In 1972, Matthew Lipman founded the Institute of Advancement for Philosophy for Children (IAPC), producing a series of novels and teaching manuals promoting philosophical inquiry at all levels of schooling. The programme consisted of stories about children discussing traditional topics of ethics, values, logic, reality, perception, and politics, as they related to their own daily experiences. Philosophy for Children has been adapted beyond the IAPC texts, but the process remains one of an open community of inquiry in which teachers promote respect, conceptual clarity, critical judgement, and active listening without imposing their own ideas.
Philosophy in Schools describes the successes and difficulties in implementing this community of inquiry model. The book covers topics including the formation of non-didactic courses in ethics, the difficulties of fitting a post-compulsory philosophy course into a standard curriculum framework, and the political assumptions of adopting this model in a low socio-economic school. The contributions also ask deeper questions about how a genuine community of inquiry model is incompatible with conventional models of schooling, with their positioning of the discipline of philosophy in the curriculum. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Introduction Felicity Haynes
1. Philosophy for Children, Values Education and the Inquiring Society Philip Cam
2. Philosophy and Ethics in Western Australian Secondary Schools Stephen Millett and Alan Tapper
3. That’s Not For Our Kids: The strange death of philosophy and ethics in a low socioeconomic secondary school Greg Thompson and Tomaž Lašič
4. Identifying a K-10 Developmental Framework for Teaching Philosophy Janette Poulton
5. Developing Democratic Dispositions and Enabling Crap Detection: Claims for classroom philosophy with special reference to Western Australia and New Zealand Leon Benade
6. Philosophy, Art or Pedagogy? How should children experience education? Christine Doddington
7. Kaupapa Māori, Philosophy and Schools Georgina Stewart
8. School and the Limits of Philosophy Peter Fitzsimons
9. Opening Teachers’ Minds to Philosophy: The crucial role of teacher education Sue Knight and Carol Collins
10. What is Philosophy for Children? From an educational experiment to experimental education Nancy Vansieleghem
Biography
Felicity Haynes is a retired Education researcher, who formerly taught at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Her research and teaching focuses on critical thinking, ethics, conceptual change, gender issues, and education. She founded the Association for Philosophy in Schools in 1987, and has been an active member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
"[T]he book provides interesting reflections about the role of philosophy in promoting freedom and in critically analyzing the rules established to ensure order. Philosophy can play an important role in the maintenance or in the subversion of social patterns and stratifications." - Independent Scholar and Member Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, February 2017
