There is a paradox in the idea of philosophy for children. Good teaching starts from the concrete and particular, and it engages with each student’s individual interests, beliefs, and experiences. Preadolescents find this approach more natural than a more impersonal one and respond better to it. But doing philosophy involves focusing on the abstract and general and disengaging oneself from one’s personal interests and beliefs. It involves critiquing one’s attitudes, seeing abstract relations, and applying general principles. So, if good teaching (...) focuses on the concrete and personal, and good philosophy on the abstract and impersonal, how can there be good teaching of philosophy to children? I call this the paradox of philosophy for children, and in this paper I explore how teachers should respond to it. Should they sacrifice good teaching practice, adopting a heavily teacher-centred approach in order to correct their students’ natural biases? Should they lower their expectations of what philosophical skills children can acquire? Should they even attempt to teach philosophy to children? The paper will argue that there is a better option, which exploits children’s imaginative abilities. The core idea is that by encouraging children to imaginatively identify with other perspectives, we can use their natural focus on the concrete and particular to lever them into more abstract, critical ways of thinking. In this way, their focus on the concrete and personal can be the very means to get them to think abstractly and critically. The paper will go on to outline a general strategy for implementing this approach, the Scenario-Identification-Reflection method, which will be illustrated with examples drawn from the author’s own classroom practice. The paper will also respond to some objections to the proposed strategy and offer some general reflections on the SIR method. (shrink)

This article explores the role that can be played by philosophy education in Ethiopia as a means to develop a shared meaning that is able to go beyond the ethnic polarization that is currently haunting the nation. It shows that through the introduction of a philosophy education that fosters a culture of critical reflection, dialogue, and reflection on the nature of human existence, human values, and a moral fabric that is able to bestow a sense of a common purpose on (...) the lives of individuals, one can develop a shared conception of meaning in the Ethiopian context. This reflective exercise, made possible by philosophy education, can lead into the bridging of ethnic divisions and a process of intercultural understanding that is able to introduce commonly shared normative systems. In a nation like Ethiopia that is being plagued by ethnic divisions rooted in the system of ethnic federalism, philosophy education can provide a foundation for social cohesion and ethical deliberation that leads into the creation of an inclusive society grounded on the development of a shared sense of identity. (shrink)

The methods of teaching critical thinking currently favoured are critical analysis and metacognition. The former denies the place of interactive contextual judgment in reasoning, the latter devalues human purposes and quality. A metacognitive lesson on classification is shown to be too didactic to allow children to think in any but a passive sense. Splitter’s categorization of questions shows how moving away from closed substantive questions to open ones through dialogue can encourage children to think for themselves. Some consequences for pedagogy (...) and evaluating children’s thinking are briefly examined. (shrink)