Childhood, Education and Philosophy by Kohan Walter

Author:Kohan, Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317658443
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Philosophy of childhood and the philosophies of children

In this chapter, we have been using at least three expressions to link children to philosophy. They are “philosophy for children”, “philosophy of childhood” and “philosophy of children”. In the following section, we’ll clarify them.

The first expression, “philosophy for children”, gives form to a pioneering initiative, created by M. Lipman, to take philosophy (with its classical themes, tools and methods) to children. It is a way to reconstruct the whole history of Western philosophy, disposing it to children. Lipman himself has created a curriculum from pre-school to high school and it has been practiced in more than 30 countries for the last 30 years. Actually, philosophy for children has led to a “philosophizing with children” where they become co-participants of a practice based on philosophical questioning and inquiry. This philosophical practice with children (independently of one’s acceptance of the peculiar dispositive of texts (novels and manuals) and methods proposed by Lipman) is giving place to philosophies of childhood and it will probably be the vehicle for the appearance of philosophies of children.

The second expression, “philosophy of childhood”, intends to mean a philosophy applied to a given phenomenon, concept, idea or dispositive, historically and socially located: childhood. The historical conditions for the appearance of this discipline are tied up to the invention, in modernity, of childhood as a prolonged state of the human life that should be separate from the adult maturity. We propose a critical and creative character as normative of a philosophy of childhood.

The last expression, “philosophy of children”, designates a movement that, it is to be expected, expresses the children’s voice in different problematic ambits: an aesthetics, an ethics, a metaphysics, a social and political philosophy today absent in the dominant philosophical speech.

Philosophers will listen to those voices or will continue participating in a discriminative and excluding practice. In the first case, they will accept that the many differences between children and adults, as much as the many differences between women and men, back and white, and so many others, are irrelevant in terms of any form of discrimination in the realm of thinking. They will pass by this from a condescending and hierarchical relationship to a reciprocal and equal one. The presupposition of this idea is that age (as gender, race and others) cannot legitimate relationships of excludance and dominance.

Certainly, we won’t do a great favor to children inviting them to paint in the watercolor of philosophy if we don’t allow them that to enter with their screens, their inks, their paintbrushes and, above all, their own way of painting and of conceiving the art of painting. Certainly, it might be that they enjoy and have a good time with our paintbrushes and our inks. They even can become specialists in them and feel that they do not need to find their own ones. Even so, probably, it might also happen that they feel that those instruments are a little strange to them, that when adopting them they are confined by the creations of others, and those are not good enough to express themselves.

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