Philosophy With Kids

I’m supposed to be an expert in the field of Philosophy for Children; I’ve published papers, spoken at conferences, and I teach a class at the University of Washington exploring the theory and practice of doing philosophical inquiry with pre-college students.

But I’ve felt like something of a phony of late; when I was a grad student, I used to go to as many as four different classes a week and for five summers before this past one, I always taught a three-week long all-day class to middle-school students through the Robinson Center for Young Scholars at the U of WA. In the last 18 months or so, though, I’ve only been in a couple of classrooms with kids; mostly I’ve been with college students or adults talking about what it’s like to work with children. It makes me feel about myself the way I used to feel about professional educators who theorize wonderfully but never put themselves in front of the students they’re theorizing about.

So it was very rewarding today to visit Lake Washington Girls Middle School and do some philosophy with a class of 6th graders there. I had sort of forgotten how fun it can be to explore ideas with young people in a classroom community of inquiry.

Today we wrangled with the question, “Is life fair?” and played a game that gives students a chance to develop what they think are fair principles for distributing benefits in society.

The solution that these students came up with was novel in my experience of playing the game with dozens of classes in the past decade or so. Most classes develop principles for distributing the benefits society-wide. This class worked in groups of five or six to distribute the benefits among the neighborhoods, if you will.

I brought a handful of my students from the UW to the class; I’m not sure they had as much fun as me, but I think they liked it.