point I have found philosophy classes to be commonly and crucially lacking. To focus again on my own teaching: the problem is not so much that I don’t offer my students a criterion of epistemic progress; rather, the problem is that the way this criterion is explained and used in class could easily lead a cautious and attentive student to one of two impressions: either that this criterion supports a skeptical or relativist stance, or that it’s insufficiently clear and specific to be used with the reliability and rigor that I claim for it. Perhaps the key criterion of epistemic progress I identify as central to philosophical inquiry is the criterion of soundness (sometimes I refer to this more loosely as “reasonability”). What I tell students is that philosophical inquiry makes epistemic progress when it leaves participants with positions that are supported by reasoning that is more nearly sound, or more reasonable, than the reasoning with which they began: where I explain that the soundness of an argument depends both on its validity and on the truth of its premises.3 The validity of an argument, I explain to my students, concerns whether the conclusion of this argument is logically implied by the argument’s premises—whether there would be something logically incoherent about believing the premises of the argument while denying its conclusion. This is a question about the argument’s form, about the relation between the beliefs that make up the argument’s premises and the belief that constitutes the argument’s conclusion. The nature of this relation is such that it can hold (i.e., the argument can be valid) even if the premises and the conclusion of the argument are all false. This is all to say that validity speaks to the logical coherence amongst a person’s beliefs, rather than to the question of whether any of these beliefs correspond to reality. It is important to emphasize the fact that validity is fundamentally about the logical relationship amongst a person’s beliefs—especially about their coherence or lack thereof—because this points to the incompleteness of using gains in validity in assessing epistemic progress. Gains in validity and coherence are fundamentally achievements that happen internal to a person’s belief set, or worldview. For a person to adjust her reasoning so that it becomes more nearly valid is essentially for her to articulate tighter connections amongst her beliefs and to remove beliefs that don’t fit as well: that is, it is essentially for her to tighten up her own worldview. Of course, this itself is a very good thing to do—and indeed many or even most of the reasoning skills and tools I offer my students pertain exactly to

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the business of exposing inconsistencies and correcting them. But epistemic progress is ultimately about progress toward truth and knowledge: about being able to legitimately claim that one’s beliefs are more nearly true now than they were earlier. And we cannot be assured of the truth of the belief that forms the conclusion of an argument without being assured of the truth of the beliefs that ground the argument (i.e., the argument’s premises). Now, when teaching students how to assess the validity of an argument (as well as how to form valid arguments themselves), I offer them many conceptual explanations, explicit tools, and so forth. When teaching students how to assess the truth of an argument’s premises, by contrast, it turns out I don’t really have very much new to offer them. This doesn’t mean that I don’t give them guidance. Indeed I do: what I tell them (and model for them) regarding assessing the truth of an argument’s premises is basically to do the same thing they have done in assessing the truth of the argument’s conclusion. So, suppose a philosophical inquirer is seeking knowledge regarding the question of the moral permissibility of abortion, and her current answer to this question is that abortion is morally impermissible. According to the criterion I offer my students, in order to determine how legitimate is this inquirer’s claim that this belief of hers is true (and that it counts as a piece of knowledge), we and she must identify and evaluate the line of reasoning upon which this belief is based, to determine the extent of its soundness. Suppose, then, that in defense of this belief the inquirer articulates the following argument: (a) abortion is the killing of a fetus, (b) a fetus is a person, (c) it is morally impermissible to kill a person, therefore, (d) abortion is morally impermissible. Using the tools I teach my students, we can conclude that this argument meets conditions for validity—at least at an initial level of rigor. But now we need to determine whether its premises (i.e., beliefs [a], [b], and [c]) are true. So, how do we determine whether belief (c), for example, is true? The guidance I offer my students in making this determination is to identify the line of reasoning upon which this belief is (or might be) based, so as, in turn, to determine the extent of soundness in this line of reasoning.4 That is, just as I first taught my students that the way to assess the legitimacy of a person’s claim that some belief of hers (e.g., that abortion is morally impermissible) is true is to determine the extent to which it is supported by valid reasoning from true premises (i.e., by sound reasoning), I then teach them that the way to assess the legitimacy of this person’s claim that the premises of her argument (e.g., the premise that it is morally impermissible to kill a person) are true is to determine the

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extent to which these premises are themselves supported by valid reasoning from true premises. And, of course, I then go on to teach my students the same strategy for assessing the truth of the premises upon which these latter arguments are based, and so on. In other words, I teach my students to apply the same criterion—soundness—to evaluate the truth of an argument’s premises as I had taught them to apply in evaluating the truth of this argument’s conclusion.

IV How can this presentation of soundness as a core criterion for assessing epistemic progress be taken by students as supporting either a skeptical stance or a relativist one? Well, consider the following line of thinking. It takes time to assess the legitimacy of an inquirer’s claim that a certain belief of hers is true, and we only have a certain finite stretch of time available to us in any given session of assessment. Yet examining the soundness of the reasoning supporting this belief is seemingly an indefinitely long process (given the need to examine the truth of the premises, of the sub-premises, and so forth). As such, we will apparently always have to end our examination into the legitimacy of the inquirer’s claim before it is properly complete: that is, at a point where there are still some premises (or sub-premises, etc.) whose truth has not yet been critically assessed. But if we have not yet had the chance to determine whether the underlying premises supporting the inquirer’s position are themselves true, then how can we make any determination regarding the soundness of the inquirer’s reasoning in support of this position? And if we can’t make any determination regarding the soundness of the inquirer’s reasoning here, then how can we make any determination regarding the nearness to truth of the inquirer’s position itself? Perhaps we could try pointing out that the underlying premises (although not yet critically examined) seem true—or seem false—to us. But it is easy to see why my students would be suspicious of this proposal. After all, my philosophy classes often begin by raising all sorts of skeptical scenarios, challenging the truth of some of the most confidently held beliefs my students have, and suggesting that taking these confident beliefs as true, based solely on how they “seem” or “feel”—without sound reasoning to back up these appearances—is like living one’s life in a cave and taking mere shadows for reality (or some such unflattering insinuation). A student who is willing to take this challenge seriously— who is willing not to simply dismiss or make light of Descartes’ initial

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doubts about the external world, for example—would be quite within her rights to maintain that until we’ve examined the inquirer’s underlying premises and have determined that they are (or are not) themselves supported by sound reasoning, we do not have legitimate standing to assess the truth of the inquirer’s conclusion (nor to assess whether or not it is more nearly true than what she believed on this matter prior to her philosophical inquiry). A skeptical student likely won’t deny that philosophical inquiry can allow for genuine gains in terms of the validity of a person’s reasoning— in terms of the coherence of her worldview. But having a belief that fits coherently into one’s worldview is not the same thing as having a belief that is true. The fact that some Nazi Gestapo officer had a worldview that was made more coherent when he came to believe that his victims were abhorrent vermin does not in itself speak in favor of the truth of this belief. Truth, this student might argue, is external to a person’s worldview: the truth is “out there,” so assessing that a belief is true (or is closer to being true than is some other belief) must be a matter of assessing how closely this belief corresponds to this external truth. Since the concepts and tools I’ve offered don’t seem to enable this determination—indeed, since they seem to suggest the impossibility of making this determination (at least within a finite period of time), skepticism seems warranted. I think that this line of thinking does at least loosely reflect the thinking of those students who are drawn to skepticism as the right way of carrying out philosophical inquiry. And unless I provide my students either with a different notion of truth, or with a better means of assessing how nearly beliefs correspond with the truth, the line of thinking I just depicted seems to plausibly interpret my teaching of philosophical inquiry as supporting a skeptical stance. Many of these same thoughts apparently lead other students into a sort of relativism instead. Skeptics, these students think, are right to conclude that the reasoning skills and tools being learned in class—being, in large part, logical skills and tools that help with exposing and correcting incoherence between beliefs—cannot be relied upon to determine the extent to which our beliefs correspond to truth, when “truth” is conceived in an external, objective sense. Nevertheless, the relativist argues, the kind of progress that is attainable through the use of these reasoning skills and tools—that is, progress in terms of getting one’s beliefs to “hang together” better—often does seem to amount to progress in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Thus, where skeptics go wrong is in holding rigidly to their externalist, objectivist notion of truth. Instead, we need to accept that there is no such thing as this sort of truth—or, rather, that even if there is an

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objective reality and truth “out there,” there is also a perfectly viable notion of truth that is more within our reach. And this is the notion of truth we should focus on. This alternative conception of truth is defined relative to a person’s subjective worldview: on this conception of truth, a belief is nearer to being true to the extent that holding this belief (instead of its contrary) fits coherently within the person’s worldview. Relativists may readily acknowledge that there is something lost in moving to this relativist notion of truth and knowledge. There is something disturbing, for example, about not being able to say that the Gestapo officer’s belief that his victims are abhorrent vermin is an objectively false belief—about having, moreover, to say that this belief is true (even if it is only so relative to the Nazi’s worldview). However, as the relativist sees it, unless we want to go the way of the skeptic, we should recognize that there is a viable notion of truth, knowledge, and epistemic progress that is worldview-relative: we should, in fact, recognize that this notion of truth is the only viable notion of truth and knowledge toward which progress is possible using the skills and tools of logical reasoning that are being taught in class.

V Of course, I could resist these two lines of thought with brute willpower, by simply insisting that there is a non-relativist notion of truth toward which we can make reliable—albeit fallibilistic—epistemic progress. But if I don’t offer my students something more articulate, specific, and concrete than the above to work with, they could not be blamed for thinking either that this claim is a matter of wishful thinking on my part, or—what I take to be little better—that epistemic progress in philosophical inquiry is simply a matter of the (private, inarticulate) feeling or judgment of “experts.” What I need to find, then, is a useful, specific criterion for assessing real progress toward truth and knowledge that is based on a non-relativist conception of truth. In this effort, I have found much affinity with those in the “community of inquiry” school of philosophy education, who—drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and others—conceive of the method of philosophical inquiry on the model of the method of scientific inquiry. Pointing to scientific inquiry as a model here is certainly not meant to suggest that philosophical inquiry limit its focus to physically observable and measurable facts. Rather, the aspect of scientific inquiry highlighted as relevant regards the process by which scientific inquiry proceeds. Of particular relevance is the fact that science is carried out through a public

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discourse across a diverse community of inquirers who—while adhering to the basic principles of scientific methodology—all bring their own questions, experimentations, and evidence to bear in the testing and retesting of hypotheses, with the aim of more nearly approaching truth and knowledge. It is this public discourse aspect of scientific inquiry that can be taken as a model for how we should be pursuing philosophical questions. Now, one way to understand the value of this public discourse model for epistemic progress (whether within science itself, or as it relates to progress in philosophical inquiry) is in fairly instrumental terms. Working in conjunction with a community of other inquirers means having more minds and hands working to raise topics for inquiry, to propose hypotheses, to devise and run tests (and retests) of these hypotheses, and so forth—which exponentially accelerates the breadth and depth to which topics can be investigated through a community of inquiry. Conceiving of the community of inquiry in terms of these benefits, however, doesn’t adequately capture Peirce’s idea. For Peirce, what is important isn’t just that this kind of decentralized yet joint inquiry process hastens or makes more probable the discovery of truths: rather, Peirce conceived of scientific truth—he defined it—in terms of the progress made by the community of scientific inquirers. Whereas a skeptic might conceive of truth in external, objective terms (as simply “out there”), and whereas a relativist might conceive of truth as relative to each individual’s own worldview, Peirce defined truth as what would be agreed upon as true by the whole community of inquirers at the (hypothetically imagined) “end” of the inquiry process. Based on this community of inquiry notion of truth, I want to suggest that we use something like the following criterion of epistemic progress when engaging in philosophical inquiry: progress toward the truth on a given issue is made over the course of a session of philosophical inquiry to the extent that the participants of this particular inquiry session (e.g., the students in a given class discussion) come closer to agreement on the issue in question. Now, whether it is plausible to claim that this criterion marks progress in terms of the community of inquiry notion of truth depends on how we conceive of the relation between what goes on in a particular philosophical inquiry (e.g., in the discourse that takes place in a classroom) and what would be agreed upon at the hypothetical “end” of the community of inquiry process. If we conceive of the “end of inquiry” participants as a group of idealized, wisest-of-the-wise people—who are, thus, not really like us—this would suggest that what happens in a particular philosophical

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inquiry is essentially irrelevant to what these ideal inquirers would hypothetically agree upon. And this would suggest that reaching greater agreement in a class discussion is not a plausible criterion for assessing progress toward the truth, even when truth is defined in community of inquiry terms. On the other hand—and recalling that Peirce’s community of inquiry idea comes out of his analysis of the actual practice of scientific inquiry— we could take very seriously the idea that, just as every scientific research experiment contributes directly to the building of scientific knowledge, every particular philosophical inquiry contributes directly to the conclusions that would hypothetically be reached at the “end” of the grand inquiry process. From this perspective, it does make sense to say that what happens during the course of a philosophy discussion in class—for example, what students do or don’t come to agree upon—reflects in some approximate way (that can always be made more accurate and precise, by resuming the inquiry and furthering it) what would hypothetically be agreed upon at the “end” of the grand inquiry process. And if so, then it would be plausible for us to use increased class agreement as a criterion for determining whether a given class discussion has made some progress toward the truth (on the community inquiry notion of truth).5 Although much more needs to be done to make the case (and to refine the idea) that what happens during the course of a philosophical inquiry in class contributes to, and is approximately representative of, what would hypothetically be agreed upon at the “end” of the grand inquiry process, I believe that something along these lines will prove to be a credible interpretation of Peirce’s community of inquiry idea. And since I find Peirce’s community of inquiry notion of truth to be viable and attractive, I believe that determining whether there have been gains in agreement amongst the participants of a philosophical inquiry is a plausible way of assessing whether there has been epistemic progress over the course of this philosophical inquiry.

VI Yet in talking of the epistemic importance of gains in “agreement” amongst the participants of a philosophical inquiry, I don’t mean to suggest that just any sort of agreement will do. There are plenty of ways a group of people can aim for, and move toward, greater agreement that should not be taken as indicators of progress toward truth and knowledge (even in terms of a community of inquiry notion of truth). Thus, in this

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final section, I want to point to three important qualifications and refinements that must be made to the proposed criterion of epistemic progress. One possible problem in aiming for agreement is that the process of reaching agreement could be carried out by negative or positive coercion. If we were to find out, for example, that most North Korean citizens agree that Kim Jong-il was a great leader, we might suspect that this agreement was reached either through the threat of physical violence or through the manipulation of evidence and argument by North Korean educators and news reporters. And if we were to find out that a group of scientists, all paid by the tobacco industry, produced studies all agreeing that there was no link between cigarette use and lung cancer, we might suspect that these scientists were “coerced” through financial incentives to reach their conclusions. When someone changes her position on some issue due to fears of physical or psychological harm, due to the appeal of certain practical benefits, or due to having her reasoning manipulated by others who are more rhetorically savvy, this position change does not count as a truth-directed change according to the community of inquiry idea. Thus, in a community of inquiry, the aim of reaching agreement amongst participants must be pursued under the constraint of making sure beliefchanges are achieved via non-coercive reasoning. Another possible problem in aiming for agreement is that when agreement is then found, participants might become complacent about this agreement. For example, in the lead-up to the most recent U.S. war on Iraq, many Americans reached agreement on the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots with al-Qaeda to terrorize and even destroy the U.S.—claims which proved to be false. The problem wasn’t a lack of dissenting voices challenging the arguments that supported these positions; rather, it was that a certain sort of “group-think” took place amongst most Americans, in which widespread agreement on these positions was taken to suggest that the dissenting voices could just be dismissed as “fringe” or “radical” voices, not to be taken seriously. As the history of scientific inquiry shows, epistemic progress often depends on listening to dissenting voices, welcoming—even encouraging— disagreement. And certainly the critical method of philosophy, in which we are asked to challenge even the beliefs on which there is the most widespread confident agreement, is not one that welcomes complacency about our points of agreement. However, I think a good way to think about what we are doing in welcoming disagreement in science and philosophy is not that we are devaluing agreement, but that we are searching for agreement amongst an even wider set of perspectives. The problem with Americans in the lead-up

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to the Iraq War wasn’t that they valued agreement as a mark of truth— rather, it was that they gave up searching for even more widespread agreement, amongst an even more diverse set of voices. Thus, in a community of inquiry, the aim of reaching agreement amongst participants must be pursued with the sense that while agreement amongst a certain circle of participants is an important target, widening and diversifying the circle of inquirers and finding agreement within this even wider circle is an even further mark of epistemic progress.6 Finally, a third possible problem in aiming for agreement relates to the fact that despite the errors of full-blown relativism, there are many ethical and evaluative questions regarding which what is right for one person to do or value in her particular circumstances would not be right for another person to do or value in his (this idea also applies with regard to questions of meaning). This is not really a relativist claim—it is simply pointing out that general principles, when properly applied, may yield different prescriptions for individuals who are themselves relevantly different, or who find themselves in relevantly different circumstances. For example, whether you should share your candy bar with me probably depends on whether I am allergic to the peanuts in it; whether I should go on a date with you may depend on whether I am attracted to you; and (alluding to a well-known example) whether a person ought to burn the body of a dead loved one or instead eat the body of a dead loved one may depend on what counts as proper respect for the dead within that person’s culture. Searching for agreement could lead inquirers to discount or ignore these sorts of differences between people—not only out of a desire to quell disagreement (which is addressed above), but also on the assumption that what they are trying to find agreement on are rules that are to apply identically in every case (e.g., rules like: “abortion is always morally permissible”). But in a proper community of inquiry, dedicated effort is made by the inquirers to uncover any notable differences across people in terms of their constitution or situation, and to determine the implications of these differences on the prescriptions that can be legitimately issued to people who are different in these ways. Unlike in a relativist discourse, it is not assumed in a community of inquiry that just any identified difference in constitution or situation can be used to ground a difference in prescription: in a proper inquiry, the question of whether or not a given difference in constitution or situation does legitimately ground a difference in prescription is itself a topic of the inquiry (upon which agreement must be sought). Taking these three qualifications into account, we can re-characterize the proposed criterion of epistemic progress for philosophical inquiry as

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follows: philosophical inquiry in a classroom makes epistemic progress on a given issue to the extent that there is an increase of non-coercive, inclusive, and specific agreement on the issue at hand amongst the participants in the class’ philosophical inquiry (including any texts or second-hand voices that are introduced into the class discussion). Certainly, more work needs to be done in further refining, revising, and specifying this criterion, so as to make it more useful and reliable for those engaged in philosophical inquiry. Nevertheless, we need to start somewhere in offering our students a picture of truth, and how to progress to it, that adequately reflects the values and methods of philosophical inquiry, and that does so in a way that distinguishes this inquiry from one that is supportive of either the skeptical stance or the relativist stance. I believe that this criterion is a promising one with which to begin.7

Notes 1 I will be using the terms “skepticism” and “relativism” somewhat loosely in this paper. 2 The relativist stance also commonly shows up when relativist-oriented students are making their own assertions: here they will insist that their assertion is only meant to have a claim to “truth” for the asserter herself, and is not meant to entail that those who disagree with it are wrong. 3 It is, of course, no less important here to determine the soundness of the reasoning against these positions. But for the sake of ease (and since, in its best form, the reasoning supporting a given position should already take into account and neutralize, or adjust itself to, any reasons against the position), I will focus only on the question of determining the soundness of reasoning in support of a position, in this discussion of assessing epistemic progress through philosophical inquiry. 4 It is not that I claim all knowledge is discursive in nature. But in the context of class discussions, I do heavily presume that for a claim to knowledge to be legitimate within the discussion—especially when it is at all contentious—it needs to be justified through some form of reasoning (be it deductive, inductive, or abductive). 5 Of course, the same holds true for any philosophical inquiry engaged in by any community of inquiry. And for a student to find greater agreement within one community of inquiry might lead her to be in greater disagreement—at least temporarily—with people in another one of her communities of inquiry (within a group of her friends, within her family, or within her church community, for example). Therefore, assessing overall epistemic progress is much more complicated than assessing epistemic progress within a given community of inquiry.

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6 There may be a concern that arises in relation to this condition of a proper community of inquiry: namely, that really embracing inclusion implies including even people with seemingly crazy or offensive views, and even people with rather limited capacities of expression, as peers in the inquiry. Ultimately, I don’t want to deny that such maximal inclusiveness is the ideal to be embraced within a proper community of inquiry, and that, on this view, insofar as radical or inarticulate perspectives are left out, we have not yet reached the truth on the issue in question. This means that, ideally, inquirers would be making a dedicated effort to hear out, explore the views of, and find points of agreement even with all sorts of people whose views seem troublingly deviant or confused (and an effort to further build up their capacities to do so effectively). It also means that, ideally, inquirers would be making a dedicated effort to finding ways of enabling those with difficulty engaging in discourse—whether for cognitive or emotional reasons—to express their views and concerns as much as possible, so that these can be taken up respectfully in the inquiry process. Of course, it is obviously impossible to pursue philosophical inquiry with everybody all at once. As realistic inquirers, we have to learn how to prioritize with whom to enter into a community of inquiry, and on which questions to do so. Given that we have to set priorities for whom to include in our various inquiries, it is quite reasonable for us to set these priorities in light of considerations such as: with whom do I interact the most on a day-to-day basis; who is willing to include me in their community of inquiry—or in any sort of discussion; at this moment, how skillful am I at engaging productively with people who have significantly different perspectives, temperaments, and capacities from my own, and in light of this, who falls into the circle with whom can I now productively engage in inquiry. So, taking maximal inclusiveness within the inquiry as an ideal does mean always striving to draw more voices into the inquiry, and to gain the skills needed to do so productively (and, in the meantime, recognizing the limitations of our truth claims while certain voices are still excluded). But taking this ever-widening inclusiveness as an important dimension of progress doesn’t mean there is no epistemic progress to be made, along the way, in finding agreement within smaller circles. In any case, it does seem reasonable to demand that students at least see all of their colleagues in the class as people to be included in the class’ community of inquiry circle. 7 This paper significantly benefited from the comments of Roberta Israeloff, particularly in terms of helping me make the paper more accessible to those who are not academic philosophers.

A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION FOR TEACHING REASONING IN PRE-COLLEGE CLASSROOMS MAUGHN GREGORY

If they teach us neither to think well nor to act well, what have we lost? All other knowledge is harmful in a man who has no knowledge of what is good. —Michel de Montaigne (2003, 159)

The Practice of Philosophy of Education To walk into a classroom and ask for the time, attention and trust of the young people who spend a good part of most days of the week there is an act so daring and audacious that it ought to thrill those of us who do it to the point of wondering at our good luck, but also humble us to the point of making us examine our motives and our qualifications. I have been going into schools to philosophize with children and young people for a little over 20 years and I increasingly feel the excitement, but also the responsibility, of that work (as I do in my university classrooms where students have ostensibly chosen and paid for the experience). I am not suggesting that we teachers or visiting philosophers should be filled with anxiety, but rather with care—with a carefulness that is a combination of self-consciousness, humility and reverence. Paul Woodruff explains reverence as the capacity to feel awe and respect toward certain objects, and also shame when we fail in our obligations to them. In the philosophy classroom, Woodruff writes, the reverent teacher demonstrates “awe at subject matter that cannot easily be tamed” and “respect for the students who are learning it under their own power” (2001, 188). This attitude of care and obligation of self-reckoning are necessary components of the practice of philosophy of education—a practice I take to be practically and morally necessary for all educators. As a field of academic inquiry, philosophy of education pursues such questions as: What is the purpose of education? What does it mean to be educated? To be mis-educated? Can one generation share the ways of life it values most with the next without restricting their opportunities for

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growth and discovery? What are the best educational methods? What rights do students bring with them into schools that educators are bound to honor? Who should have the authority to decide these questions? These questions entail other questions about human nature, epistemology, politics and much else that have occupied philosophers for centuries. It follows that educators’ inquiry into their own practice is necessarily, to some extent, philosophical. However, becoming familiar with the vast literature of educational philosophy and theory is helpful, but does not take the place of the practice of philosophy of education. That practice involves stepping back from the day-to-day work of curriculum design, teaching, assessment and educational administration, to engage with such questions for oneself and in relation to one’s own work. It means engaging with philosophical questions existentially as well as intellectually, by relating them to another series of questions, including: What kind of teacher do I want to be? What kind of political, moral and aesthetic environment am I creating in the classroom? Is my work in education consistent with my other political and moral commitments? How is my educational work affecting the kind of person I am? I believe that all genuine philosophy has a component of this kind of existential inquiry.1 A philosopher is someone whose rigor in intellectual inquiry is matched by a rigorous practice of self-work.2 This is particularly crucial for we teachers and classroom philosophers, whose attitudes and views about philosophy of education affect not only the integrity of our own work, but the opportunities for growth of the students who work with us. In my work in philosophy, in teacher education and in Philosophy for Children (“P4C”),3 I have been alarmed by educators and teacher education programs giving little or no attention to philosophy, because this omission indicates a misunderstanding about the nature of philosophy in general and its relevance to education in particular. I have been equally alarmed by philosophers in pre-college classrooms who give little or no attention to the aims and methods of education: who wonder neither about how what they do might work for or against various educational aims nor about the merits of their pedagogy for reaching their own educational aims. This problem reflects a naïve trust in the power and importance of philosophy, however it may be practiced, and reinforces an old myth currently in resurgence among political conservatives: that the only preparation a teacher really needs is either content expertise or real-world experience, that educational theory and method don’t actually contribute much, if anything, to student learning, and that the surest road to educational reform is to get more high-level content experts and professionals into schools.

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In this paper I will summarize the approach to teaching reasoning in pre-college classrooms developed by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) at Montclair State University; I will first discuss a philosophy of education that legitimizes and informs that approach. Though I believe that certain kinds of philosophical practice are necessary for personal and collective wellbeing and that this is just as true for children as for adults, I do not believe that everything we do in the name of philosophy—in K-12 or in college classrooms—must be a good thing, just as I don’t make that assumption about science or literature or history or math. As with all education, the work of pre-college philosophy education requires a philosophy of education, because how we go about that work ought to depend on what we think constitutes its purpose.

Some Rival Justifications for Teaching Reasoning to Pre-College Students In the research literature on pre-college philosophy education and in my observation of various philosophy in schools programs, I identify three broad but very different purposes for teaching reasoning in K-12 classrooms. The first is to help our students improve their lived experience: to find meaning, live intentionally, engage in self-correction, build community, and otherwise live a worthwhile life, right now. Doing so involves constructing what David Granger calls an “everyday poetics of living,” informed by aesthetic, ethical and political ideals-in-progress, and is close to the original meaning of wisdom, the deep yearning for which the ancients named philosophy (Hadot 2002). Just over 80 years ago the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead urged us to reinstate wisdom as the ultimate aim of education. He reminded us that “[e]ach individual embodies an adventure of existence,” (1929, 39), and argued boldly that “[e]ducation is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life” (1929, 39). Whitehead defined wisdom simply as “the way in which knowledge is … employ[ed] to add value to our immediate experience” (1929, 30), and he denounced “[t]he drop from divine wisdom, which was the goal of the ancients, to text-book knowledge of subjects, which is achieved by the moderns,” as “an educational failure” (1929, 29).4 That kind of textbook proficiency that Whitehead saw as a failure, many would accept as a legitimate aim of education. In fact, improved academic achievement is the most frequently articulated purpose for teaching reasoning in pre-college classrooms. This second, broad purpose is sometimes broken down into such elements as helping students make

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more sense of subject content and develop cross-curricular cognitive skills (Haynes, 2002), helping them think in ways characteristic of particular disciplines (Lipman, 2003), and offering them more “intellectually stimulating” experiences that will increase their motivation for academic work (Fisher, 2008). The most notable difference between this purpose and the first is that while each takes the value of learning to reason to be instrumental (apart from the value or meaning to be had in the practice of critical thinking itself), their ends are quite different. Wisdom, a well-lived life, is an end in itself, at any age, while academic achievement (again, apart from its inherent enjoyment) is another instrumental aim, valued for its efficacy in reaching something else. In the understanding of many students, parents and educators, that something else is eventual socioeconomic success (Sternberg, 1999), which, itself, is largely valued as an instrument for achieving ultimate ends such as the enjoyment of social status and the satisfaction of acquisitive desires. However we might evaluate the worth of such ends, they are certainly unrelated, except accidentally, to the qualitative improvement of the present life of the K-12 student made to study reasoning. A narrow emphasis on academic achievement not only distances educational experiences from the end of living well now, but often displaces that end with other ends that are inimical to it. One of the reasons philosophy of education is such an important endeavor—not only for philosophers but for educators, students, parents, and indeed for all citizens—is that it compels us to evaluate those ultimate ends toward which education is supposed to be instrumental. Philosophers of education who urge that wisdom be its overarching purpose (Gregory and Laverty 2010, 2009, Gregory 2011, 2009, Maxwell 2007, Needleman 1982a, Noddings 2005a, 2005b, Nussbaum 2010, 1997, Palmer 1993, Rose 2009, Sternberg 2003, 2001) warn that a narrow focus on academic achievement as a means to socioeconomic advancement excludes other important individual and public purposes of education, such as making the most of one’s talents, finding one’s moral bearings, becoming practiced in the virtues, advancing disciplinary knowledge, continuing traditions of cultural excellence, pursuing political and justice, and otherwise living meaningfully. This is not to say that economic stability is unrelated to individual or collective wellbeing, or that preparing students to compete successfully in the job market is an illegitimate aim for education.5 It is to say that a student who is capable of making a good living may not be capable of living well. As Whitehead warned, “You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge; but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom” (1929, 30).

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The danger of a narrow focus on education as a means of getting ahead points to a third purpose of teaching reasoning in pre-college classrooms: to help students become proficient in the kinds of techniques and strategies that enable them to prevail in argumentative discourse, i.e., to become skilled rhetoricians. This purpose is clearly evidenced in many reasoning programs that involve debate and other modes of intellectual competition. Such programs are often recommended for intrinsic values such as the excitement of competition and the spectacle of intellectual virtuosity, as well as for how they prepare students to compete as adults in the court room, the board meeting, the political campaign, etc. The most telling difference between this purpose of teaching reasoning and the previous two is that in the first two, reasoning is understood as the search for reasonable belief—as inquiry—whereas here it is an instrument for winning some kind of advantage over one’s opponents, often regardless of the merit of one’s position.6 This distinction was urged by Socrates, who insisted that persuasive speech be circumscribed by a commitment to truth and fairness, and who spoke scornfully of: … men who saw that … what the public finds acceptable … is to be rated higher than truth, and who could make trivial matters appear great and great matters trivial simply by the forcefulness of their speech, besides discovering how to clothe the new ideas in fine old language and to refurbish old thoughts by novel treatment …. (Plato, 1973, p. 84)

I have engaged in argumentative contests as academic exercises and enjoyable pastimes, but I do not believe the skills, the discursive styles and the attitudes they cultivate very often translate into artful living. Many of these exercises involve “hot-button” topics, artificial problems and intellectual puzzles far-removed from the students’ everyday experience, so that successfully solving them in no way enhances the quality or the meaning of their present lives. More importantly, to the extent these activities reward cleverness, cunning and winning points against an opponent, they can be mis-educative for both good inquiry and civil discourse. And to the extent they cultivate tendencies toward egotism and demeaning others, they can be impediments to wisdom. Many of us regret the cult of the champion that has characterized professional philosophy and other academic disciplines. We are coming to see this approach not as a necessary part of inquiry, but as a chauvinistic, cultural artifact that actually deforms disciplines and makes democratic community more difficult. Like ancient western and Asian philosophers who recommended non-egoistic dialogue as a spiritual practice, many modern philosophers and educational theorists have recognized that discourse characterized by

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hospitality, humility, curiosity and collaboration is not only ethically but epistemologically more sound. (Palmer 1993, Noddings 2005b, Hadot 1995, 2002).7

A Pragmatist Philosophy of Education In Philosophy for Children we introduce young people to reasoning skills and dispositions as part of their practice of philosophy, which we understand to be an important means of living better lives now (Lipman and Sharp,1978). Whitehead understood how important it was that what happens in schools add immediate meaning and value to the lives of students. Writing about the same time, John Dewey explained that getting something from school that is meaningful in one’s life right away and getting something that is instrumental to finding meaning later on is not an either/or proposition, because only in learning how to work well with our present, lived problems and opportunities will we grow in our capacities to do so later. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.” (Dewey 1938; 1967, 49.)

Dewey’s pedagogical model begins from the observation that children (like adults) are continually challenged and provoked by new obstacles to the kinds of experiences they already value and by possibilities for novel kinds of value they want to experience. In either case, they have to experiment with new ways of thinking, feeling and acting, until eventually they hit upon the new idea, emotion or behavior that solves the challenge to what they already value or helps them experience a new value. It’s not (only) that if a child learns the alphabet now, some day she can be transported by a piece of great literature or journalism; it’s (also) that the instant she begins to decipher letters and other signs in her environment, all kinds of new puzzles, meanings, perils and enjoyments open up for her. School curricula should help children deal with the opportunities for meaning in their current lives, not set up an artificial realm of “academic” experience segregated from the rest of life. That distinction corresponds to Dewey’s criteria for an “educative” experience: that it prepares us to be more curious, discerning, responsive, purposeful or skilled in future experience. Experiences that make us callous, careless, repetitive, or scattered, Dewey called “mis-educative.” (1938; 1967, 25.)

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How does philosophy fit into that? How does doing philosophy enable children to understand and deal intelligently with the problems and opportunities of their young lives, where “intelligently” means in ways likely to result in more meaningful and valuable experience? Another of Dewey’s important insights is that some of the meaning of our everyday, ordinary experience is philosophical. Dewey understood “ethical,” “aesthetic,” “political,” and other philosophical categories to refer to dimensions of ordinary human experience. In Art as Experience (1934), for example, he argued that the fine arts are merely rarefied instances of the kinds of aesthetic meaning that is possible in all experience, and that how we respond to the aesthetic problems and opportunities we confront will help determine the aesthetic quality—the beauty, interest and intensity—of our experience.8 The study and practice of philosophy can help us to wake up to the aesthetic, ethical, political, logical, and even the metaphysical dimensions of our experience, and enable us to find ways of thinking, feeling and acting that make our experiences more loving, more just, more reasonable, etc. The pioneers of Philosophy for Children—Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and Gareth Matthews—all showed the world something that had rarely been noticed before: that children’s experience is just as replete with philosophical meaning as is that of adults (Lipman 2003, Matthews 1996, 1980, Sharp, 2004). And as Adriaan Peperzak argues, children’s experience is not simply an immature or deficient version of adult experience, but an entirely different and equally valuable realm of meaning: The meaning of various phases [of life] cannot be reduced altogether to their being instrumental in preparing for later periods, nor as moments whose entire meaning is integrated into the next one. Childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age all have their own irreducible possibilities and suggestions for meaning. Many elements of a child’s life, for example, are taken along and integrated into a person’s growing-up, but much of its meaning is irretrievably lost; only children can realize it. (1999, 20-21)

Philosophy as a wisdom tradition brings together two quite different but interrelated kinds of self-corrective inquiries: one for reasonable belief and the other for existential meaning. While most K-12 critical thinking programs focus exclusively on the former, Philosophy for Children attempts to bind the two inextricably, making the pursuit of reasonable belief a necessary component of the pursuit of meaning, and vice versa. I have argued that in Philosophy for Children, the goal of each dialogue is

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that the participants arrive at reasonable philosophical judgments regarding the issues that prompted it (Gregory 2006). In this context, reasonable means that the judgment be well-reasoned, well-informed and personally meaningful. Philosophical judgments must be justified in part by their reliance on sound arguments and good evidence. For a judgment to be well-informed means both that it has been informed by diverse perspectives and that it has been made accountable to the community of one’s peers. That it be personally meaningful means that the person making the judgment has found her own way to it—that it is genuinely felt and constitutes an occasion of self-correction, rather than external correction (i.e., accepted on the basis of the teacher’s authority or peer pressure). Judgments of one’s peers should not override, but merely temper and inform, one’s own judgment. For this reason, it is important that the dialogue not be so fast-paced or so abstract that we lose access to our own inner voice.

The IAPC Method of Teaching Reasoning to Pre-College Students In Philosophy for Children, reasoning is always introduced in the context of classroom dialogue, based on children’s questions that arise from their own recognition of the philosophical dimensions of their experiences. That dialogue follows the ritualized practice developed by Lipman and Sharp, known as the classroom community of philosophical inquiry.9 My own description of that practice is as follows: Ɣ We encounter together a philosophical story or text that prompts us to wake up to philosophical dimensions of our experience, e.g. logical, aesthetic, ethical, or political, and highlights something curious, problematic, or intriguing about them, which awakens our sense of wonder. Ɣ We share our wonderings with each other and together we construct questions for discussion that qualify as inquiry questions because they are of the nature of: “What’s most reasonable to believe, value, or do about this?” We organize our questions into an agenda for the discussion. Ɣ In our discussion, we use creative thinking to come up with possible answers, and critical and practical reasoning to eliminate the less reasonable possibilities. In doing so, we rely on each other to correct and expand our individual thinking, and thereby come to recognize the inquiry as the work of the group.

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Ɣ We develop reasonable philosophical judgments about what to believe, value, and/or do, and we think of ways to implement and experiment with these judgments in life, beyond the practice of collaborative discourse.

In P4C the speech-acts of participants in a dialogue are called “moves,” an analogy to a game of chess, in which each new move is made in relationship to an ever-changing context. Students discuss their ideas by making moves like asking a question, offering a hypothesis, giving an example or counter-example. As they do so, the facilitator intervenes with her own moves that model and/or invite students to make a specific kind of move. The facilitator of philosophical dialogue has three main tasks. The first is to help the students advance their inquiry along its general trajectory from a question to a judgment, by prompting them to generate and test hypotheses and helping them to keep track of how many different hypotheses have been generated and to what extent each has been tested. The following examples (from Gregory 2007) are indicative of these kinds of facilitation moves: Identifying Issues ż What did we find puzzling, interesting or confusing? ż What issues would be worth discussing? What do we want to know? ż What kinds of judgment seem called for? Formulating and Organizing Discussion Questions ż Do our questions cover all of the important aspects of the issue? ż Is there redundancy among our questions? Could some of them be combined? ż Are there any “Q-Q’s” (questions inside questions (Jackson, 2001))? Does this question assume something that needs to be questioned itself? ż Is there a logical priority to some of our questions? Do some questions require or assume answers to others? ż What other relationships are there among our questions? Formulating and Organizing Hypotheses (Possible Answers) ż What are some possible answers to the question? ż What’s your opinion? ż Are any other beliefs on this subject possible? ż Is there redundancy among these hypotheses? ż Are any of these hypotheses in tension or conflict with each other?

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A Philosophy of Education for Teaching Reasoning Experimenting with and Evaluating Judgments Reached in Dialogue ż How can we experiment with this judgment outside the dialogue? ż What kinds of consequences would count as confirming or disconfirming the judgment? ż Has our experimentation given us reasons to revise, abandon or warrant the hypothesis? Implementing Warranted Judgments ż What are the implications of our new judgments for how we live? ż How can our new understandings / values be translated into action, especially in this time, in this place and under these circumstances?

Philosophical dialogues typically become very complicated very quickly, but this simple road map for inquiry makes it possible for any participant to be able to identify where we are, at any point in the dialogue. The facilitator will now and then ask the group to pause, and ask if someone can tell us where we are. A student may respond, e.g., “We are seeing if we can think of any counter-examples to Manuela’s idea that a friend is someone who always tells you the truth, which was one of the three hypotheses we came up with, so far, to our question, What does it mean to be a friend?” The facilitator’s second task is to monitor and guide the social dimension of the dialogue: how well the students attend to each other, treat each other respectfully and collaborate in ways that advance the inquiry. Philosophy for Children draws on the Socratic principle that these elements are an essential part of reasoning-that good thinking is discursive. Socrates was the first of many philosophers to argue that the efficacy of rationality depends not only on certain logical structures, but also on a family of social and ethical practices like curiosity about alternative views, freedom of expression, accountability to peers, nondogmatism, the attempt to verify others’ findings, and collective selfcorrection. Another way to understand inquiry dialogue is that it aims at disciplined but “unforced agreement” (Rorty, 1991, p. 38) that represents a kind of objectivity (Appleby, et al., 1995). The facilitator may guide this social dimension of the dialogue by making facilitation moves such as: Inclusion and Mutual Attention o It seems we’re hearing a lot from a few people and hardly anything from others. o For the next few minutes I’d like to only hear from people who haven’t had a chance to speak yet. o Remember not to only look at me when you talk, but to look around and talk to the whole group.

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o Can someone re-state Lila’s point in your own words? o What evidence do we have that people have been actively listening to each other? Respect and Care o Before anyone responds to what you just said, I’d like you to think about whether you can make the same point, but in a more respectful way. o Is this topic too upsetting for us to discuss in a respectful way? o I want to stop for a minute and ask each of us to think about how our behavior is helping or disturbing our discussion. o Can someone help Manuel make the point he’s trying to make? o That was a brave thing to do, Monica, to voice an opinion that most people seem to disagree with. That helps us see this question in a different way. Collaboration o Let’s remember to connect what we’re saying to what others have said. o I'm losing track of how our different views are related. Can someone draw out the connections? o OK, but remember the objection Justine already made to that point-how do you respond to her? o Is your point different from Ravi’s point?

The facilitator’s third task is to model and prompt specific kinds of reasoning as needed, either to deepen the inquiry (to make it more reasonable) or to help it advance along its trajectory toward a sound judgment. The following examples (from Gregory 2007) are the kinds of moves a facilitator might use to prompt good reasoning: Clarification ż What do you mean by _____? How are you using the word _____? ż What would be another way of putting that? ż I didn’t understand when you said _____. ż What criteria are you using? ż Can someone else say what you understand his point to be? Detecting Assumptions ż Are there any hidden assumptions in this position? ż Are we assuming that …? ż What is being assumed here? ż Is that a reasonable assumption?

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A Philosophy of Education for Teaching Reasoning Giving Reasons ż Why? What makes you think so? ż Do you agree or disagree, and why? ż If someone wanted to disagree with you, what would she say? ż How many different reasons can we think of? ż Is that a good reason? ż Are any of these reasons better than others? Making Categorical Inferences ż Would you qualify that statement with “all,” “most,” or “some”? ż Is it true that “all” / “no” / “some” ______ are ______? ż What follows? ż Does that follow? Making Hypothetical Inferences ż Is this a hypothetical (if-then) statement / premise? ż Does anything follow from this hypothetical premise? ż In what sense is it true that “if P then Q”? Is it a predictive hypothesis (a hypothesis of correlation)? A causal hypothesis? A categorical or definitional hypothesis? ż Is this inference valid? Does the conclusion follow from the premises? Making Inductive Arguments ż Do you think you might be jumping to conclusions in this case? ż Is the evidence strong enough to support that conclusion? ż Was the sample relied on to make this generalization randomly drawn? ż Was the sample relied on to make this generalization representative of the population? What are the relevant characteristics? ż How big was the sample relied on to make this generalization? ż Was a control group used? Reasoning by Analogy ż How are these two things or situations alike? ż Is it reasonable to think that because these things are alike in this way that they will also be alike in that way? Identifying Fallacies ż Is that source an appropriate authority? ż Are we sure we aren’t supporting or rejecting a hypothesis because of who offered it? ż Are we sure we aren’t supporting or rejecting a hypothesis because of peer pressure? ż Are you supporting that position just because it’s a middle-of-the-road position? ż Didn’t that word mean something different when you used it earlier? ż Aren’t you distorting the other person’s position?

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Evaluating Evidence ż Can you or someone else think of an example? Are there other examples? ż We have a number of examples already; can anyone offer a counterexample? ż What would count as a counter-example to this generalization? ż (How) is that evidence relevant? ż Is that an established fact? How was it established? ż Is that true? Is it always true? Is it true everywhere? How do we know? ż Is this something that has to be determined by expert opinion? Where could we look for such opinion? ż Is this something that could only be established by empirical research? Where could we look for such research? Are we qualified to conduct it ourselves?

In making these kinds of moves, the facilitator models how to clarify ideas, uncover assumptions, distinguish reasons, etc., and invites students to practice those kinds of reasoning moves. Equally importantly, she demonstrates her own judgment-making about which of these moves is needed at specific points in the dialogue, and for what purposes. It is expected that these facilitation moves will be mimicked by the participants as they internalize the facilitator’s insights, so that the facilitator’s role becomes “distributed” throughout the group (Lipman 2003, 139 and 157). In addition to practicing reasoning as dialogical moves in the course of an inquiry, the IAPC curriculum recommends that students practice particular logical principles and other kinds of reasoning between (and sometimes in the middle of) dialogue sessions. The IAPC curriculum includes numerous exercises to be selected and adapted by the facilitator as she assesses the students’ proficiency with various kinds of reasoning. Importantly, these pedagogical judgments are made, not with an eye to fulfilling a mandated curriculum standard (though such standards may also be informative), but in order to support the students’ self-directed enterprise of philosophical discovery. This enterprise circles around, and frequently returns to the kinds of questions that, Jacob Needleman observed, “are educated out of us by the time we reach so-called maturity” (1982a, 85). Needleman, who created a high school philosophy program in the late 1970s (1982b), wrote of his students, “I wanted them to feel permitted to ask great questions … to feel the natural right to ask of the universe those simple, gut-level questions that are strongest in childhood, or which appear in moments of great disappointment or tragedy” (Ibid.). Teaching reasoning can be part of an education in philosophy as a way of life in which such questions are kept

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alive, and the practice of philosophy of education can help us see through and around the cultural and institutional obstacles to this purpose of education.

References Appleby, J., et al. (1995) Telling the Truth About History. New York, W.W. Norton & Co. Dewey, J. (1989) [1934] Art as Experience (LW 10). Carbondale, IL, University of Illinois Press. —. (1986) [1938] Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (LW 12) (Carbondale, IL, University of Illinois Press). —. (1938) [1967]. Experience in Education. New York, Collier Books. —. (1920) [1955] Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York, Mentor Books. Fisher, R. (2008) Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom. 3rd ed. Continuum, New York. Granger, D.A. (2006) John Dewey, Robert Persig and The Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education. New Yor, Palgrave Macmillan. Gregory, M. and Laverty, M. (eds.) (2010) Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, Vol. 19, No. 4, Special Issue on Philosophy, Education and the Care of the Self. —. (2009) “Philosophy and Education for Wisdom,” in Kenkmann, A., ed. Teaching Philosophy. London, Continuum International, pp. 155-73. Gregory, M. (2011) “Philosophy for Children and its Critics: A Mendham Dialogue,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No. 2, 199219. —. (2009) “Ethics Education and the Practice of Wisdom,” Teaching Ethics Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2009), 105-30, with Commentary by Karen Mizell at 131-34. —. (2007) “A Framework for Facilitating Classroom Dialogue,” Teaching Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 59-84. —. (2006) “Normative Dialogue Types in Philosophy for Children.” Gifted Education International, Vol. 22, Nos. 2- 3, pp. 160-71. Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Trans. M. Chase. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing. Hadot, P. (2002) What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Haynes, J. (2002) Children as Philosophers. Routledge Falmer, London.

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Jackson, T.E. (2001) “The Art and Craft of ‘Gently Socratic’ Inquiry” in Arthur L. Costa, ed.: Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking, 3rd Edition. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, pp. 459-65. Lipman, M. et al. (1980) Philosophy in the Classroom (Philadelphia, Temple University Press). Lipman, M. and Sharp, A. M. (1978) “Some Educational Presuppositions of Philosophy for Children.” Oxford Review of Education Vol. 4, No.1. Lipman, M. (2004) Philosophy for Children’s Debt to Dewey, Critical and Creative Thinking, 12, pp. 1-8. —. (2003) Thinking in Education, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Matthews, G. (1996) Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. —. (1980). Philosophy and the Young Child. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Maxwell, N. (2007) From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities. London, Pentire Press. de Montaigne, M. (2003) The Complete Essays, M.A. Screech, trans. New York, Penguin Books. Needleman, J. (1982a) The Heart of Philosophy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. —. (1982b). “Teaching Philosophy to Adolescents.” Thinking Vol. 3, Nos. 3-4 (1982), 26-30. Noddings, N. (2005) Happiness and Education. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. —. (2005b) The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education, 2nd Ed. New York, Teachers College Press. Nussbaum, M. (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, Princeton University Press. —. (1997). Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Palmer, Parker J. (1993) To Know o Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. New York, HarperCollins. Pierce, C.S. (1878) “How to Make our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, 12, pp. 286-302, accessed 12/17/10 from www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html. Peperzak, A.T. (1999) Reason in Faith: On the Relevance of Christian Spirituality for Philosophy. New York, Paulist Press. Plato (1973) Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (trans. Walter Hamilton). New York, Penguin Books.

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Rorty, R. (1991) Objectivity, relativism and truth. Cambridge, Cambridge University. Press. Rose, M. (2009) Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. New York, The New Press. Sharp, A. M. (2004) “And the Children Shall Lead Them.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 177-187. —. (1996) “Self-Transformation in the Community of Inquiry” Inquiry, Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, Spring, l996. Shaughnessy, M.F. and Gregory, M. (2005) “An Interview with Maughn Gregory: About Philosophy, Critical Thinking and Higher- Order Thinking.” The Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving, Vol. 15, No. 1 (April 2005), p. 115-25. Sternberg, R.J. (1999) “Schools should nurture wisdom” in B.Z. Presseisen (ed.), Teaching for Intelligence. Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight Training and Publishing, pp. 55-82. —. (2001) “Why Schools Should Teach for Wisdom: The Balance Theory of Wisdom in Educational Settings,” Educational Psychologist 36:4, pp. 227-45. —. (2003) Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Thoreau, H.D. (1849 and 1854; 1986) Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York, Penguin Classics. Walton, D. (1998). The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1929; 1967) The Aims of Education. New York, The Free Press. Woodruff, P. (2001) Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. New York, Oxford University Press.

Notes 1

Jacob Needleman puts it this way: “The magic of real philosophy is the magic of the specifically human act of self-questioning-of being in front of the question of oneself” (1982a, 13). 2 Pierre Hadot (2002) explains that in the ancient western philosophical schools, “philosophy is not merely discourse but a choice of life, an existential option, and a lived exercise, … because it is the desire for wisdom” (230), and that “[a]ll schools denounced the risk taken by philosophers who imagine that their philosophical discourse can be sufficient to itself without being in accord with the philosophical life” (174). 3 “Philosophy for Children” was the name Matthew Lipman gave to the program he developed with Ann Margaret Sharp. Others have used that name to refer to

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pre-college philosophy education programs unrelated to the Lipman/Sharp method, and others who use or adapt the Lipman/Sharp method use other names such as “philosophy with children,” or “philosophy in schools.” In this essay “Philosophy for Children” refers specifically to the Lipman/Sharp method, which is the only one I attempt to describe here. 4 Seventy-odd years earlier Henry David Thoreau lamented that, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically” (1854; 1986, 57). 5 However, most of the world’s great moral philosophers have taught the principle that, in the words of Thoreau, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor” (1986; 56-7). 6 On the differences among inquiry, negotiation, persuasion and other types of argumentative discourse, see Walton 1998. 7 Montaigne made this point passionately in his essay, “On educating children”: “Above all let [our pupil] be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether that truth is born at his rival’s doing or within himself from some change in his ideas…. As for our pupil’s talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it and have no guide but reason. Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; stubbornness and rancor are vulgar qualities visible in common souls, whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom” (174). 8 Dewey writes, for instance, that “the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product … issues[s] from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary experience is expressed…. A conception of fine art that sets out from its connection with discovered qualities of ordinary experience will be able to indicate the factors and forces that favor the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value” (1989, 17). 9 Charles Peirce (1878) and John Dewey (1986) theorized “self-corrective” inquiry by disciplined communities as a method of producing reliable knowledge; but it was Lipman and Sharp who introduced the method of the classroom community of philosophical inquiry (Lipman, et al. 1980; Lipman 2004, 2003; Sharp 1996).

PART VII ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION OF PRE-COLLEGE PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT ASSESSMENT TREVOR NORRIS

There are many deep—and perhaps inherent—tensions between the discipline of philosophy and its formalized or institutionalized teaching. I begin this paper by considering the challenges raised by the need to assess philosophy students. I then turn to the issues involved in assessing philosophy teachers and philosophy programs. In doing so, I will raise several philosophical questions about assessment in philosophy and how philosophy is impacted by the requirements of assessment. But I conclude by emphasizing the importance of teaching and learning philosophy. Ontario is one of the only jurisdictions in the English-speaking world to offer philosophy courses within the public education system that are developed and overseen by the government. Currently over 30,000 students are enrolled in grade 11 and 12 philosophy courses. The following comments are drawn in part from a research project into the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario schools, philosophy curricula revisions, and philosophy teacher education. They are also drawn from the literature concerning teaching philosophy, theories of assessment, and philosophy of education. The comments will be general and exploratory, seeking to raise questions and pose dilemmas. Although I raise critical concerns about assessment, there is no doubt that students should receive feedback from their teachers and that teachers should be able to obtain a sense of how well students are understanding the content of their classes. However, these seemingly benign and benevolent aims can become problematic at an institutionalized level.

Assessing Philosophy Students Although ancient philosophers rarely graded their students, they did however decide who belonged within the circle of philosophers, as in Pythagoras’ mathematical cults. The very idea of being initiated into “the

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mysteries” shows that philosophy traditionally excluded the many and selected the few. As Foucault and Pierre Hadot1 remind us, Stoic and early Christian philosophers made life itself a test for one’s fitness to engage in philosophy an enduring evaluation of one’s harmony with nature or one’s readiness for the kingdom of heaven. Philosophy invites self-assessment in commanding each person to “know thyself,” and in many ways it condemns us to perennial assessment. However, in this paper I want to argue that one of the deepest tensions between philosophy and its teaching concerns assessment. This is in no small part because historically philosophers rarely evaluated others, at least on the basis of academic merit. Socrates emphasized that he didn’t consider himself a formal teacher.2 It is only as philosophy became formalized, professionalized, and institutionalized in recent centuries that it has come to be seen as a subject that can be tested. Furthermore, grading, along with mass schooling itself, is an Enlightenment project connected with industrialization and modernization and grounded in the scientific method. This lends a certain flavor to the way in which assessment and evaluation are built into schooling. Philosophy can help cast light on assessment because assessment rests on many philosophical assumptions. For example, assessment raises epistemological questions about objectivity, appeal to an ideal, relative standards, etc. Eunice Jang notes that, “Measurement and empirical epistemology go hand in hand.”3 In other words, implicit assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity are built into testing. Assessing is always a normative and political undertaking, involving many often unexamined assumptions. For example, a recent study of grading habits among Republican and Democratic professors indicated that Republicans were more likely to favor those students already doing well, whereas Democratic favored those who were middle or on the lower end of grades.4 Assessment in philosophy assumes that the discipline can be taught and learned in a linear manner, i.e. that one will know more, or do philosophy ‘better,’ at the end of a course or program than in the beginning. Common views of assessment suggest that there is an assumption of at least some if not complete objectivity on the part of the evaluator. However, many philosophers have questioned the value of objectivity by demonstrating that perhaps we judge better through intimacy and proximity rather than distance and indifference. For example, in “Personal Knowledge,”5 Michael Polanyi emphasizes the role of “tacit knowledge”, a form of knowing in which the ‘person’ is a central part of the knowing process, in which knowing and being are inseparable. One way to assess philosophy is on the basis of philosophy students’

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scores on standardized tests such as the LSAT. This could be characterized as the “LSATification of philosophy,” the evaluation of philosophy based on how well it serves as preparation for the LSAT. But of course, there are many dimensions of philosophy that are not concerned with things like logic or argumentation. Furthermore, philosophy itself should raise questions about evaluating philosophy based on its support of empirical objectives, such as test preparation, because this approach doesn’t take into account the many abstract and perhaps intangible dimensions of philosophy: the pursuit of wisdom, the examined life, the experience of wonder, or an exploration of the whole of human experience. One shudders at even the prospect of attempting to devise a standardized or objective test for such things. How do we measure wisdom?—especially when we don’t know what it is! How do we measure that which is deferred, cannot be contained or made manifest? How do we measure something whose value depends on its pursuit rather than possession? This seems similar to the paradox in Plato’s Meno, in which we search for something without knowing what it is. Moreover, a focus on objective assessment in philosophy could lead to an unwarranted emphasis on teaching the schools, thinkers, movements, and branches that can more easily serve as the subjects of tests. For example, what happens to philosophy student assessment in light of the linguistic turn in twentieth century philosophy? This turn attempted to dissolve the subject/object divide by linking observer and observed through the medium of language. And what to make of the changing relationship between philosophy and literature that has influenced philosophical debates in recent decades? If philosophy is equivalent to literature and an argument is just a plot, then how can we assess a philosophy essay beyond the quality or character of its writing? Can a philosophy essay be evaluated differently from a short story or poem? Is philosophy like art, where beauty and form and imagery are as important as accuracy and precision or content? In his essay “Making Hollow Men,” philosopher of education Charles Harvey argues that to be is to be assessed, that assessment brings us into being as subjects. This is an inversion of the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum” into “I am measured and counted, therefore I am”.6 In fact, it is the aim of modern schooling to transform us into subjects that can be assessed. Harvey is concerned about what happens when assessment becomes a perpetual state, with the “perpetual assessment of the person in (post)industrial nations.”7 His concern is that through assessment the subject is not only brought into being, but also turned into a thing, an object. But that is only half the story: assessment also turns us into an

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image without substance or content, an “empty sign.” This is because the grade becomes more ‘real’ or important than the subject such that the subject becomes empty, no more than its grade. There is no subject left, only the sign of its grade. This is the reason that, for Harvey, we become “hollow,” absent to ourselves as subjects, an accumulation of empty signs. Educators often hold the view that it is our responsibility to provide feedback to students—that we evaluate students to ensure that they are getting something out of the class and understanding its content. However, there may be another side to evaluation: assessment can often stem from doubt, suspicion, and mistrust, and may presuppose failure or dishonesty. If we “put someone to the test,” or “test a relationship,” it is because to some extent we feel distrust towards another person. One does not “test” someone unless one is in doubt of their character, knowledge, capability, and so on. Yet various forms of assessment can lead to significant learning. Indeed, good philosophy assessment requires students to think about the material in critical ways, and not only repeat back at the instructor whatever the instructor has said. A testing-as-learning model can illuminate the pedagogical value of testing as an instructional strategy itself, during which considerable learning takes place. Here, assessment can be transformative even before it happens. For example, it is not simply the case that you teach something and then test it, in linear fashion. Evaluation can be the first consideration, which will determine teaching, course content, instructional strategies, etc., and can be a facet of the course from beginning to end. How can we connect claims that the young are “natural” philosophers, inherently inquisitive, etc., to an evaluative structure that designs the teaching of philosophy around objective assessment of student skills? One of the key debates in Ontario, as we revise the provincial curriculum for high school philosophy, concerns the ways in which assessment might influence philosophy curriculum. That is to say, how will the growing emphasis on standardized tests influence the content of philosophy courses and the ways in which they are taught? What happens to philosophy in a testing culture? Does it have to become narrowed, quantified, objective, cognitive (vs dispositional), uniform, and extrinsically motivated? Are there other possibilities? Ministry documents in Ontario require teachers to differentiate between cognitive and behavioural skills, and they require that evaluation be based on content knowledge, rather than how students conduct themselves. But isn’t part of the point of philosophy to influence character, identity, disposition, etc.? This assessment approach seems contradictory to government claims that philosophy will have positive political

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implications: i.e. improve democracy, increase political engagement and the quality of political debate, and even support attempts to teach virtue, respect, and responsibility. For example, the provincial Ministry of Education requires that there be no implications for students’ grades if they never arrive on time for class or submit assignments on time. This raises significant implications for responsibility and other ethical issues. Has one really learned much about philosophy if one’s behaviour has not been impacted? One way to address this issue is for students’ own educational experience to become an object of study for students, and there is no better place to do this than a philosophy class. Philosophy in schools can involve philosophical examination of student experiences. For example, asking students ethical questions about grading is sure to elicit comments: What theory of justice should be used in grading students’ papers? Should students be graded on the basis of effort, need, ability, etc? Making assessment a topic for philosophical analysis in a philosophy classroom is sure to engage students.

Assessing Philosophy Teachers and Programs Similar issues are implicated in the assessment of philosophy teachers and programs. Philosopher of education Jeff Stickney critically examines the Ontario Ministry of Education’s set of criteria for determining if “teaching” is happening in any given classroom.8 These criteria are prepared in order to assist administrators during the routine practice of “teacher inspection” (the phrase seems to reveal an accusatory facet of evaluation). Teacher inspection occurs through what are called “walkthroughs,” in which administrators make two-minute visits to classes with a checklist of over one hundred “look-for’s.” The development of universal and interchangeable criteria to evaluate teaching is intended to allow any person to evaluate any subject being taught by any person at any time, as quickly and uniformly as possible. This is surely a remnant of Taylor’s industrial and managerial model of schooling. The assessment of teachers raises important questions about philosophy itself: when evaluating the teaching of philosophy are we not also evaluating the act of philosophizing itself? For when one teaches philosophy well, one is in fact also philosophizing. Perhaps there is something intrinsically pedagogical about ‘doing’ philosophy, so that in evaluating philosophy teaching one is evaluating how closely a philosophy teacher embodies philosophy itself. The reverse is true as well: in philosophizing one is teaching, hence the widespread use of the Socratic

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method in education. Likewise, to be a student is in itself to become a philosopher, because when we acknowledge ignorance and pursue wisdom we become students of wisdom and thereby turn towards philosophy. So in evaluating students, we are in a sense also evaluating philosophy itself, or how closely a student embodies philosophy. I turn now to philosophy programs. What kind of criteria might be developed regarding assessment of pre-college philosophy programs? Are we really utilizing assessment criteria in a rigorous way, or do we produce evaluative reports to justify our assessments and give the appearance of rigor? Are any of the above issues regarding assessing philosophy students and teachers also relevant in the context of assessing philosophy programs? While there are not formal evaluations of philosophy programs in Ontario, there are occasional large overhauls of the provincial curriculum in order to align it with other changes to educational governance as well as in response to pressures from various interest groups. This has in fact been a good opportunity to address problems in the existing curriculum, gain a sense of how it has been used throughout the province, and try to ensure that the curriculum is shaped by those familiar with philosophy. It is important that the philosophy curriculum not be determined by administrative experts who seek uniformity and routinization, or even by the general public who may demand something instrumental and benign from philosophy. There are several key criteria for assessing philosophy programs. First, good teacher education and preparation is crucial. Second, there must be ample opportunities for professional development. Third, a rigorous, clear and accessible curriculum and available resources are essential. Finally, it is important that connections to and support from the larger philosophy community exist, as well as professional opportunities for philosophy students, and it is crucial to support inspirational philosophy teachers and scholars.

Conclusion Philosophers may always assess who is and isn’t a philosopher and what is and isn’t philosophical, but its modern institutional context raises new and significant challenges for philosophy evaluation. In raising these questions and issues, I hope to have begun to indicate some of the larger questions raised by the assessment of philosophy students, teachers, and programs. But by no means do the tensions between philosophy and its assessment imply any inherent incompatibility between philosophy and its

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institutional context. In fact, they may contribute to the development of key strategies to promote the establishment of philosophy programs. I hope to have revealed how philosophy can help cast light on itself and its own assessment in ways more congruent with philosophy. These general reflections on assessment may help us understand the challenges of teaching and learning philosophy so that we are better positioned to justify and pursue its promotion.

Notes 1

Michel Foucault. History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: Care of the self. (Vintage: New York. 1988); Pierre Hadot. Philosophy as a way of life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. (Wiley: New York,1995). 2 See the Gorgias and Apology. 3 Thomas A.Schwandt & Eunice Jang. “Linking validity and Ethics in Language Testing: Insights from the Hermeneutic Turn in Social Science.” Studies in Educational Evaluation. 30 (2004) 267. 4 Talia Bar & Asaf Zussman. “Partisan Grading.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2012, pp. 30-48. http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~azussman/partisan_grading.pdf 5 Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1974. 6 Charles Harvey. “Making Hollow Men.” Educational Theory. 60 (2): 193. 7 Ibid, page 198. 8 Jeff Stickney. “Wittgenstein’s Contextualist Approach to Judging ‘Sound’ Teaching: Escaping Enthrallment in Criteria-based Assessments.” Educational Theory. 59 (2): 202.

WHAT CAN PSYCHOLOGY CONTRIBUTE TO THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY? DEANNA KUHN

It has been heartening to see the talented group of thinkers and educators represented in this volume come together to bring their wideranging perspectives to bear on a compelling common theme: How can we introduce young students to the richness and rewards of philosophical inquiry? Together, these writers bring a great number of years of experience working with young people toward this end, learning what works and what doesn’t, and their collective experience is of enormous value to anyone embarking on this pursuit. The contributors to this volume make a persuasive case for the value of their endeavor. Jacobson, for example, speaks for most of the contributors in asserting that young students—of elementary as well as middle-school and high-school age—have an ability “to think well about significant issues that are integral to their lives” and “to see how the issues at hand are indeed already issues that matter to them.” Others go beyond the question of competence in alluding to the dispositions that they believe such engagement can develop. Mohr-Lone refers to “philosophical sensitivity” and Israeloff to a disposition “to answer questions and to question answers” and, certainly, that core philosophical disposition “to wonder.” What can psychological research contribute to the compelling, yet formidable, undertaking that this volume’s authors are engaged in? In my brief comments here, I want to make the case that it has not just an important but an essential role to play. The contributors to this volume all ask how the discipline of philosophy can be introduced to younger populations in compelling, effective ways. The complementary, and I believe essential, question that I would introduce is this one: What do young students bring to their engagement with philosophy? The answers are multi-faceted and extend across competencies, skills and dispositions. Cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists by now have accrued a body of knowledge across this wide range, although as always there is much more to learn. Moreover, it stands to inform the undertaking

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this volume is devoted to. Philosophers have been known to claim that the proper domain of philosophy is only that set of questions that cannot be answered by empirical investigation. But that is not to say that there are not domains of empirical inquiry that can inform philosophical investigation—a demonstration that Piaget long ago sought to provide in his studies of children’s developing understandings of time, space, and other concepts, in what he coined the field of genetic epistemology. Moreover, Piaget taught us that the “deep reasoning skills” that MohrLone mentions as a hoped-for product of engaging children in philosophy are a moving target. Children’s reasoning skills develop, in extended and often complex trajectories that require careful analysis. The most directly relevant trajectories are those in epistemological understanding—which in this volume Turgeon characterizes as at the core of doing philosophy with children—and in argumentative reasoning. The origins of epistemological understanding lie in early childhood. Threeyear-olds are unwilling to attribute to another a belief they know to be false. The incomprehensibility of false belief reflects an epistemology in which beliefs come directly from the external world, rather than being constructed by the knower. Hence there is no inaccurate rendering of events. Even after a false belief is comprehended, the products of knowing remain at least for a time more firmly attached to the known object than to the knower. At this absolutist level of epistemological understanding, knowledge is thus understood as an accumulating body of certain facts. By adolescence there is typically some progress toward a multiplist, or relativist, level of epistemological understanding. The discovery that reasonable people, and even experts, disagree may serve as a source of recognizing the subjective and uncertain dimension of knowing. This recognition may assume such proportions, however, that it eclipses recognition of any objective standard that could serve as a basis for evaluating conflicting claims. Knowledge consists of opinion, freely chosen by their holders as personal possessions. Knowledge is now seen as emanating from the knower rather than the known, but at the significant cost of any discriminability among competing claims. This developmental progression has been documented as commonplace and has been characterized as an extended task of coordinating the subjective and objective elements of knowing (Kuhn, Cheney, & Weinstock, 2000). Far from universal, however, is progression to the next, evaluativist level in which some opinions can be more right than others. Rather than facts or opinions, knowing entails judgments, which require support in a framework of alternatives, evidence, and argument. Recognizing the role of human interpretation and judgment poses

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somewhat different challenges in scientific and social domains (Iordanou, 2010). In science, entry of human interpretation into what was previously regarded in absolutist terms is to be understood as a positive development: Science comes to be appreciated as a human construction and interpretation as an essential resource for knowing. The “filter” that human minds represent empowers the scientific endeavor. In the social domain, in contrast, when human subjectivity first impinges on the absolutist realm of objective fact, it is typically regarded in negative terms, as the intrusion of human “bias.” The danger is one of a permanent stall in the multiplist’s radical relativism, as both Green and Wartenburg hint at in their contributions to this volume. In the social domain, then, the major developmental challenge is to conquer the view that human interpretation plays an unmanageable, overpowering role. In the science domain, the challenge is to recognize that human interpretation plays any role at all. Better understanding of these developmental challenges puts us in the best position to support young people’s progress as they engage themprogress that is far from inevitable in the absence of conducive contexts. And there is perhaps no more promising context for such progress to occur than in the engagement of children and adolescents in “doing” philosophy. It may not look much like traditional philosophical inquiry to begin with, as we focus on issues they can directly connect to, but the deepest of philosophical issues soon surface. With respect to developmental trajectories in argumentive reasoning, research by myself and others has shown that young students can devise cogent arguments to support a claim if it is something important to them— why they should have some privilege, for example—although their typically poor performance in expository essay writing has been widely noted. Where we have found middle-school students to be most notably deficient is in dialogic argument—in particular, in listening and responding to an opponent’s arguments. The tendency instead is to reiterate one’s own arguments with more force and elaboration, with the sense that they will eventually prevail with persistence and the opponent’s claims merely fade away in the face of their power. Dense and extended engagement in dialogic argumentation with peers about meaningful issues, we have found, however, to be a sufficient remedy for these initial weaknesses—one that moreover extends to gains in their individual expository argument in written contexts (Kuhn & Crowell, 2011). Students begin to attend to and engage their peers’ ideas, contributed to by the fact that student dialogs in our research are conducted electronically—what an opposing peer has expressed thus sits on the screen to be responded to and is not so easily ignored. We have done this work in the context of what is

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presented to students as a class in philosophy although, like many of the authors in this volume, our aim is to engage them in doing philosophy, rather than teach them about philosophy. The topics they address are contemporary social issues—whether parents should have the right to home school their child or whether organ sales should be allowed—but they inevitably invoke deep and enduring philosophical topics. We also have evidence that the experience develops intellectual values (Kuhn & Park, 2005; Kuhn, Wang, & Li, 2011; Michaels, O’Conor, & Resnick, 2008) as well as intellectual skills, with both being measurable kinds of gains. I conclude on this last point of measurable gains because it is so critical. Einstein may have been right that we don’t know how to measure all that is important, but we must pursue the effort. We live increasingly in a culture of accountability, and this has become especially the case in education. Whatever virtues we extol of engaging young people in doing philosophy, the question will be there, posed by an army of insistent parents and educators: How do you know this is a good use of our children’s time, compared to the myriad of alternatives that compete with it? What is your evidence? These are questions we must have answers to. I agree with Mohr-Lone that “…[e]ngaging in philosophical inquiry trains young people to evaluate claims based on reason and analysis,” and that “…[t]he hard thinking that philosophical inquiry demands provides students with some of the analytic skills they need to engage in thoughtful decision-making throughout their lives.” But I must be able to show that I am correct to any who would question such claims. The first essential step, of course, is to more precisely identify these intellectual skills, a task Turgeon clearly recognizes in her chapter. But then we must be able to chart their course and to measure progress along it. There will be no easier way to justify the practice.

References Iordanou, K. (2010). Developing Argument Skills Across Scientific and Social Domains, Journal of Cognition and Development, 11, 293 – 327. Kuhn, D., Cheney, R., & Weinstock, M. (2000). The development of epistemological understanding. Cognitive Development, 15, 309-328. Kuhn, D., & Crowell, A. (2011). Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents’ thinking. Psychological Science, 22, 545 – 552.

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Kuhn, D., & Park, S.H. (2005). Epistemological understanding and the development of intellectual values. International Journal of Educational Research, 43, 111-124. Kuhn, D., Wang, Y., & Li, H. (2011). Why argue: Developing understanding of the purposes and value of argumentive discourse. Discourse Processes, 48, 26-49. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27, 283-297.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Selected Books on Pre-College Philosophy Cam, Philip. Thinking Together: Philosophical Inquiry for the Classroom, Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association and Hale & Iremonger, 1995. Costello, Peter R., ed. Philosophy in Children’s Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Fisher, Robert. Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Inquiry in the Classroom, London: Cassell, 1998. Freakley, Mark, Gilbert Burgh, and Lyne Tilt MacSporran. Values Education in School: A Resource Book for Student Inquiry. Melbourne, Australia: ACER Press, 2008. Gopnik, Alison. The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009. Hannam, Patricia and Eugenio Echeverria. Philosophy with Teenagers. London: Continuum, 2009. Haynes, Joanna and Karin Murris. Picture Books, Pedagogy and Philosophy. London: Routledge Research in Education, 2011. Isaacs, Susan. Intellectual Growth in Young Children. London: Routledge, 1930. Jackson, T.E. “The Art and Craft of ‘Gently Socratic’ Inquiry” in Arthur L. Costa, ed.: Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking, 3rd Edition. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, pp. 459-65, 2001. Lipman. Matthew. Philosophy Goes to School. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. —. Philosophy in the Classroom. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1980. —. Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. —. Ann M. Sharp and Frederick Oscanyan. Growing Up With Philosophy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. Lone, Jana Mohr. The Philosophical Child. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Marsal, Eva, Takara Dobashi and Barbara Weber, eds. Children

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Philosophize Worldwide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009. Matthews, Gareth. Dialogues with Children. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. —. Philosophy and the Young Child. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. —. Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. McCall, Catherine. Transforming thinking: Philosophical Inquiry in the Primary and Secondary Classroom. Great Britian: Routledge, 2009. Needleman, Jacob. The Heart of Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Pritchard, Michael S. On Becoming Responsible, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991. —. Philosophical Adventures With Children, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. —. Reasonable Children, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Reed, Ronald. Talking With Children, Denver: Arden Press, 1983. Schapiro, Tamar. “What is a child?” Ethics 109 (4): 715-38, 1999. Shapiro, David. Plato Was Wrong! Footnotes on Doing Philosophy with Young People. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Wartenberg, Thomas. Big Ideas for Little Kids. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. White, David. Philosophy for Kids: 40 Fun Questions That Help You Wonder About Everything! Austin, Texas: Prufrock Press, 2000. Worley, Peter. The If Machine. London: Continuun, 2011.

Selected Websites with Pre-College Philosophy Resources National Endowment for the Humanities, a federally funded organization, sponsors Summer Institutes and Summer Workshops for teachers on a vast range of subjects including philosophy. http://www.neh.gov//projects/si-school.html Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, an organization affiliated with the University of Washington Department of Philosophy. The Center has been introducing philosophy into the lives of young people since 1996 through our “Philosophers in the Schools” program and workshops, given by educators trained in philosophy, about ways to facilitate philosophical dialogues with young people, and its website includes many resources for teachers. http://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter

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Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), a national support and resource-sharing organization for teachers, parents, professional philosophers and others involved in teaching philosophy to pre-college students. The website includes many resources for teachers. http://plato-apa.org Project High-Phi, supports philosophical inquiry in America’s high schools. This organization sponsors an annual High-Phi Essay Contest, and has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to sponsor Summer Institutes for high school teachers interested in incorporating philosophy into their curricula. http://www.high-phi.org Squire Family Foundation is a private non-profit organization devoted to introducing young students to philosophy and advocating for more philosophy at the pre-college level. The Squire Foundation also cosponsors the National High School Ethics Bowl and supports regional high school ethics bowls nationwide. http://www.squirefoundation.org Teaching Children Philosophy features two different projects: book modules to use in teaching philosophy to children using children's literature, and materials for teaching a college course in which undergraduates teach philosophy in elementary schools. The website also contains useful advice for teachers. http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org

CONTRIBUTORS

Arik Ben-Avi is a graduate student in philosophy at Yale University and a co-founder of Yale’s Philosophy Outreach Program. He was drawn to philosophy out of a sense that philosophy has an important role to play in helping people live more authentic, fulfilling, and well-related lives, and in helping society become more democratic and just. His work in philosophy —as a researcher and as a teacher—is driven by a desire to make some contribution to this project. Jen Glaser is senior faculty at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, co-director of the Israel Centre for Philosophy in Education"Philosophy for Life,” and immediate past president of ICPIC (the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with children). This academic year Glaser is on sabbatical, where she is visiting scholar in the Graduate Program for Philosophy and Education at Columbia University, Teachers College and in the Davidson school of Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Glaser's main areas of research include philosophy of education, conceptions of personal identity and group membership, authenticity and integrity, hermeneutics, pluralism, children’s philosophical thinking, children’s theological and the connection between philosophical inquiry and the teaching of Bible. She has published extensively in the area of personal identity and group membership, civic education, pluralism, critical thinking, philosophical inquiry with children, deliberative democracy and social justice. Glaser has wide experience in formal and informal Jewish education. Sara Goering is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle, and works in the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children. She helped to develop philosophy programs for young people at the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University, Long Beach. In summer 2011, she did a TEDx talk about the value of doing philosophy with kids (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7DLzXAjscXk). Her own children—ages 3.5 and 7—are very interested in discussing why lying is okay on April Fool’s Day.

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Steven Goldberg teaches history and philosophy at Oak Park River Forest High School. He also taught A-Level philosophy in England during a Fulbright teaching exchange, developed and taught a summer program for high school students at Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and recently led workshops on teaching philosophy at University of Chicago’s Graham School. Goldberg serves on the CPIP Committee for the APA and has been a reader and table leader for AP World History. Over the past decade, he also has led numerous student trips to India. Goldberg is the author of Two Patterns of Rationality in Freud’s Writings (University of Alabama Press, 1988) and co-editor of Technological Change and the Transformation of America (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). He also has written for magazines and journals in philosophy, education, and history. In 2005 Goldberg received the National Council on Social Studies Award for Global Understanding. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from DePaul University. Mitch Green is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1993. His main areas of research are the philosophy of language, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mind. He directs Project High-Phi (www.high-phi.org), which aims to support philosophical inquiry in America's high schools. His publications include Self-Expression (Oxford U.P., 2007), Moore's Paradox (Oxford U.P., 2007, co-edited with J. Williams), Engaging Philosophy: A Brief Introduction (Hackett 2006), and 'Perceiving Emotions,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2010). In July 2011 he directed an NEHsupported Summer Institute entitled “Epic Questions: Mind, Meaning and Morality,” in which thirty secondary-level teachers were immersed in philosophy for three weeks. Green also holds a grant from the National Science Foundation for research on the evolution of language and communication. Since 2011 he has been working with the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities to develop a website, BSocratic, to support philosophical exploration online. Maughn Gregory is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, where he is faculty adviser to the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. He publishes and teaches in the areas of philosophy of education, pragmatism, philosophy for children, gender and education, and critical thinking.

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Matthew Hayden recently received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was a William Heard Kilpatrick Scholar, and is now an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at Drake University. His dissertation was on cosmopolitan education as moral education, using an analysis of discourse ethics and agonistic pluralism. His other research interests include ethics, moral philosophy, the efficacy of and moral responsibility in assessment and evaluation in education, and the willful ignorance seen in conscious choices to not learn in both schooling and in daily life. David Hilbert teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and works primarily on issues in philosophy of perception, although he also has an interest in historical issues (Berkeley and history of visual theory). Hilbert has published extensively on color and color vision. He has made occasional visits to the high school classroom, which has provoked him to think hard about how he teaches college students. Roberta Israeloff has directed the Squire Family Foundation, which advocates for more philosophy education at the pre-college level, since its inception in 2007. The Foundation works closely with the American Philosophical Association and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, and co-sponsors both PLATO and the National High School Ethics Initiative, as well as many other efforts-such as essay contests and university outreach programs-to bring philosophy to younger students. She is also a writer, author and co-author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles, essays, short stories and reviews in many national publications including The New York Times, Parents Magazine and a variety of literary journals. Kirsten Jacobson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine. Jacobson specializes in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy and the philosophy of art. Her research interests include the study of spatiality and the interpersonal significance of space, the nature of home and dwelling, and more generally, the philosophical significance and status of the phenomenological method. Her published work has focused significantly on using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to conduct novel analyses of psychological and physiological illnesses, ranging from spatial neglect to agoraphobia, and more generally to consider issues of "existential health." In 2009, she created a philosophy outreach program called Philosophy Across the Ages, which brings together undergraduate philosophy students with local high school

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Contributors

students and retirement community members for seminar-style discussions of accessible and exciting philosophical texts. Deanna Kuhn is professor of psychology and education at Teachers College Columbia University. She previously held a faculty position at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She is editor of the journal Cognitive Development and previous editor of the journal Human Development, and co-editor of the cognition volumes of the two most recent editions of the Handbook of Child Psychology. She has published widely in psychology and education in outlets ranging from Psychological Review to Harvard Educational Review. Her current work focuses on design and evaluation of curricula to develop reasoning skills in middleschoolers. Her books include The development of scientific thinking skills (Academic Press, 1988), The skills of argument (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Education for thinking (Harvard University Press, 2005). Jana Mohr Lone is Director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington's Department of Philosophy. The Center brings philosophers and college students into Seattle public school classrooms to teach philosophy classes. Since 1995 Mohr-Lone has facilitated philosophy sessions with kindergarten to high school students, and introduced college and graduate students, K-12 teachers, parents and others to methods for bringing philosophy into young people’s lives. She is the author of The Philosophical Child, a book about ways to inspire philosophical conversations with children (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), and writes the blog Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People. Since 2009 she has been chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy. She spends a lot of time talking with her three teenaged sons about questions such as whether life has any meaning. Benjamin Lukey completed his Masters and Doctorate in Comparative Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at MƗnoa. He has been involved with philosophy for children in Hawai‘i since 2001, facilitating p4c inquiries and working with many excellent teachers at various elementary schools. Lukey also spent two years facilitating p4c at Loveland Academy, working with children with autism and other developmental disorders. Since 2007, Lukey has been part of the p4c Hawaii Executive Council, which was created to direct the development of the p4c Hawaii Center. Since that time he has also served as the Philosopher in Residence at Kailua High School, working with high school teachers to integrate p4c

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Hawaii into their curricula while cultivating the development of a p4c community throughout the school. ͒ Craig Merow turned his attention to the Big Questions after teaching high school mathematics and science for over thirty years. When his youngest daughter Katharine went off to college he began work on a BA in philosophy. They both graduated in 2006 and went on to graduate school. Craig completed a Masters degree in bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a University Distinguished Fellow at Michigan State University. He has taught numerous courses in philosophy at Germantown Academy and has worked with the Penn Center for Bioethics, the Squire Family Foundation, and the APA to encourage the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools. Claudia Mills is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, specializing in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophical analysis of children's literature. She is the author of 45 books for young readers, most recently Fractions = Trouble! (Farrar/ Macmillan) and Mason Dixon: Pet Disasters (Knopf/Random House). Trevor Norris is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the intersection of education, politics and philosophy, and in particular on globalization, (neo)liberalism and democracy. He is the author of a 2011 book with University of Toronto Press, Consuming Schools: Commercialism and the End of Politics. A second key research area focuses on the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario public schools, studied by over 30,000 students per year and taught by over 400 teachers. These two areas give rise to a third, philosophical “methods” in education: an investigation of philosophical methodologies beyond the qualitative/quantitative divide in relation to the teaching and learning of philosophy. Norris is the recipient of a multi-year federal grant to research the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario schools. Jeff Sebo is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Animal and Environmental Studies at NYU. In 2008, Sebo co-founded the New York Institute of Philosophy Outreach Program, which is dedicated to providing the benefits of a philosophical education to students outside the university setting. He also directed the program from 2008-2010, and taught several classes at local high schools in ethics and metaphysics.

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Contributors

David Shapiro is Education Director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children. In that capacity, he has been involved in bringing philosophy and philosophers into pre-college classrooms since 1995. He is also a full-time faculty member in philosophy at Cascadia Community College, near Seattle, where he regularly incorporates philosophy for children-type activities, exercises, and readings into his college-level philosophy classes. Wendy Turgeon is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at St. Joseph’s College in New York. She also teaches graduate courses in Philosophy for Children as an adjunct at Stony Brook University. She has been involved in teacher training through her courses and has published on philosophy of childhood. She is particularly interested in issues surrounding children and nature. Thomas E. Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. He has been discussing philosophy with young children for over a decade and has taught a course in which undergraduates teach philosophy in elementary schools. Among his publications are Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature (Rowman and Littlefield) and Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld). He has created a website for using children’s literature to teach philosophy: http://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org. This summer he is teaching an NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers on Existentialism. He has also published extensively in the philosophy of film, including Thinking On Screen: Film as Philosophy (Routledge).