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Welcome to the new Philosophy for Australian Schools website. Here you can look at upcoming events, find resources to help you teach community of inquiry, become a part of our forum, become a member or contact the association. The training and development information for 2011 is up and running! Click on the 'Events' tab to register now.
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About Philosophy in the Classroom
In the late 1960's Matthew Lipman (US Philosopher and Educator) developed an educational syllabus known as 'Philosophy for Children' and the 'Community of Inquiry' approach. His idea is to turn the classroom into a community of inquiry, i.e. a group bound together by an interest in certain puzzles (and these have to be puzzles of a certain sort, which we'll spell out shortly), as well as by a commitment to the procedures of rational thinking and fairmindedness. The puzzles need to be genuine puzzles - puzzles which matter to the children and do not have answers tucked away anywhere, puzzles which can only be solved through thinking for yourself.
Lipman's idea is that while young children are curious and wonder about almost everything (ask "why" a lot), 10 years on, this curiosity is gone: "...from marvelling at everything, they marvel at nothing". And because they no longer ask "why", children lose their motivation to think critically and constructively. And so their ability to think for themselves shrivels. Lipman talks of "a crust of scale" that "grows over their minds", and blames schools: children are quick to realise, he says, that the questions teachers set them already have answers laid down somewhere - in a book, on the net, in the teacher's head. "What do plants need in order to grow", "Why did Colonel Light choose Adelaide as the site of S.A.'s capital..." Children are quick to realise that it is quicker and more accurate to look the answers up, rather than thinking the questions through for themselves.
The questions we focus on asking in Philosophy for Australian Schools are genuine puzzles in Lipman's sense and the method we employ in the workshops is the one Lipman recommends for the classroom; disciplined collaborative dialogue. Dialogue, because thinking shows itself most directly in speech; disciplined, because critical, reflective thought shows itself in not mere talking, but in talking disciplined by the rules of logic (rules which allow participants to see where their thinking has gone wrong); and collaborative because children think better in collaboration with their peers (Vygotsky). In a Community of Inquiry, participants co-operate by building on each other's ideas, by questioning each other's underlying assumptions, by suggesting alternatives when some among them find themselves blocked and frustrated and by listening carefully and respectfully to the ways in which other people express how things appear to them. The participants in a community of inquiry will respect and value each other's contributions, and each member will have the courage to risk an opinion. The teacher is a participant too, a co-inquirer: she does not herself have an answer to the puzzle. But, she has, as the children do not yet have, a firm grasp of the rules of rational and fairminded inquiry. The aim is for the children to come to discover these rules for themselves, in the process of thinking about issues that matter to them, and which have no answers tucked away. The Philosophy for Children program uses specially written stories, or less often stories from general children's literature as stimulus for discussion within additional and separate philosophy lessons.
