Philosophy for Children (P4C)
Philosophy for children builds on the childrens’ own wonder and curiosity about ideas that are vitally important to them. The subject matter of Philosophy for Children is those common, central and contestable concepts that underpin both our experience of human life and all academic disciplines. Examples of such concepts are:
Truth, reality, knowledge, evidence, freedom, justice, goodness, rights, mind, identity, love, friendship, rules, responsibility, action, logic, language, fairness, reason, existence, possibility, beauty, meaning, self, time, God, infinity, human nature, thought.
The central pedagogical tool and guiding ideal of Philosophy for Children is the community of inquiry. In the community of inquiry, children work together to generate and then answer their own questions about the philosophical issues contained in purpose written materials or a wide range of other resources. Thinking in the community of inquiry is critical, creative, collaborative and caring.
"In philosophy you learn how to think, not what to think”
Getting Started...
The stimulus is normally a story or fable which the teacher reads to the class. It can alternatively be a song or a picture. The more thought provoking the better.
The children split into pairs and spend 5-10 minutes discussing the story, poem, song, picture etc. They have to come up with a question. It could be quite specific: "what does this word mean?" or, "why did this character do that?" or more general: "do people always do such and such?" or "why are changes so difficult to manage?" etc.
Scaffolding and modelling questions will be important at first.
The teacher writes the questions on the board. The whole list of questions is then read to the class. Children consider which question they would like to discuss. A vote is taken and one question is discussed in depth for about 30 minutes.
In addition to fulfilling Citizenship and PSHE objectives this work also addresses aspects of Art, Music, Literacy and Drama, The philosophy classes can help children develop literacy skills, particularly being able to better infer meaning from texts. Applying a questioning attitude has also been very helpful in science.
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