Two New PLATO Initiatives!

I've written before about PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), a national organization that advocates and supports introducing philosophy to K-12 students. Two exciting new projects: a high school essay contest - see here - and annual awards for elementary, middle and high school teachers - see here. Lots of progress in the movement to bring philosophy into children's lives!

Just Pretend

Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, by Geoffrey Hayes, is an early-reader graphic novel about two siblings and the efforts of the younger child, Penny, to join her brother in "playing pretend." Constructing pretend worlds is part of many children's childhoods - I remember when my children wouldn't answer me unless I addressed them as "Darth Vader" or whomever they were pretending to be. And, of course, younger siblings efforts to get their older brothers and sisters to include and accept them is also part of many children's experiences.

The story raises questions about why we create pretend worlds, the lines between pretending and getting lost in fantasies, the differences between playing alone and playing with others, how siblings understand one another, and how our relationships with other people change us.

Frog in Love

Frog in Love by Max Velthuijs is the story of Frog, who has felt strange all week, and is trying to figure out what is wrong. He feels like crying and laughing at the same time, and that "there's something going thump-thump" inside him. When he tells Hare about how he is feeling, Hare tells him that he is in love.

Frog is very excited to learn that he is in love, and tells Piglet, who asks him, "Who are you in love with?" Frog hadn't thought about that question, but quickly he responds that he is in love with a "pretty, nice, lovely white duck." Piglet tells Frog that a frog can't be in love with a duck, but Frog ignores him. Frog begins anonymously leaving gifts for Duck, but he can't bring himself to speak to her. He decides to impress her by breaking the world high jump record, but it is when he falls and injures himself that Duck comes into his life.

How do you know what you are feeling inside? Can you feel like "crying and laughing at the same time?" If so, how can that be? Can you love someone you don't know? Do two people have to be alike to love each other? Do we love people because of their accomplishments? What makes us love another person?

"Shivers"

Arnold Lobel is probably my favorite children's book author, and a master at generating philosophically suggestive narratives. The Frog and Toad books, in particular, are full of stories that raise many puzzles about life and experience.

One of my favorites is the story "Shivers," in Days With Frog and Toad. Frog tells Toad a ghost story and Toad interrupts several times to ask things like, "Are you making this up?" and "Is this a true story?"At the end of Frog's story, Frog and Toad are scared and are "having the shivers," which, Lobel writes, "was a good, warm feeling."

Can being scared be a "good, warm feeling?" Why do people like scary stories and films? Is it fun to be scared? When we feel scared, say,  listening to a story or watching a film, are we really scared? (We don't call the police or scream for help.) Are we just enjoying the idea of being scared? What is it we experience when we read scary books or watch horror movies?

A Pair of Red Clogs

A Pair of Red Clogs is Masako Matsuno's first book for children, written in 1960. A grandmother, looking for a box to send a new pair of clogs to her granddaughter, finds an old pair of cracked red wooden clogs in her storeroom.

The grandmother remembers how excited she was when, as a child the age her granddaughter is now, her mother bought her a brand new pair of red clogs. Soon after, the clogs had a crack in them as a result of a game she played. She wanted a new pair and decided to make the old pair so dirty that her mother would want to buy her another pair. As she shuffled the clogs through the mud, she began thinking about how this was really telling a lie.

The story examines the little girl's feelings of shame and regret at having tried to trick her mother. Should she tell her mother she had done so? Is lying wrong? Is it always wrong? Why did she keep the shoes for so many years? Did what she did change her relationship with her family? Can we still trust someone if they have once lied to us?

Asking Questions

I have written in many places about the centrality of questions to the work we do, and the importance generally of children learning to ask good questions and trusting that their questions are valuable.


Almost all very young children are alive with questions; they seem to naturally apprehend that this is the way to investigate and understand the world. At some point, however, most children absorb the message that questions are often not particularly welcome. They learn that having a question means that there is something they should have already grasped but have not. Asking questions publicly broadcasts what they don't know, and this has the potential to be somewhat shameful, or at least embarrassing. And so they go silent. Walk into a sixth grade classroom, and it’s obvious that students pose questions with a tentativeness absent in kindergarten.

However, the ability to construct good questions is indispensable for navigating one’s way through contemporary life. Developing confidence and skill in questioning allows children to evaluate critically the constant flood of information that bombards them, gather what they need to make good decisions, and convey what gaps remain in their understanding of particular topics or situations. The more accomplished a child becomes at framing good questions, the more able he or she will be to think clearly and competently for herself.

Engaging children in conversations in which their questions are central, and encouraging them to articulate what led to their questions, is vital for helping children develop the ability to formulate and pose clear and articulate questions. Often a considerable part of a philosophy session with children will be spent listing the children's questions and then choosing which question(s) to discuss. It can be easy, sometimes, in the goal-driven society in which we live, to see this part of the session as a precursor to the real work, the philosophy discussion itself. Indeed, when I first began doing philosophy in pre-college classrooms, I was often impatient about the time it took to get all the students’ questions on the board and decide what to discuss.

I've come to understand, however, that the time spent helping students to formulate their own questions and ensuring that the discussion starts with those questions is in the end just as valuable as the time spent actually talking about them. For one thing, learning to articulate questions in a clear way, so that your question accurately describes whatever it is that’s puzzling you, is an important skill that can only be developed with experience. Moreover, devoting time to listing and analyzing the students’ questions lets the students know that asking questions is itself a valuable practice, quite apart from the discussion of them (let alone answering them).

An organization about which I've recently become aware, The Right Question Institute, notes that asking questions is an essential skill for all learning, and its website has many resources for helping students construct good questions. My colleague, Amy Reed-Sandoval, has written about using the organization's "Question Formulation Technique" in a philosophy session with children: http://amyreedsandoval.com/2013/03/20/teach-students-to-ask-their-own-questions/

So much of primary and secondary education emphasizes knowing the answers, as if we had utter clarity about the meaning of most aspects of life. But, as philosopher Matthew Lipman once noted, it is when our knowledge of the world is revealed to be “ambiguous, equivocal, and mysterious,” that students are most inspired to think about the world. Questions are the keys to articulating that ambiguity and mystery. Philosophy can illuminate for children how vital questions are to examining the world in which we live and our place in it, and help them to cultivate their inclinations to question.

Waterloo & Trafalgar

Olivier Tallec's 2012 wordless picture book, Waterloo & Trafalgar, portrays two men, one in blue and one in orange, who are separated by walls and watch each other suspiciously behind their telescopes throughout the seasons, embroiled in conflict. Not until they have a common cause do they stop fighting. At the end of the book, we see that the two warring men both live inside an enclosed area,  situated within a beautiful blue and orange park that neither of them appears to see.

The amusing and colorful line drawings tell a multi-layered story, raising such questions as: Why do people engage in conflict? What is the point of war? Is compromise always possible? What does it take to trust another person? Another country? What do we really know about each other, and about the world?

The 60-Second Philosopher

Andrew Pessin's The 60-Second Philosopher is a series of 60 very short chapters (each two pages) that provide ideas for thinking about a wide range of philosophical topics (time, color, various ethical questions, knowledge, free will, etc.). The first chapter, "The Philosopher Within You," begins:

There's the legend of the fish who swam around asking every sea creature he'd meet, "Where is this great ocean I keep hearing about?" A pretty small legend, true—but one with a pretty big message.
We are very much like that fish.

The book is a wonderful resources for getting children and adults to reflect about all of the questions raised by everyday experiences.

Otter and Odder

Otter and Odder, by James Howe, was introduced to me recently by one of my undergraduate students. The story is about Otter who, looking for food, falls in love with the fish he is about to eat. Told by his community that this is not "the way of the otter," and characterized as "odd and getting odder," Otter asks himself, "What is right? What is wrong? What is natural? What is the way of the otter?"

Can a fish love an otter, when the way of the otter is to eat fish?

The story inspires thinking about social norms and the forces that impact the way we understand the world, changing moral and social values, the meaning of community, what it means for something to be "natural," the nature of love, and the relationship between individual desires and the demands of the community.

An Angel for Solomon Singer

Cynthia Rylant's story An Angel for Solomon Singer is the story of Solomon Singer, who lives in a hotel for men in New York City, and doesn't like it. His room has no balcony or fireplace, and he cannot have a cat or dog, or even paint his walls a color of his choosing.

"It is important to love where you live, and Solomon Singer loved where he lived not at all, and it was this that drove him out into the street each night." He wanders the streets, and eventually ends up in a restaurant, where a friendly waiter takes his order and suggests he return again. Solomon returns night after night, and finds that eventually when he wanders the streets, on his way to the restaurant, they feel warm and beautiful, and that in the restaurant he feels he is home.

What is home? What makes a place a home? Do we need a home? Why or why not? Is being home about a place outside of us, or about something inside us? Can we be at home anywhere? Do homes change? Can a home become no longer a home? Does home mean the same thing to all people?