In this provocative and timely book, David Kennedy explores what can go awry when we put our humanitarian yearnings into action on a global scale--and what we can do in response. Rooted in Kennedy's own experience in numerous humanitarian efforts, the book examines campaigns for human rights, refugee protection, economic development, and for humanitarian limits to the conduct of war. It takes us from the jails of Uruguay to the corridors of the United Nations, from the founding (...) of a non-governmental organization dedicated to the liberation of East Timor to work aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Kennedy shares the satisfactions of international humanitarian engagement--but also the disappointments of a faith betrayed. With humanitarianism's new power comes knowledge that even the most well-intentioned projects can create as many problems as they solve. Kennedy develops a checklist of the unforeseen consequences, blind spots, and biases of humanitarian work--from focusing too much on rules and too little on results to the ambiguities of waging war in the name of human rights. He explores the mix of altruism, self-doubt, self-congratulation, and simple disorientation that accompany efforts to bring humanitarian commitments to foreign settings. Writing for all those who wish that "globalization" could be more humane, Kennedy urges us to think and work more pragmatically. A work of unusual verve, honesty, and insight, this insider's account urges us to embrace the freedom and the responsibility that come with a deeper awareness of the dark sides of humanitarian governance. (shrink)

This article explores the necessary requirements for effective teacher facilitation of community of philosophical inquiry sessions among children, and suggests that the first and most important prerequisite is the capacity to listen to children, which in turn is based on a critical and reflective interrogation of one’s own philosophy of childhood —the set of beliefs and assumptions about children and childhood which adults tend to project onto real children. It argues that the most effective way to explore these assumptions is (...) in community of philosophical inquiry, where we encounter the same concepts—nature, person, good and evil, innocence, etc.—which underlie more general philosophical inquiry. It then describes the work of the American educator Patricia Carini, who developed the Descriptive Review Process as a phenomenological approach to understanding the children with whom one is in relation, and identifies the Descriptive Review Process as another form of the practice of philosophy of childhood which, together with the regular practice of POC-CPI among teachers, offers us a grounded, integrated methodology for schools dedicated to adult-child dialogue and to school as a site for cultural reconstruction. (shrink)

In this essay David Kennedy argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a “new sensibility,” Kennedy argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny — the long formative period of human childhood and the paedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle — makes of the adult–child collective (...) of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” Kennedy identifies three key dimensions of dialogic schooling, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry, which is based on the problematization and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science or mathematics, whether literature, art, or philosophy. Second, CPI opens a functional space for shared decision making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for the critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent “new reality principle” through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels. (shrink)

This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. I argue from Herbert Marcuse’s prophetic invocation of a “new sensibility,” which is characterized by an increase in instinctual revulsion towards violence, domination and exploitation and, correspondingly, a greater sensitivity to all forms of life. As the embodiment of (...) a form of philosophical “post-animism” or hylozoism, it represents the evolutionary shift that, it could be argued, our species requires for survival at this historical moment. I suggest that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” I argue for a form, or archetype of schooling first articulated in ancient Greece called skholé, a space that functions, according to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, as a “meeting place,” a “form of gathering and action” dedicated to inquiry, and not to the production of calculated, preordained outcomes—a space removed from the world of production, and characterized by a form of temporality associated with childhood: aion, or “timeless time,” as opposed to kronos, or linear time. Skholé is dedicated to emergence and cultural reconstruction, which follows from an educative relationship between adults and children based on understanding the latter as bearers of the “novel,” and on a faith in the “reorganizing potentialities” of childhood impulse, or interest—that is, on natality as a fundamental principle of cultural evolution. (shrink)

We lead off this issue of Childhood and Philosophy with a collection of testimonies, homages, and brief memoirs offered from around the world in response to the death of the founder of Philosophy for Children, Matthew Lipman on December 26, 2010, at the age of 87. To characterize Lipman as “founder” is completely accurate, but barely evokes the role he played in conceiving, giving birth to, and nurturing this curriculum cum pedagogy that became a movement, and which has taken root (...) in over 40 countries, from Iceland to Nigeria to Taiwan to Chile and everywhere in between. The movement itself is broader than the program, which has in fact experienced multiple transformations in multiple contexts over its half-century of life. In fact, as many of the testimonies below either state outright or imply, the movement is an emancipatory one and thus implicitly political, infused with all the long-suffering hope for our species inspired in us by the fact of natality, and by our own intuitive faith in the transformative power of reason—or as Lipman came to call it, “reasonableness.” For those seized by its educational possibilities, it presents a sudden influx of sunlight and fresh air into an institution long stultified by its own rigid habitus, and promises the reconstruction of schooling in the image of authentic democratic practice that recognizes and honors the unique capacities of children. As Philosophy in the Classroom—Lipman’s first and now classic statement of educational philosophy--puts it, the movement promises a re-orientation of the goal of education from information (or “learning”) to meaning, and inaugurates the dialogue with childhood and children that follows from that. Lipman was not just founder of this movement but creator, inventor, developer, convener, organizer, faithful soldier, ambassador, apologist, polemicist, propagandist, and, finally, undying optimist. (shrink)

The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at the age of 68, has left many of us involved in the movement of philosophy for/with children bereft, no doubt in many different ways. The warmth and intensity of her personal and professional focus, the simple clarity of her thinking, and her boundless energy in the work of international dissemination of the concept and practice of philosophizing with children, resonate (...) even more sonorously in her death. We thought it appropriate to try following at least one pathway backwards in her life story through the memory and testimony of her chief collaborator over a period of 35 years, Matthew Lipman. I interviewed Lipman, age 87, in the single room of the eldercare center in New Jersey that has become the site for his dogged and tenacious struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, and asked him to reflect on their long partnership. The transcript ends suddenly, not because we stopped talking, but because I stopped taping, sensing his fatigue, and suggesting that we return for another round, at which point we turned to other, less somber matters. (shrink)

Late afternoon winter light entered the room obliquely, striking the seven asembled there as if in some final reckoning. They sat around the oblong table slumped in the padded chairs, exhausted, but strangely poised. No one had spoken since Jesse slammed out.

At the very least, even though Chinese schools do not look very different from those in the West, China offers an opportunity for Philosophy for Children to question its basis, its methodology, its aims. It seems to be expressing a different cultural voice, and to be disposed to the kind of dialogue we are more used to claiming than practicing. Both Kunming and Shanghai provide, in their own ways, formidable contexts: the deep, strong and disciplined educators of Railway Station School (...) of Kunming and the scholarly, sophisticated and committed members of the Shanghai institute for Research in the Human Sciences seem determined to take Philosophy for Children, not just beyond their own limits as Chinese, but beyond the limits Philosophy for Children has already established for itself in the West. Philosophy for Children in China, then, looks like a wonderful opportunity to think ourselves--what we are as educators engaged in the practice of philosophy--again. An invitation to think ourselves again. Is this not what dialogue and philosophy are about? It’s up to us to accept the invitation. (shrink)

In this dialogue between two interlocutors, the ontology of childhood is considered, first from the point of view of temporality, then power, then language, then from the perspective of philosophy, and inquires whether there is a specific philosophical and/or childlike dialectic of questioning and answering. The claim is made that both the philosopher and the artist carry a childlike way of questioning and acting on the world into adulthood. The discussion then moves to education, and considers the possibility of reconstructing (...) the latter beyond the Platonic notions of “formation,” reproduction, discipline and subjection, and evaluates the role of philosophical dialogue in a school setting as an agent of transformation. (shrink)

Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group that is characterized by conversation; that creates its discussion agenda from questions posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus (whether text or some other media); and that includes discussion of specific philosophers or philosophical traditions, if at all, only in order to develop its own ideas about the concepts under discussion. The epistemological conviction of community of philosophical inquiry is that communal dialogue, facilitated (...) by a philosophically educated person, recapitulates and reconstructs the major elements—and even the positions or claims—of the tradition, in one form or another, through the distributed thinking characteristic of dialogical discourse. The pedagogical locus of control of CPI is the group as a whole, which is understood as potentially self‐regulating through a process of ongoing dialectical transformation. The role of the facilitator is to act, among other things, from the Socratic “position of ignorance” as a bridge between concepts and arguments and as a trigger for conceptual system transformation. (shrink)

Those of us who have experienced the joy and terror of the intensive formation of a philosophical community of inquiry over an extended period, understand intuitively that it is a process of development which has certain characteristic structures and patterns. These can be glossed in a number of ways, all of which will be metaphors, if only because any given moment within the life of the COI is an instant of vertiginous freedom.

This paper traces the changing status of the school as a counter culture in the anthropological and historical literature, in particular from the moment when compulsory mass schooling assumed the function of ideological state apparatus in the post-revolutionary 19th century West. It then focuses attention on what may be called the New School, which could be said to represent an evolved, postmodern embodiment of the social archetype of the school as interruption of the status quo. It emerged in the form (...) of schools initially associated with Romanticism and with socialist libertarian or ‘anarchist’ impulses, and moved, if temporarily, into the educational mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the left sector of the Progressive Education movement, proliferated in the 1960s and 70s in various school reform movements, and is a constant presence today in the theory and practice of those schools that identify themselves as ‘democratic’. It is based on principles of adult–child dialogue and direct democratic practice. Examples that we have of the New School tend to be characterised by material and activity environments that value variety, emergence, choice, emotional safety, self-initiation and self-organisation; that are multi-sensorial and polysymbolic; and that are organised on the principles associated with mastery learning, social learning theory and play theory—that is, moderate complexity and optimal cognitive arousal as exemplary conditions for learning. (shrink)

Normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood [sic]. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should (...) be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other.The quiet revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two inseparable .. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, (...) in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children in Transition presents a diverse collection of perspectives on the worldwide educational movement of philosophy for children. Educators and philosophers establish the relationship between philosophy and the child, and clarify the significance of that relationship for teaching and learning today. The papers present a diverse range of perspectives, problems and tentative prospects concerning the theory and practice of Philosophy for Children today The collection familiarises an actual educational practice that is steadily gaining importance in the field of (...) academic philosophy Opens up discussion on the notion of the relationship between philosophy and the child. (shrink)

This review of Matthew Lipman’s autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking, is a reflection on the themes and patterns of his extraordinarily productive career. His book begins with memories of earliest childhood and his preoccupation with the possibility of being able to fly, moves through the years in which his family struggled with the effects of the Great Depression, through his service in the military during World War II, his discovery of the joy and beauty of philosophy, his academic rise at (...) Columbia University, his Fullbright sojourn in Paris, and his early and later career. Lipman’s educational project led in four related directions: the practice of philosophy for children, which he invented, and which presents an epistemological challenge to a second field, philosophy of education, which is as startling as was Rousseau’s two hundred years before. Third, it led to a realm of theory called philosophy of childhood, upon which the practice of philosophy for children is a kind of action-meditation, prompting adults as it does to reflect on children’s differences from and similarities to adults at the same time, and in the same discursive space. Finally, his praxis also implicitly challenged those accounts of children’s philosophies, paradigmatically represented by Piaget’s work, which represent childhood epistemology as evidence for various genetic and epigenetic stage-based theories of cognitive development. The consequence for education of this confluence was a methodology—community of inquiry—that serves as a bridge between the two most influential philosophers of education of the 20th century—John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The educational praxis that emerged from his venture, for all its apparent simplicity, operationalizes a postcolonial standpoint epistemology vis a vis childhood and children, pulls the linchpin that holds in place the school as ideological state apparatus, and empowers the elementary classroom as a primary site for democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

This article examines the current state of foreign language education in Japanese universities as illustrative of the troubling conditions facing the liberal arts in a globalized neoliberal milieu. The utopian ideal in education has always insinuated, at the least, a pedagogy that inspires personal agency, creative investment, challenge to power and social change. This imagining of incalculable futures, however, has been undermined by the seemingly inevitable and confluent forces of a networked world, represented most forcefully by the socioeconomic reductionism of (...) neoliberal globalism. In the context of contemporary Japanese higher education, these forces are joined by Japan’s uniquely ambivalent relationship with the ‘outside’ world, and manifested in the rigid conceptualizations that motivate deeply problematic government and institutional initiatives for the ‘globalization’ of higher education. Within the frame of Bernard Stiegler’s work on transindividuation (ps... (shrink)

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children, but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education (...) is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes and desires,” made possible by an emergent form of social character. It has followed its own developmental trajectory from its origins in Pestalozzi’s Rousseau-inspired innovations, through anarchist theory and practice and the Progressive Education movement, to its current most salient formulation in the Democratic Education movement, whether as an enemy within the gates of standardized education or as expressed in innumerable alternative forms of schooling or unschooling. The paper highlights several key characteristics, gleaned from all those forms, of the dialogic school—identified as intentionality, transitionality, emergence, aesthetic temporality, interdisciplinarity and group governmentality--and argues further that community of philosophical inquiry theory and practice as a form of post-Socratic group dialogue that emerged in the 1970’s, is a pedagogical praxis that offers a grand operational template for dialogic education as a form of schooling. (shrink)

The idea of the classroom as a community of inquiry, and of the community of inquiry as a model for optimal classroom practice, is perhaps one of the great unrealized ideas in Western educational history. We first find it represented in the Socratic dialogues, but it is not realized there, whether becasue of the dominating power of Socrates' intellect, or the scribal distortions which resulted from PLatos's didacticism, or both. More recently, the concept finds powerful theoretical articulation in the epistemology (...) of Peirce, Royce, and Buchler. (shrink)

This article argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult-child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a ‘new sensibility’, the author argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. (...) After exploring child-adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what Dewey called ‘impulse’ and ‘habit’, three key dimensions of dialogic schooling are identified, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which is based on the problematisation and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse-model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science, mathematics, literature, art, or philosophy. Second, it opens a functional space for shared decision-making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum (e.g. ‘alive’, ‘justice’, ‘system’, ‘biosphere’) and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent ‘new reality principle’ through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels. (shrink)

Born in 1923 and recently deceased after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, Matthew Lipman wrote this brief but detailed autobiography just before his illness made it impossible to write any more. It begins with memories of earliest childhood and his preoccupation with the possibility of being able to fly, moves through the years in which his family struggled with the effects of the Great Depression, through his service in the military during World War II, his discovery of the joy (...) and beauty of philosophy, his quick academic rise at Columbia University, his sojourn in Paris, and his early and later career. “I feel for philosophy,” he writes in the last paragraph of this, his last book, “what an astronaut might feel at the sight of the earth’s sphere, all green and brown and blue, as it appears from a space station.” He then expresses the hope that Philosophy for Children “will build a better and more reasonable world for our children and their children to inhabit: a world that looks as beautiful from across the street as it does from the distance of space.” (170) Lipman’s memoir is a modest testimony to an extraordinary life-trajectory, and an exemplification of the philosopher as one with the form of double-vision—seeing life from outer space and from across the street—that is perhaps philosophy’s most profound vocation. (shrink)

One upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were - Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.

Offers both theoretical and practical insights into the dialogue between adults and children as a democratic model for schooling.

What follows is one piece of a series of conversations that I conducted with a small group of young children in a day care center where I was working in 1983. The children were between the ages of 3 and 6, and we had been together long enough to speak frankly and comfortably with each other. I used small group time to ask six questions, all of them about the ultimate issues - the origins, ends, and limits of things, death, (...) dreams, soul, spirit, self, God, evil. Taken together, the conversations we had make for a transcript of 65 manuscript pages. The issues raised there are many, and provoke questions not only about how young children think, but how adults influence them to think. The issues taken up below - the origins of things - was continued past this conversation, and its sequel will appear in the next issue of Analytic Teaching. Although the text tends to speak for itself, a few comments on the pattern of the conversation follow the transcript. (shrink)

This paper seeks to identify the role of play in the design and function of Socratic dialogue as practiced in community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) in classrooms. It reviews the ideas of some major play theorists from various fields of study and practice—philosophy, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and education—and identifies the epistemological, ontological, and axiological judgments they share in their analyses of the phenomenon of play. It identifies five psychodynamic dimensions in which the Socratic play of “following (...) the argument where it leads” can be identified: the “play space,” the “time of play,” “the rules of the game,” “the stakes in play,” and “play and power.” Finally, it suggest that there is a historical relationship between the reconstruction of Socratic dialogue in CPI and the cultural reconstruction of “child” in post-modern philosophy, with special attention to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-child” as emblematic of an emergent “post-human” style of subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper seeks to identify the role of play in the design and function of Socratic dialogue as practiced in community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) in classrooms. It reviews the ideas of some major play theorists from various fields of study and practice—philosophy, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and education—and identifies the epistemological, ontological, and axiological judgments they share in their analyses of the phenomenon of play. It identifies five psychodynamic dimensions in which the Socratic play of “following (...) the argument where it leads” can be identified: the “play space,” the “time of play,” “the rules of the game,” “the stakes in play,” and “play and power.” Finally, it suggest that there is a historical relationship between the reconstruction of Socratic dialogue in CPI and the cultural reconstruction of “child” in post-modern philosophy, with special attention to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-child” as emblematic of an emergent “post-human” style of subjectivity. (shrink)

The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrative construct about who we are, what our borders and limits and capacities are, what is pathology, and what is normality, and so on. These ontological and epistemological narratives are usually linked to grand explanatory narratives like science and religion, and are intimately linked to cosmological pictures. The “intersubject” is an emergent form of subjectivity in our time which reconstructs its borders to include the other, (...) and which understands itself as always building and being built through a combination of internal and external dialogue. The shift from monological to dialogical discourse is both a product and a producer of the intersubject, and is in turn made possible by a shift—underway for the last one hundred years or so—in the human information environment. The major educational innovation which reconstructs theory and practice for the intersubject—community of philosophical inquiry (CPI)—assumes, following field and systems theory, that any group gathered together is an interactive system. It also assumes that the fundamental forms of growth and development both of the individual and of the collective take place through a process of communal deliberative inquiry into meaning, resulting in the reconstruction of beliefs, values, and discourses on both an individual and a collective level. CPI is a process in which subject and object are both active and passive, shaping and being shaped, determining and determined, in and through their transaction. It assumes that its interlocutors are in a relation of both mutual and self-interrogation. As the phenomenon of the intersubject gains credence in human culture, philosophy is gaining power as an educational idea in the elementary and high school classroom. Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals enter a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children arose in the 1970s in the US as an educational programme. This programme, initiated by Matthew Lipman, was devoted to exploring the relationship between the notions ‘philosophy’ and ‘childhood’, with the implicit practical goal of establishing philosophy as a full-fledged ‘content area’ in public schools. Over 40 years, the programme has spread worldwide, and the theory and practice of doing philosophy for or with children and young people appears to be of growing interest in the field of (...) education and, by implication, in society as a whole. This article focuses on this growing interest by offering a survey of the main arguments and ideas that have given shape to the idea of philosophy for children in recent decades. This aim is twofold: first, to make more familiar an actual educational practice that is not at all well known in the field of academic philosophy itself; and second, to invite a re-thinking of the relationship between philosophy and the child ‘after Lipman’. (shrink)