Do we put
what is precious at risk through conversation?
"Do not give
dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may
trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” Jesus, in
Matthew 7:6, Bible, New International Version.
Both Matthew Lipman
and Ann Sharp sometimes write that Philosophy for Children discussions promote
religious understanding and growth – understood in quite traditional ways. In
1984, Lipman presents philosophic discussion as a way of encountering
religious stories: “In any educational context, whether religious or otherwise,
reasoning and inquiry skills are cultivated in order to improve the ability of
students to retrieve meanings from what they read and hear and otherwise perceive
in the world about them. Often the curriculum is scripture and commentary; the
meanings to be retrieved are religious meanings.” (29) He gives examples
in this article of ways to use particular reasoning skills to understand
traditional stories; one senses the influence of the great Jewish interpretive
traditions in these remarks.
In a late
autobiographical written interview exchange, Ann Sharp reflects on many
religious institutions and influences over decades of her early life; clearly,
the starting points for her own early journeys of thought were religious
stories and claims. She writes with regret about the theological poverty
of contemporary education: “I often wonder if one of the reasons why my
undergraduates are so unmotivated toward philosophical thinking is because they
don’t have access to theological speculation, and much of what they do have in
terms of religious background, if anything, is dogmatic, not subject to
personal reflection and divorced from their everyday life.” (34, emphasis
mine). (One might take Lipman’s recommendation to be a call for infusing
dogmatic religious materials with personal reflections that connect them to
everyday life, for the philosophic processing of religious stories to elicit
their meanings. ) Later in the interview, Sharp summarizes her current
relationship to religious questions: she was once interested in reconciling
faith and reason, but has become convinced, through her wider reading of
philosophy, that faith and reason were “speaking different languages with
regard to human experience.” It is centrally important to understand how this
conviction influences Sharp’s attitude toward the religious and spiritual
significance of Philosophy for Children.
The question about
the relevance of philosophy discussions in the classroom to religious stories
and assertions was not central in the early days of the Philosophy for Children
movement. When Lipman wrote his classroom novels, he avoided many topics that
would annoy and frighten religious people. He never has a child say, as
innumerable children have said in innumerable elementary schools: ‘You’re a
Lutheran, so you are going to hell’ or ‘The teacher is just wrong about
dinosaurs, because the world is really only 6000 years old.’ Lipman was
concerned to give his basic approach to inquiry a foothold in public schools,
and so he has Harry start out thinking about reversible sentences, a matter on
which few parents have opinions. Perhaps he hoped that the children would
practice their new-found skills on all the claims they were commanded to
believe, but he didn’t directly address religious convictions in the early
novels.
Lipman’s initial
strategy was certainly right. There was no other way to introduce philosophy
into the schools. But, apart from strategic considerations, how do we
understand the relationship between the community of inquiry and those beliefs
that people hold closest: their religious, spiritual, and aesthetic
commitments? Is there something special about these beliefs that requires a
different approach than is appropriate to, for example, the question about the
definition of friendship?
In her writings,
Ann Sharp says quite a lot that is relevant to this question. She comes at it
from several directions, in papers written for different purposes and audiences
over three decades.
Her position is
sometimes hard to make out, for several interlocking reasons. She has the
generous habit of quoting briefly, in passing, from substantial works, without
saying whether she agrees with the quotations or just finds the views
provocative, and without locating the quotes within philosophic systems. This
is useful as bibliography. She gives the reader some leads for future work on
the topic. This is not, however, helpful to someone who is trying to isolate Ann’s
own position.
In almost
everything she writes on these topics, Ann is attempting to present the basic
method of philosophy for children and the rationale for using that method in
the public schools. This is also a reasonable and generous impulse: many readers
will need considerable background before they can grasp any particular
issue related the program. Further, she feels a natural responsibility to
spread the word about this new educational initiative. However, her rehearsal
of basic points crowds out new arguments and insights in the articles, and it
eats space that could be used for a fuller development of the most central and
potentially controversial claims.
Finally, when Sharp
writes about the community of inquiry, she describes the ideal case: the
classroom in which everything goes right. In such a classroom, students adopt
philosophic practices quickly, acquire necessary skills, make space for each
other’s contributions, treat each other carefully, and progress from individual
conceptual analysis to the construction of a story that takes in all the
divergent views represented in their community. The teacher facilitates without
dominating, skillfully asking the right question to move the discussion
forward. I have worked with these materials in many classrooms, and it is
remarkable how often they succeed, how well they work, and how far people can
take the conversation, even on the first day. However, it doesn’t always work
this way: the practice is good but not supernatural. Sharp’s way of writing
obscures the question of risk. I may endanger my connection to a view I care
about by exposing it to a community of inquiry. In the ideal case, there might
be no risk. But not every community is safe; not every teacher is able to
guarantee a safe space.
In the following
discussion, I will sketch four claims about the relationship between practices
in the classroom community of inquiry and religious material (stories,
assertions, and concepts). I think that Ann Sharp presents each of these in
some of her writings. Some of them make Philosophy for Children out to be
more spiritually and religiously important than others. On a scale of
increasing radicalness and decreasing modesty, the claims are these:
1. Religious topics can reasonably be addressed in the community of
inquiry; philosophy for children is a possible source of fresh religious
thinking;
2.
Classroom dialogue gives
content to notions that are important in religious, spiritual and aesthetic
contexts, without competing with, or replacing, religious practice;
3.
Classroom philosophical
inquiry is itself religious – a kind of community that is a plausible unifying
ideal for a democratic society;
4.
The formation of a
classroom community of inquiry creates a work of art, subject to the critical
categories appropriate to works of art, and offering the kind of satisfaction
that a work of art provides.
The first claim, that the classroom community of
inquiry can reasonably engage with some religious claims, metaphors, and
stories, is, by itself, very modest. The second claim is also modest. It gives
the philosophy for children classroom an important role in helping students to
understand the vocabulary of religious belief. Both papers are in basic
agreement with Lipman’s claim that philosophy for children can support
religious practice. Claim three seems to place philosophy for children in
direct competition with religious practice, and claim four maps out an
alternative way of understanding philosophic inquiry that avoids this
suggestion.
In the following sections, I will show in more
detail how Sharp develops each of these claims, making some brief critical
comments about her views. I will then look more closely at the two pieces
presented in this anthology, in an effort to clarify the question: ‘What risk
does philosophy for children pose to closely held beliefs?’
Philosophy for children engages critically and
creatively with religious materials.
A two-part, 1994
paper, “The Religious Dimension of Philosophy for Children” (Journal of Value
Inquiry, March and November 1994), is a plausible starting point for thinking
about Ann’s views on religious content in classroom philosophy discussions.
Part one presents a basic thesis, with many examples. Religions address “our
understanding of what life is all about, its purpose and meaning.” (3) They
contain “ideas and beliefs about the essential nature of the world and (one’s)
place in it,” (3) often expressed through metaphors. Feminist theologians
have shown what it is like to engage in criticism of such metaphors, arguing
that some traditional pictures - of the universe under the control of an
all-powerful lawgiver, for example - are inadequate to the experience of some
people, especially women, and to some problems faced by humanity, and need to
be replaced by other, better metaphors.
The basic material
of religious positions is, in this way, open to criticism; religious
topics can
reasonably be addressed in the community of inquiry: “Questions of religious
belief would become a subject for collaborative reflection and inquiry
connected to the other qualities and moods of their daily experience which fund
the changing and complicated stories of our humanness.” (11) Indeed, children
have a loose enough relationship to traditional metaphors to come up with
viable alternatives that adults might miss.
In part 2, Ann
begins by observing that, in international teacher workshops at Mendham, New
Jersey, the conversation approaches a new intellectual ideal: transcultural
consciousness. “Most individuals operate from a far narrower frame of reference
from that of which they are capable, failing to transcend the influence of
their particular culture, their particular parents, and their particular
childhood experience that has formed their view of the world…. It has been the
experience of many of the participants that they do come to understand the
world-views of others and take different perspectives into account.” (2)
The remainder of
the article reviews in detail the strategies and values of classroom
philosophy, looking at how this practice might enable children to go beyond
their own upbringing and culture to achieve empathy and to craft new metaphors
that respond to current crises. So philosophy for children is positioned as a
possible source of fresh religious thinking, crafting metaphors that respond
forcefully to the crises of racism, environmental degradation, and all kinds of
oppression.
The optimism expressed
in these two papers is exhilarating. Events since 1994 have made anyone
reasonable hope for new practices that allow people with different basic
metaphors to come into relationships of common understanding and mutual
appreciation. Events have also made the difficulties clear: faiths are so often
understood as irreconcilable opposites, ultimate choices, reasons to go to war.
In 1994, Ann was concerned to present the basic idea of philosophy for children
to a skeptical world: much of her writing is introductory exposition of basic
approaches. What is missing is an appropriately detailed discussion of how one
can approach religious material in classroom discussion without trivializing
it. People’s commitment to religious metaphors is supported by the experience
of their lives, by the examples that hold them up as people. It is not a matter
of giving (and countering) simple reasons, and the discussions are not quick. A
model that works well for concepts quite distant from the core values and core
identities of participants may need revolutionary adaptation to address closely
held beliefs that define who these people are. We need more experience and more
honest experiments to make good on what Ann promised in 1994.
Philosophy for children practice exemplifies
central concepts used in religious contexts.
In some of her work, Sharp suggests a friendly
and complementary way of building bridges between religious practice and the
practice of philosophy for children:
classroom dialogue
sometimes gives content to notions that are important in religious contexts,
without competing with or replacing religious practice. The classroom can
become one more field of action in which religious concepts are rediscovered
and put into practice: “The enterprise comes to be characterized by hope – hope
that the dialogue itself will enable participants to transcend their diverse
perspectives without sacrificing the richness and the uniqueness of each of the
world-views shared. Participants seem to be willing to work together, to work
creatively with rules, and to consciously create an ambiance of trust,
openness, and wonder. A certain quality of agape or love seems to develop with
time.” (, “The Aesthetic Dimension of the Community of Inquiry,” (Inquiry:
Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, Autumn 1997)73)
In “The Community
of Inquiry as Ritual Participation” (in Children Philosophize Worldwide,
Frankfurt, 2009), Sharp uses the notion of ritual, understood in a Confucian
way, to explain the framework within which classroom philosophy sessions
proceed. One can take this as a suggestion about how a notion that has its
usual home in religious contexts is enlivened and exercised by other uses.
Philosophy for children is a particular form of
religious activity.
In some of her
writing, Sharp goes beyond recognizing common features in religious and
philosophical practice to claim philosophic discussions as sacred space (“The
Sacred-As-Relationship in the Community of Inquiry” in Philosophy on Top of the
World (proceedings of a conference in Iceland in 1997): “John Dewey made a very
suggestive remark in his work A Common Faith that each time a community
gets together to engage in deliberation, active inquiry into matters of
importance, they are engaging in a ritual, a ritual that celebrates the ideals
of goodness, truth, and beauty. These ideals do not exist somewhere in another
world but are human projections that regulate our inquiry and motivate us to
move the actual (that which is) to what we think “ought to be,” a world in
which the ideals are incarnate. This movement towards the ideal is God,
or, better yet, what Mary Daly calls “godding.” (9) She quotes with admiration
Eva, a Brazilian student, “Couldn’t God also be a relationship? I mean, perhaps
it is like friendship. Once you have a friendship, you act very differently and
the world even looks different.” This direction, naming the working philosophy
classroom as sacred space, as a manifestation of God, is one that clearly
appeals to Sharp as a way of re-animating religious practice in an American
context.
This line of
thought complicates any discussion of the relationship between philosophy for
children and religious content. There is, in the 1994 Religious Dimension
paper, a fairly clear line on how to understand this relationship: religious
claims are metaphors that make broad sense of human beings’ place in the world.
They can be criticized for adequacy, as any metaphor can be criticized, within
the normal practices of classroom philosophy. This new article suggests that
philosophy for children itself embodies a religious metaphor, an ideal of human
life, an experience of the sacred – one that could be, in principle, in
conflict with other such metaphors. This was surely the kind of scandal that
Lipman was so careful to avoid giving in his choice of material for the novels
and in his early presentation of the program. Sharp’s attraction to this way of
understanding philosophic practice opens a very important (and somewhat
dangerous) line of inquiry for the philosophy for children movement, as that
movement approaches religiously committed parents and communities as a possible
component of their children’s education. Lipman had a clear answer to the
question, “Is this program just religious instruction by another name?”
-- something like, “No, this is a collection of generally respected
skills that have been found useful in inquiry over 2500 years.” Sharp’s
remarks in the Deweyan direction require a much more complex treatment of that
question.
This idea of the
place of philosophy for children is most powerfully expressed in the
posthumously published paper, “In the Beginning Was the Deed: Empowering
Children’s Spiritual Consciousness.” There, Sharp argues that philosophy for
children presents children who can no longer believe in God with an alternative
point of access to values which have long been honored in religious myth and
practice: “Dispensing with God does not have to mean dispensing with
spirituality.”
The classroom community of inquiry is a living
work of art.
The paper, “The
Aesthetic Dimension of the Community of Inquiry,” gives some insight into
Sharp’s thinking on questions of aesthetics. Her approach is striking. She
doesn’t write about the ways in which one might address aesthetic claims in a
philosophy discussion – the community of inquiry taking on the view that the
Mona Lisa is a great painting or that Warhol’s soup cans aren’t art. Rather,
she discusses the formation of the discussion as creating a work of art,
subject to the critical categories appropriate to works of art, and offering
the kind of satisfaction that a work of art provides: “The community of
inquiry, at its best, offers an immersion in aesthetic experience that can
serve as a funded experience in envisioning new possibilities and in making
decisions. The sensitivity, the appreciative discerning of parts and wholes,
the imaginative manipulation of elements to construct something of harmony and
vision, will be dependent on the consciousness and quality of this immersion.”
(68) Later, she gives an example of how this aesthetic understanding and
aesthetically sensitive construction might manifest themselves in discussion:
“If we attend carefully we can observe that the reasoning that takes place in
such a group is a narrative exploration that is guided by the principle of continuity.
Not only is there continuity between the remarks but there is an effort to
actively construct some continuity among views. This group work necessitates a
certain de-centering from the ego and a simultaneous focusing on the inquiry
itself. One finds that each participant builds on the ideas of others and some
participants begin to envision new possibilities for solutions of problems
under discussion. A dramatic rehearsal seems to be taking place in which each
of the students is imaginatively trying out solutions and testing their
consequences with participants of the group. Imaginative empathy grows as the
dialogue attempts to bring different perspectives into some kind of balance or
harmony. Reading faces becomes as important as attending to words.” 72-3 For
Ann, aesthetic values are enacted as well as discussed in philosophy
discussions; they describe the form within which a satisfying discussion
proceeds.
Sharp also uses
aesthetic language to explain the ultimate goal of moral education in the 1983 article,
“Education: A Philosophical Journey (Studies in Formative Spirituality,
November 1983). After arguing for extensive skill building though reasoned
discussion, as a pre-requisite for mature moral life, she describes the desired
result: “Ultimately, a moral education should render children capable of
thinking for themselves in a way that constitutes a harmonious whole. One’s
actions should be right aesthetically as well as morally. Happiness then is the
reward of right action, a reward that is intrinsic to itself. People do not do
the right thing for praise or some other reward. They act in a certain way, as
Wittgenstein says, because it fits who they are and is consistent
with their own values.” 361 For Sharp, one language for explaining the ideals
of classroom discussion and of life-building through philosophic education is
language usually applied to works of art: the formation of rich and harmonious
wholes.
Ann Sharp finds a power in philosophic
discussion with children that reminds her of what she valued in her long
engagement with Christian practice, as a devout child trying to be good, and as
an undergraduate in a series of religious schools, teaching in other religious
religious schools. As she admits in her autobiographical interview, she came to
see philosophy and religion as different languages. Her professional and
personal energy were firmly committed to philosophy, and her feminist and
environmental reflections made her aware of the limits of religious images and
institutions as inspiration for needed social change. When she writes that
secular human beings are unable to believe in the old manner, to take the
idea of a transcendent God seriously, it seems likely that she is also
reflecting on her own distance from the faith of her youth and adolescence.
In Sharp’s writing on religious topics, she says
various things. Some of her writing is very much in the spirit of Matthew
Lipman’s 1984 paper emphasising the value of philosophic training for getting
at the meanings of religious texts. To go beyond dogma and blind faith to a
living relation with the tradition, to bring religion into dialogue with
everyday life, one must do just the kind of alert, critical work that
philosophy for children teaches and encourages. Further, to come to some
understanding of religious ideals of intimate community and intense
engagement with the world, one needs experience with all manner of serious
attempts to live well and thoughtfully, and philosophic engagement can provide
such experience. So, in much of what Sharp writes, philosophy for children is
positioned as a valuable complement to religious practice, as it was imagined
to be complementary by those medieval thinkers that Sharp so much admired.
In other writings, drawing on Dewey, Sharp
explores the idea that philosophic practice can fill the role of religious
practice, that the classroom can become sacred space. I think this writing has
to be read partly in a personal way, as reflecting Sharp’s increasing distance
from the piety of her early years. She is looking for a spiritual home, for a
replacement for what she has lost, and philosophy for children is a promising
candidate. Beyond that, she is seeking some way to give those for whom “God is
dead,” to whom traditional religious practice is no longer relevant, some way
of being spiritual - accessing those conceptions, practices, and experiences
that have been central to Sharp’s formation. Again, philosophy for children
seems a promising direction to explore. It solves both a personal and a societal
problem.
One might think, encountering Sharp’s most
enthusiastic recommendations of the philosophy classroom as sacred space, that
she is recommending a new religion that must be in competition with other
religious practice. I think that would be a mistake: she, like Lipman,
recommends a family of practices that have the power to enliven children’s
thinking about aspects of their religious traditions that are often cold and
dead for them, to make the claims of religion interesting and relevant. Sharp’s
philosophic training did her that service, and she is passing on what she has
learned. That she came to assign to philosophic practice a supreme importance,
and to withdraw from the traditions that she once embraced, is important in her
biography, but it is not central to understanding how philosophy may be of use
in religious education.
One must also remember the tentativeness and
playfulness of these essays. Sharp is trying out various ways of understanding
what happens in the philosophy classroom. It is natural to think of the ideal
classroom discussion as embodying something like agape, the highest kind of
love and respect. It is also natural to imagine the classroom as a performative
space where a powerful work of art comes into being through the independent
contributions of many people. There are perhaps other good metaphors. It would
run totally counter to Sharp’s deepest commitments to take any metaphor as
absolute or exclusive.
I see the problem of risk, the problem of
fundamental opposition between philosophic practice in the classroom and the
reality of some religious faith, in other directions. The problem is not that
philosophy is some kind of competing religion. It might be that, for some
people, but it need not be. The problem is that basic features of philosophic
practice may leave no space for serious religious talk. In the second part of
this introduction, I want to give space to that worry.
How Religious
Commitments Enter into Classroom Discussion
In the paper, “Is
There an Essence to Education?” (Journal of Moral Education, October 1986,
reprinted here), Sharp defends the claim that it is at least a necessary
condition for education, and perhaps its essence, that “children become
conscious of themselves in relationship to the other people in their world.”
Such consciousness requires imaginative engagement with other people’s
views and the testing of possibilities within a classroom community of inquiry.
She describes a conversation about friendship in which children propose several
promising accounts, construct counter-examples to each account, and decide, at
the end, to leave all the accounts on the board as part of the meaning of
friendship, while acknowledging that none of them is without problems. They
feel at the end that they have made progress: thinking of these accounts and
finding difficulties with them. The discussion is a fine example of what
happens in a good, long-enough philosophy for children session.
I agree with Sharp
that the discussion she describes is valuable and that it makes an
important contribution to the education of the children. It is, however, a
particular conversation, in two ways. The topic is friendship, a relationship
that most of the students have experienced and observed in many forms. They
will have no trouble evaluating the claims or the counter-examples from their
own experience, from the experience of their friends, or from easily imagined
variants of stories with which they are familiar. And friendship is a public
topic: it is only possible because people have some broad agreement about what
it is. This group’s very permissive account is not just interesting conceptual
work; it also affirms the possibility of a variety of relationships that matter
to people. The discussion makes the world safe for many kinds of friendship. It
is almost an agreement: we will allow this sort of exception to our general
expectations.
So, there seems to
be no problem with the claim that education regarding friendship happens in the
way described. I have some worries about the generalization of that claim: “It
is a mistake to think that there is a necessary dichotomy between the
development of individual identity, individual thoughts, individual styles, and
the community of inquiry. On the contrary, it is through the community of
inquiry that children come to express their views, develop their own ideas
about the world and share an experience in which they are accepted by
others.”(192) What about the situation in which a child’s experience is far
enough removed from that of others that they have no way of sharing that
experience briefly in a community of inquiry discussion? Consider for example
the child who is a devout Baptist because his aunt is a devout Baptist, and
what he admires about his aunt is intricately connected to her being Baptist.
He sees his best hope of being like her in trying to also be a good Baptist. If
he says only, “I am Baptist because my aunt is a Baptist and she is a good
person,” there are many reasonable rejoinders: good people can have false
beliefs, perhaps the aunt is a good person for reasons unconnected to her being
Baptist, lots of people are good without being Baptist. However, if he goes on
to explain how she goes about being Baptist, in what ways he wants to be like
her, how it seems that the Baptist faith helps him to be like her, he uses lots
more than his share of air time. The unspoken constraint in philosophy for
children discussions is that reasons need to be brief, and counter-examples
need to be brief. Otherwise, the requirement of equal access cannot be met. But
if one knows that one’s full reason for some conviction involves quite a long
story, and a story that contains features quite peculiar to one’s own
experience, one may not be helped to individuality by locating oneself within a
community of inquiry. One does not promote autonomy by telling someone: you may
entertain any belief that you can explain and defend briefly in terms that
other children will understand.
The situation is
worse for a child who believes that God told her something. How should a child
make other children understand that her world includes an extra person whose
promptings she does not feel entitled to ignore? If the child feels a call to a
committed, celibate religious life, what possibility is there for the child to
locate her decision in relation to the decisions of other children? (In the
1960s, about 25% of the graduates of a St. Paul, Minnesota girls school entered
the religious novitiate; this is not a fanciful case.)
Of course, for the
sanity and safety of children, one hopes that they inhabit a world in which
they have enough in common with other children that they can develop shared
concepts through the community of inquiry and can find their place in relationship
to others. As Ann says, “Each child in the community, in his or her own way is
trying to make sense of the world. Further, it is a great burden to expect
children to do this on their own.” (192) But we must allow for the possibility
that children may sometimes have to make sense of the world on their own
because the presuppositions and conditions of the community of inquiry do not
allow them to adequately express or defend their convictions.
I think this point
applies to more than just religious views, though the problem comes up most
remarkably with those. Lots of convictions in human life are rooted in long
stories of relationships and observed lives. One says: “I want to be like my
father” or “I’ll do anything to avoid turning out like my father,” and there’s
a story behind that: a story that could be told, only not in a classroom with
20 children all needing a chance to talk within an hour’s class time.
Why not say
something important but modest about philosophy for children: it is a way of thinking
through some important concepts, to help children come to know themselves
through their relationships to others? This is one important way that they come
to know themselves and to develop their autonomy. It is a particularly
useful way, because it enables communities to maintain practices that
contribute to everyone’s welfare: friendship, fairness, loyalty.
Thirty years ago,
when I was working actively at a local elementary school, I took on an intern
to conduct some extra sessions. I gave him strict instructions to stick to the
stories provided and to observe the ritual of philosophy for children
discussion. I learned later that he had taken it upon himself to challenge
directly the religious convictions of students in a way that endangered both my
program in the school and the careers of those who had supported me. At that
point, it was enough to tell him that he had made a bad strategic mistake. But
I wanted to say more: he had made also a philosophic mistake. This sort of
position cannot be addressed by simply raising objections and considering
arguments pro and con. A whole different approach is needed.
That was also
brought home to me, somewhat later, when I interviewed an intelligent and
charismatic spiritual healer from Australia. During the interview, she
explained that part of her own journey was to return to her aboriginal
community of origin after a western education and to make contact with the
ancestors and spirit guides, some thousands of years old. In passing, she
added, “Only five or six of them come with me for most speaking engagements,
but when I come to America, all twenty want to come along.” I realized that,
for her, the room contained twenty more people than I could see, and the fact
that I could not see them did not, for her, count against the claim that they
were present. We moved on, in the interview.
It was natural for
Ann Sharp, in the early years of her work with philosophy for children, to want
it to solve the full range of educational problems, to address the needs of the
world for mature and intelligent leadership. As I consider ways of scaling back
the claims that Sharp makes for this practice, I am brought up short when I
remember that, in my own community, children are being recruited as suicide
bombers, children are being lured into cults, children are developing
idiosyncratic mythologies that move them toward terrifying destructive acts.
Without some forum for discussing what people care about most, what people are
willing to give their lives for, I don’t see any way to help such children. At
the same time, I cannot share Sharp’s optimism that the standard practices of
philosophy for children, the customary classroom ritual, will bring about a
transcultural consciousness, an ability to place one’s own commitments within
the human community of diverse commitments. One might hope that the habits of
reflective evaluation, developed through weekly philosophic conversations on
relatively safe matters of common concern, will be internalized in the way
children talk to themselves about matters they may not be willing or able to
share in public. Surely, philosophy provides better support for those facing
religious decisions and crises (the young Muslim considering joining ISIS, for
example) than most of what happens in elementary and secondary schools. At the
same time, it seems clear to me that some substantial new experiments are
needed to find ways of respectfully addressing the deeper concerns and
convictions of children.
In the article
“Silence and Speech in Pixie,” (Studies in Philosophy for Children: Pixie,
1996), Sharp comes close to addressing this point. She also shows how the novel
Pixie implicitly makes space for a kind of individual development
that does not take place through conversation or through the individual
locating himself or herself in relationship to others. Pixie contains a
very talkative girl, the title character, and a boy, Brian, who does not speak
until the end of the story. Ann’s article is a long list of the possible
reasons why someone might choose not to speak. As one might expect, some of
these identify deficiencies or harms, conditions that need to be corrected: the
child has never been listened to, has been oppressed. A working community of
inquiry can draw a child with these deficiencies into the common world and the
common conversation. Ann suggests that Brian may simply use other modes of
communication besides speech to enter into the dialogue. He may simply be a
non-standard member of the community of inquiry. But Ann also lists some other
possibilities, not fully fleshed out, but enticing: his silence may be a
religious response to the world, akin to that of Christian monks, a silence
growing out of a sense of language as an inadequate response to the world. She
also considers the idea of silence as conscience, as a state of being so
attentive to the world that there is no room for speech.
These possibilities suggest a limit to the claims for community of
inquiry as the source of autonomy and the place where meaning is discovered. It
seems to me important to develop these suggestions, to come to a broader view
of education within which the community of inquiry is one important element in
education for meaning making and for autonomy, suitable for many children with
respect to many aspects of their lives, but not a universal path to
fulfillment. This opens up the possibility of seeking out partners in other
pedagogical movements, to gradually realize the potential of democratic
education, of education aimed at individual autonomy, across the full spectrum
of human concern.
