Philosophy for children
A well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National Curriculum since 2009, the publication of founder Peter Worley’s teaching guide The If Machine this March and the ‘Roundtable on Philosophy for Children’ hosted by the Forum for European Philosophy in June suggest there is now confidence in the broad intellectual support of educational practitioners and philosophers alongside the political will necessary to achieve the aspirations of this project.1 An interview with Worley appears in the May/June issue of Philosophy Now magazine, alongside a special section on ‘doing philosophy with children’ dedicated to Matthew Lipman. Lipman, who pioneered the philosophy for children and communities (‘P4C’) movement in the USA during the 1970s, died at the end of last year. It was his work that inspired the foundation of the educational charity SAPERE (Society for Advancing Philosophy Enquiry and Reflection in Education) in 1992, which also held its own ‘Introduction to Philosophy for Children’ event in July.
It is significant that this joint push for basic philosophical teaching for children coincides with the growing popularity of philosophy at A-level. In contrast, applications to study the subject at degree level have dropped in the last year (along with less vocational humanities subjects in general, a trend we might expect to continue with the trebling of tuition fees), whilst philosophy programmes in higher education seem to have been bearing the particular brunt of hasty and often brutal attempts to rationalize resources and cut costs. Over the last year protests against the announced closures of philosophy at Liverpool and Keele have forced managerial reversals, whilst the purging of philosophy courses at Middlesex, Greenwich, London Met and, most recently, Northampton continues. It is the context of this broader crisis that demands our attention here, not least because a popular drive towards philosophy may be a symptom either of a revitalization that could spread into higher education or of its regression and eventual expiration.
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Notes
1. The Philosophy Shop’s recent ‘whitepaper’, Plato Not Playdoh: Philosophy In Our Classrooms – The Time is Right, cites the recommendations of the 2009 Cambridge Primary Review concerning the promotion of thinking skills, making Citizenship and Ethics mandatory, and the adoption of empowerment, autonomy and dialogue as key aims for primary education; seewww.thephilosophyshop.co.uk/asset/169/Whitepaper_ final.pdf.
