Children As Philosophers

"The Philosophy of Childhood," by Gareth Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
"Dialogues with Children," by Gareth Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
"Philosophy and the Young Child," by Gareth Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

By Herbert Kohl

Usually this column is about newly published resources. However, I am now teaching a course on the philosophy of education and had the idea of beginning the class with an examination of children as philosophers. In doing so, I have discovered some older resources that provide rich material for a curriculum engaging students in philosophizing.

Every parent experiences their children raising philosophical questions such as, “Why do I have to do this?” “Do people have to die?” “Are dreams real?” “Where does pain go when it goes away?” “Is grandma real when she isn’t here?” “How do I know what other people think?”

All of these childhood musings have been the topics of thousands of years and thousands of pages of philosophical speculation. And they are good for the development of the mind. Lively thinking and intelligent questioning are two of the goals of education and there is no better way to provide practice in these skills than to do philosophy in the classroom.

Gareth Matthew’s three books, all still in print, are the best I know of that examine children as philosophers. They are full of actual conversations with children about philosophical questions and with interesting commentary on how to engage children in philosophical conversations. For example, here is one child’s epistemological questioning:

Jordan (five years) going to bed one evening, asked, “If I go to bed at eight and get up at seven in the morning, how do I really know that the little hand of the clock has gone around only once? Do I have to stay up all night to watch it? If I go away, even for a short time, maybe the small hand will go around twice” (Philosophy and the Young Child, p. 2).

There can be a lot of speculation over this question but not a single definitive answer. Thinking and talking about complex, perhaps unanswerable questions makes the mind agile and it’s thinking complex. It is one way of developing critical sensibility and can be fun.

I love to do philosophy in the classroom, as it brings out the playful and imaginative minds that children have but don’t often get the chance to exercise in school. Matthews’ works provide rich and interesting resources to develop complex, wide-ranging, abstract thought.

Fall 2001