An Interview with Matthew Lipman

In the late 1960’s, I was a full professor of philosophy at Columbia University, in New York. I thought that my undergraduate students were lacking in reasoning and judgment, but that it was too late to improve their thinking significantly. I thought (and I was almost alone in this opinion at that time) that it needed to be done in childhood. There should be courses for children in Critical Thinking when the children were eleven or twelve years of age. But to make the subject “user-friendly,” the text would have to be written in the form of a novel—a novel about children discovering logic. But this too seemed to me too narrow. The novel should be about children discovering philosophy. So I wrote Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery (the title a pun on Aristotle). When I tried it out in an experiment (in 1970), it seemed to work very well, so I wrote (together with Ann Margaret Sharp) a teacher’s manual containing hundreds of philosophical exercises. That worked well also. I left Columbia and set up The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children [IAPC, ed.], as part of Montclair State University. After a few years, I wrote a book dealing solely with Ethics—a sequel to Harry called Lisa, for slightly older children. More and more books were written, each for a different age level, and with its own instructional manual. Also a variety of theoretical books were written and published (by university presses like Temple, Cambridge and Teachers College Press).

In addition to requiring very unique textbooks (philosophical novels for children), Philosophy for Children has a unique pedagogy, in that students at every level begin by reading an episode aloud, raising questions about it, and then discussing the questions. It is this methodology, involving mutual criticism and scrupulously careful voicing of opinions and judgment, which educators recognize as an educational approach that prepares children to become citizens in a democracy.

How did it arise and how was it developed?

Philosophy for Children (P4C) didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It built upon the recommendations of John Dewey and the Russian educator, Lev Vygotsky, who emphasized the necessity to teach for thinking, not just for memorizing. It is not enough for children merely to remember what has been said to them: they must examine and analyze that material. Just as thinking is the processing of what children learn about the world through their senses, so they must think about what they learn in school. Memorizing is a relatively low-level thinking skill; children must be taught concept- formation, judgment, reasoning, etc.

After a small but intensive experiment with the program (which showed that children could be taught improved deductive reasoning without “teaching for the test”), a number of Philosophy PhD’s were taught to train teachers throughout the United States, which they proceeded to do in the 1970’s. By the end of the decade, some 5,000 classrooms in the country were using the program. (The experiment indicated that children of age 11 could be taught to reason 27 weeks better in mental age on formal reasoning problems, after only 9 weeks of exposure to the program.)

We proceeded, through the assistance of the New Jersey Department of Education and private foundation grants, to hold workshops for the training of teacher-trainers, who would then turn around and train teachers, who would proceed to use the program with children. The trained teachers reported that the children responded to the program joyously, as it gave them an opportunity to talk openly in the classroom, and to discuss their ideas with one another and with the teacher.

Since Philosophy for Children is largely a language-based program, its success is related closely to its being accurately developed through a large number of languages. (Every country wants its own translation, and quite rightly so.) 

How many approaches are there to Philosophy for Children? Would you please discuss them?

Just as there is only one discipline called “philosophy,” so there is only one Philosophy for Children. But there are many different versions of each. For example, there are many different versions of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of art, and so on. Each “philosophy of” is an extensive critique of the discipline upon which it focuses. But the Philosophy for Children is not identical with Education, nor is it identical with Philosophy of Education. What is called “Philosophy for Children” represents an effort to develop philosophy so that it may function as a kind of education. It becomes education that employs philosophy to engage the mind of the child so as to try to satisfy the hunger of the child for meaning.

Philosophy with children has grown up as a small offshoot of Philosophy for Children, in the sense that philosophy with children utilizes discussion of philosophical ideas, but not through specially written children’s stories. Philosophy with children aims to develop children as young philosophers. Philosophy for children aims to help children utilize philosophy so as to improve their learning of all the subjects in the curriculum.

When I first became interested in this field, I thought that children could do no better than “Critical Thinking”—that is, having their thinking trained to make it more rigorous, consistent and coherent. But critical thinking contains no concept formation, no formal logic, and no study of the works of traditional philosophy, all of which I have endeavored to supply in Philosophy for Children. Critical Thinking does not lead children back into philosophy, and yet it is my contention that children will not settle for anything less. Nor should they have to. Critical Thinking seeks to make the child’s mind more precise; philosophy deepens it and makes it grow.

Which is the best and most influential approach to philosophy for children?

To me, the program that I have developed and that goes by the name of Philosophy for Children is identifiable as the best approach to the improvement of children’s thinking. Here are some reasons:

1. Interest
   Children work best at whatever it is that most keenly interests them. This is P4C, first because it involves imaginative fiction, second because it is about children like themselves, and thirdly because it involves them in discussion of controversial issues (e.g. ethics). P4C goes beyond Critical Thinking.
2. Emotion
   P4C is not limited to the improvement of critical thinking. It recognizes that thinking can be intensely exciting and emotional, and it provides ways in which children can talk about and analyze those emotions.
3. Critical Thinking
   P4C wholly embraces critical thinking, but it does so with greater breadth and depth. Critical thinking is generally only an “add-on” to the existing curriculum, but P4C recognizes the need children have to deal truthfully with what they find problematic or puzzling.
4. Values
   Children discover early on that our treatment of value issues tends to be ambiguous, vague and muddled. Consequently, they welcome efforts to get them to think precisely and clearly. But this doesn’t mean that their thinking should be dispassionate or lacking in feeling. Children can think better about issues that concern them, when their thinking, in addition to being critical, is caring, appreciative and compassionate.
5. Creativity
   Good thinking can be charged with imagination, as when we enter whole-heartedly into a story, or develop a hypothesis. P4C is therefore especially successful in the area of creativity.
6. Communality
   Philosophy is dialogical: it stresses the need to open the dialogue to all members of the community. In other words, it stresses shared inquiry. The world can think better about how to treat innocent victims when it feels compassion for them than when it does not.

What is your invented method in this area?

I’ve taken many familiar components and combined them in a new way, so as to devise a new form of education. Until Philosophy for Children came along, philosophy and education were considered quite alien to one another, not mixing the way oil and water don’t mix. But a program like P4C that urges children to think up questions, and try to answer one another’s questions through open discussion is a program that combines learning and enthusiasm, feeling and thought, imagination and understanding. This is why one reviewer, speaking of my 2003 book Thinking in Education, says that I have “created the great maieutic epic. It is a passionate vision of what education can and should be.”

I have tried to develop a new, reflective paradigm of education, whose regulative ideas are reasonableness (in personal character) and democracy (in social character). This paradigm emphasizes the importance not just of critical thinking, but of creative and caring thinking as well – all three varieties are necessary. It stresses making, saying, doing and feeling as the main arteries of judgment. Disciplined practice in these forms of understanding lies at the heart of the philosophical version of education. The pedagogy of such practice is what we call the “community of inquiry”. This balanced, cooperative approach accords well with Rawls’ “reflective equilibrium” and Dewey’s experimentalism.

Children puzzle over many of the same concepts that philosophers puzzle over—concepts like rules, truth, goodness, justice etc. They have opinions on these matters, but they learn to develop these opinions into considered judgments. By giving them a great deal of practice in finding good reasons for their judgments, Philosophy for Children gives children an education of which they may well be proud. It teaches them how they ought to think.

What philosophers and psychologists greatly influenced your work in these areas?

John Dewey
for his intense sympathy for the child, his emphasis upon thinking in the classroom, and his seeing the importance of artistic creativity in getting the child to be emotionally expressive.

Justus Buchler
American philosopher in the 20th century, for his important studies in the nature of human judgment, and for his understanding of the role of judgment in the education of the child.

Lev Vygotsky
20th century Russian psychologist, who recognized the connections between classroom discussion and children’s thinking, between the child and the society by means of and through the teacher, and between the language of the adult world and the growing intelligence of the child.

Jean Piaget
20th century psychologist and educator, whose work illuminated the relationships between thinking and behavior.

Gilbert Ryle
20th century British philosopher, who analyzed the connections between language, teaching and self-teaching.

George Herbert Mead
American philosopher and social psychologist, whose work dealt almost exclusively with the social nature of the self.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
20th century Austrian-British philosopher, who explored with enormous sensitivity the complex social relationships that are expressed through the subtleties of language.

What are the advantages of your method?

I attempt to show those who prepare teachers for the classroom that education without philosophy in the elementary school is just as deficient as education without philosophy would be in the undergraduate and graduate areas of education. Children need to discover criteria for distinguishing between valid and invalid reasoning (logic), between supported and unsupported theories of knowledge (epistemology), and between acceptable and unacceptable forms of moral judgment (ethics), etc. The soundest way of doing this is to see education in all its vast complexity as a mode of inquiry, and to see philosophy as a mode of inquiry into that mode of inquiry. Only in this way can students be encouraged to think for themselves about their own thinking. Another way of putting this is to say that inquiry is the genus of which the various forms of philosophy are species. Thus, there is ethical inquiry, aesthetic inquiry, social inquiry, and so on.

Another advantage of this method is that it provides our various forms of knowledge and understanding with coherence and consistency. Children learn that most of the questions they ask can be dealt with in a reliable fashion by seeing them as occasions for philosophical inquiry. They also discover that this same method is in use now throughout the world, and that the time is not far off when this one basic method will enable them to communicate clearly with other children in similar programs in many countries and continents.

What terms, circumstances, instruments and environment are needed in order to perform the program?

To teach this program in a classroom, the teacher needs only one novel for each child, as well as an instructional manual for the teacher.

However, the teacher needs to have had a course for training in how to conduct a philosophical discussion, how to employ the exercises and discussion plans, and how to encourage children to think for themselves. This course in training would also make use of the text, Philosophy in the Classroom, by Lipman and Sharp (Temple U. Press).

The children in a class, plus their teacher, are seated in a circle so that they can speak face-to-face with one another. The students read the assigned episode aloud, no more than one paragraph at a time. (The equal distribution of time has democratic implications not lost on the children.) When the reading is completed, the teacher recruits questions, asking such questions as “Did anything in this reading puzzle you?” and “Did this episode make you wonder?” “Can you put your feelings in the form of a question?” The teacher then writes each child’s question on the chalkboard, adding to it that child’s name, as well as the page and line number in the text that is at issue. Next the teacher asks who wants to begin the discussion. The hands go up and the teacher selects one child to begin by discussing one of the questions written on the board. At an appropriate moment, the teacher may introduce an exercise on that topic taken from the instructional manual. Suppose the question is something like, “Are Harry and Bill friends?” Before long, the children will begin to see that the concept of friendship is vague or ambiguous or both, and she may introduce a discussion plan on the nature of friendship. (The ethical implications of friendship are bound to be noticed by the students.) In this way, the children engage in concept–development that can help them not only with philosophy but with all of their studies that deal with concepts. It is a method that provokes their thinking and that does not rest until it has evoked their capacity for criticism and self-criticism, and this in turn engages them in self-correction.

Assuming the teacher has been properly prepared, children will feel at home in the program, and at the end of a session, generally enjoy it so much that they hate to see it end. This is because it stimulates them to think for themselves rather than allow others to do their thinking for them. Also, they love to be able to express their ideas to one another, defend their reasoning if necessary, and help each other become aware of the implications of their assumptions.

Is Philosophy for Children appropriate for all children?

Any child that is capable of using language intelligibly is capable of schooling and growth, and is therefore capable of the kind of discourse and conversation that philosophy involves. Philosophy begins when we can discuss the language we use to discuss the world. The aim is not to make children into little philosophers, but to help them think better than they now think. Of course, the more accomplished children are with regard to listening and speaking, the more quickly they can adapt to philosophy, with its emphasis on mental acts, thinking skills, reasoning and judgment. But the program attempts to avoid any use of technical terminology.

Have you any message to Iranian philosophers and educational administrators about the importance and necessities of the program?

Philosophy for Children is a world-class educational program with relatively low maintenance costs. But these advantages are somewhat offset by the need to follow instructions for installing the program. It is precisely among developing countries that Philosophy for Children can make a remarkable difference. The following steps are those we recommend be taken by any country contemplating the use of Philosophy for Children:

1. Send representative or representatives to the International Training Center at Mendham, N. J. for Philosophy for Children, which is held every year in the last week of May and again in the last two weeks of August. Each representative should be a philosopher or should have a record of a number of courses in philosophy. Representatives should be ready, upon return to their country, to train future teachers of P4C, and even more immediately, to translate texts and see them through publication. (Program cannot be carried through without availability of such translations.)
2. Select first group of teachers to be given a 1 or 2 semester course in in-service teacher education. (Such selection should be limited to volunteers.)
3. Specialists in educational psychology should be utilized to develop measurements of quantitative and qualitative impact of program. (This can be postponed for a year or two, until the use of the program is well under way.)
4. As program becomes established, it is well to prepare to develop graduate students with philosophy backgrounds to receive pre-service preparation.

If the program is to perform in developing countries like Iran, what should the starting point be?

In deciding on the sequence of steps to be taken in starting the program, here are some considerations to keep in mind:

1. The representative or representatives to be sent to a Mendham workshop/conference should have an adequate command of English and some background knowledge of philosophy. This person should also direct the translation of the texts and the training of teachers upon his or her return to Iran.
2. The group of children chosen to initiate the program should be representative. There is no need to select only “gifted” children, but neither is it appropriate to begin with special populations such as emotionally disturbed children or deaf children.
3. The age level of the students in the beginning should be 8-10 years. This suggests that the program with which to begin would be Pixie, the teacher’s manual to which is entitled Looking for Meaning. This is not to say that other age groups or other programs would necessarily be wrong, but simply that the probabilities favor Pixie. (Thus Harry might work well with ages 11-12 or Elfie with ages 6-8. If a program is preferred that stresses thinking skills and environmental considerations for ages 6-9 you might want to start with Kio and Gus.) Actually, all the programs involve practice in thinking skills and in moral reasoning.
4. The design that has been sketched out so far is one that involves a minimum of expense and is limited in the impact it can have upon a large population. We would be happy to propose a much larger process, such as the dissemination process we are now engaged in Ukraine. This involves the training of teachers in Philosophy for Children and the training of college undergraduates in Critical Thinking. It also involves the English Department of Kirovgrad State Pedagogical University, and numerous exchanges of university personnel from both countries. Now in its third year, this dissemination program appears to be highly successful.
5. It is highly desirable that one of the first things to do, following the training received at Mendham workshop/conference, is to establish a center in Iran. This can be called something like Iranian Center for Advancement of Philosophy for Children. It would offer curriculum materials translated into your language or languages, the training of schoolteachers and would conduct research projects to determine the degree of success the program is having in Iranian schools. You could, if you like, be considered an affiliate center of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children here at Montclair State University. There is no charge for this identification. The chief cost to you would be the travel and registration costs for the Mendham workshop/conference. Exclusive of airfare, this cost is $1,750 per participant for 2 week August workshop, and $1000 for the 8 day May workshop.