Interview with Matthew Lipman—Part 1/Part 2: Brave Old Subject, Brave New World

by Saeed Naji

1. Prof. Lipman, in your book Thinking in Education, 2nd Edition (Cambridge, 2003) you contrast two paradigms of education, the traditional one and the reflective one. Can you explain this contrast?

Not without great oversimplification, I'm afraid. The traditional understanding people had of education, reaching all the way back to antiquity, was that it was a way of getting the younger generations to adopt the same knowledge—the same facts and relationships and values—as were considered true by the generations that had immediately preceded them. There was thought to be no need for students to reflect on or analyze what they were taught: such a critical examination had already taken place in the preceding generations.

The Enlightenment brought a call for reform. Montaigne demanded the teaching of judgment, but no one seemed to know how this was to be done, and in fact, there was little attempt to teach judgment until the end of the 19th century. Kant called for an education that would get children to think for themselves instead of one that parroted their elders; he even contributed to the design of the reflective model by referring to what he was advocating as "the practice of philosophical inquiry". But again, no one knew how this was to be done, so it was largely forgotten.

It was only with the beginning of the 20th century, particularly during the first half of that century, that educators like John Dewey began to erect the scaffolding of the new reflective paradigm. There were other educators, of course—like Durkheim and Goodman and Mead—educators who were inspired by the social sciences or by logic, enabling them to call for new principles in education, new criteria, new standards, and the best of these led to the formation of the reflective education paradigm. Except for Dewey, there was no call here for thoroughgoing pedagogical change. Dewey demanded over and over again that teachers must teach for thinking. It was not enough to teach merely for more up-to-date factual knowledge, just as it was not enough to teach just for reasoning or for truth. Children, like scientists, had to work together, because all inquiry was cooperative. All of it involved deliberation and participation. Thus the leaders of the reflective method of education in the 20th century saw that teaching for thinking had to be teaching for precise, open-minded, fair-minded thinking. Consequently in the latter half of the 20th century, the slogan of the more progressive educators was that the schools needed to teach for critical thinking—for thinking that did not violate the principles of experimental science or of formal, or even of informal logic. But only Dewey went far beyond Ryle, Scheffler, Goodman, Nelson, Rawls and the like, to visualize education as the operative leading edge of an enormous social reform aimed at revising society into a world order in which people lived democratically as naturally as they walked upright. With the end of the 20th century came the end of the Deweyan phase of reflective education. With the start of the 21st century came the phase characterized by the introduction of such useful operatives as the community of inquiry, the reflective equilibrium, and the strengthening of judgment.

We can therefore distinguish of the earlier reflective model, shaped by the pedagogical philosophy of Dewey from the later reflective model, characterized by Philosophy for Children. The goal of thinking permeates both phases: both aim at producing thinking students, thinking teachers, thinking schools of education. Both have become sufficiently strong and enduring to see themselves planted in virtually every portion of the globe.

2. Why has the position you advance in the 2nd Edition of Thinking in Education been called the "great maieutic epic"?

The word "maieutic" is the Greek term for midwifery. It is usually taken to mean by Socrates, that there is an analogy between midwifery and teaching: the midwife delivers the pregnant mother of her child, as the philosopher delivers the ideationally pregnant student of his or her thinking. (A number of alternative interpretations have been advanced as to precisely how Socrates's pronouncement is to be understood. I think this one is as helpful as any and has the distinct merit of being applicable to the cornerstone of Philosophy for Children: helping children to think for themselves.)

And so the midwife helps the mother give birth not just to a child to a living thinker, indeed, to an entire world society of living thinkers. Socrates daringly invokes the maieutic paradigm: his doing so is a dialectical stroke of epic proportions. Thinking in Education, 2nd Edition is an effort to show that we are only at the beginning of the redesigning and refashioning of education. Our efforts can be considered heroically successful only when education as conceptual midwifery becomes the rule rather than the exception.

3. You say that to overcome the deficiency of education in elementary schools, we need 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. Furthermore, you see inquiry as "the genus of which the various forms of philosophy are species". This is a new conception of education and philosophy and their relations. In what sense can education and philosophy be regarded as inquiry?

Inquiry is the investigative response to problematic aspects of human experience. It generally begins as questioning and moves from there into interpretation and hypothesis formation. Through discussion and deliberation, it seeks to transform the problematic into the controversial, the participatory and ultimately the reasonable.

Scientific inquiry is often invoked as alone embodying inquiry, but this is unjustified. All imaginative and creative thinking (hence all art) is inquiry, and all investigation of the ethically or valuationally problematic is inquiry. Aristotle was moving in this direction, I believe, when he asserted that all deliberation is inquiry.

But what of education and philosophy? To assert that education is not inquiry is to claim that it has to be identified with traditional rather than with reflective education, and this is unacceptable.

There is no justification for denying the status of inquiry to philosophy. All the humanities are forms of inquiry, and philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy can also be seen as a highly sophisticated form of education.

4. Generally speaking, why is a philosophical novel more effective in education than a merely philosophical text?

A textbook is an assemblage of a huge amount of information compiled by scholars and for scholars. But if the audience at which the textbook is aimed is made up not of scholars, but of children, some device is needed to motivate the reading. A novel may provide a fictional, imaginative setting, an energetic dialogue, lively characters, a sprightly style, animation, humor, or all of these. In this manner, the author is able to pack the information to be communicated into the form of a story with which the reader identifies and which the reader is able to enjoy and understand. Those who write Philosophy for Children novels and workbooks can thus intersperse each page with lightly concealed philosophical meanings, problems and relationships. The children are likely to draw these out of the stories and bring them to the attention of their classmates. A sentence, a word—strikes them as ambiguous or vague or misleading. In this way, their inquiry begins, and continues until they are satisfied that they know the meaning of what was written or said.

In short, graduate students in philosophy may bring with them their own personal motivation for reading very abstract texts, but children need a motivation for doing so, and a story is often the best way of doing so. This is not a reason, however, to agree with Piaget's conception that young children cannot deal with abstractions. It would be better to say that children don't want to be made to deal with abstract, dry and technical vocabularies. They can do very well with short abstract words like good, bad, law, fair, hope, happy etc. when it happens that these are words whose usage they share with philosophers.

However, it is no simple matter to write a philosophical novel, for in addition to the criteria or considerations just cited, such a novel must challenge the readers to think independently and to discuss the embedded ideas with one another.

5. What characteristics, elements and components do the books concerning Philosophy for Children need to involve?

For any given novel, there is no set number of components, but a set of such novels (such as Philosophy for Children, which contains almost a dozen novels) will make demands on the author that are more specific:

1. Ideas must be drawn from a variety of sources in philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of education, logic etc. Some of these may be omitted in order to spend more time on others. For example, some areas of ethics must be represented in virtually every chapter of a given text. On the other hand, there could be a relatively small amount of ethics, but it is inadvisable to skip it completely.
2. There should be at least one program (a program is here a novel plus a manual) for each age level (a level usually comprises one or two ages.) Thus Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery is designed for children ages 9-11, and Pixie is for ages 7-9.
3. As much as possible, the language used by the speakers in the novels should correspond with the real-life language of the readers in the classrooms, their homes, and with one another.
4. Thinking exercises for each chapter of the novels should be provided in each separate manual. (For suggestions concerning the writing of philosophical exercises, see my article, "Philosophical discussion plans and exercises", Critical and Creative Thinking, 5 No.1, March, 1997.)

In addition to the humanistic contents which elementary school philosophy provides to children who study it, there are the cognitive structures and processes which it illuminates and thereby strengthens. Some of these are:

Modes of Judgment	Types of Thinking	Systems Thinking Skills	Mental Act	Affective States
Making	Critical	Reasoning	Deciding	Hoping
Saying	Creative	Inquiry	Considering	Liking
Doing	Caring	Concept-Formation	Wondering	Honoring
Feeling		Translation	Remembering	Encouraging
		etc.	Explaining	Prizing
			Understanding	Esteeming
			etc.	etc.

6. What are the differences between this kind of novel and other novels at the children's level?

Children's literature is a vast, complex and relatively uncharted field of writing and publishing. Much of it is directed to the home of the child, or to the school library, or to the individual to use for occasional purposes. On the other hand, P4C is specifically aimed at the classroom, where the teacher has been especially prepared for the teaching of philosophy with children.

Another significant difference is that P4C aims at teaching children how to do philosophy—i.e. how to engage in philosophical practice. This is very different from fables or from proverbs, which aim to impart a small gem of wisdom, usually on the final page of the story.

7. The books in P4C are said to be novels about children "discovering philosophy". What do you mean by "children discovering philosophy"?

The stories are written in such a way as to scatter a number of quite diverse philosophical ideas at random on each page. Children, with their natural curiosity, cannot help being intrigued by these, and want the other members of the class to examine and discuss them. Such discussions should be encouraged by the teacher, and encourage the children to have faith in their own philosophical powers.

8. What are the differences among books concerning children of different ages, during which children may have special demands?

To some extent, I've already dealt with this in response to Question #5. I would add only that philosophy can be used to make children aware of how they are one with all people, and how, on the other hand, they are different from one another. These differences may involve differences of family traditions, manner of thinking, modes of artistic expression, language, skills etc.

9. What kinds of books are the best among all the books written in this field?

I find it difficult to answer this question, largely because I haven't read English translations of numerous books intended to be novels for teaching philosophy to children, nor have I been able to read those books that remain untranslated.

10. What methods are used in the books to teach reasoning and judgment? What is the difference between this method and the method for adults?

When preparing teachers to teach P4C, we use the same method as the method to be used by those teachers when they eventually teach P4C to children. That is, the children read excerpts from the novels dealing with reasoning, and they then discuss them, if they have any questions they want to ask. It is true that, with regards to teaching logic, the proportion of questions making use of didactic teaching is likely to be larger than those from other areas of philosophy. But there are a good many portions of logic that lend themselves to being taught by the discussion method: logical fallacies and informal reasoning are examples.

11. It is suggested that the books be translated, but there are difficulties in doing this. There are ethical values in the novels that the children of some countries would not have sympathy with. Also, there may be a cultural spirit that is inconsistent with the ethical values in different countries. How can this difficulty be overcome?

It is very difficult to try to teach Philosophy for Children in countries where the curriculum has not been translated into the language of those countries. The translation need not be literal, but it should be the same language that the people in that country speak.

Those who try using IAPC materials that touch on ethical or religious values should read Philosophy in the Classroom (Lipman, Sharp, Oscanyan. Available from IAPC.) They should also read the instructional manuals for the novels they are planning to teach. The situation is far from hopeless, even in countries where the influence of religion upon education is very strong.

12. There are some writers in Iran as well as in other countries who are working at writing thinking novels at the children's level. What rules should they follow so that their books conform to P4C standards?

I think you might address this question initially to the International Council for Philosophical Inquiry with Children [http://www.icpic.org]. If, after reading the ICPIC response, you still have questions you would like me to deal with, I would be happy to give you further suggestions.