“All men are philosophers” – Antonio Gramsci
“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.” – Simone Weil
The name of the program “philosophy for children” raises rather interesting questions. For instance, why is it we don’t have–and one has never so much as heard of–a “philosophy for adults,” as if somehow it is merely assumed that philosophy falls within the purview of adults? Quite the contrary. As Dr. Jackson of Philosophy for Children Hawaii has said, “philosophy is what we are all born with, and anybody that’s around young children knows we come into this world filled with a sense of wonder, and we ask these amazing wonderful questions. For most of us, sadly, we lose that sense of wonder as we go along …”[1] This is consistent with what philosophies and philosophers, from as ancient a provenance as Aristotle to as late as Russell and Chomsky today, have held. As Aristotle said, philosophy begins in wonder. One might even be so hopelessly sanguine as to believe that it ends there too, if ever it ends at all. Yet in any case, it is wonder, wonder which is the natural predilection of the child. But Dr. Jackson also goes on to say that children lose this sense of wonder as they go along. Albert Einstein, himself rather disenchanted with the way “education” was offered in his own time, rather ruefully remarked, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education,” and further expressing his dissatisfaction, said, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” This is no mere accident.
Noam Chomsky, who has delivered perhaps the most salient and radical contemporary critique of education[2] suggests, “A lot of the educational system is … designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on.”[3] Chomsky isn’t alone in this either. On the issue of how schools all too often kill creativity, Sir Ken Robinson, whose talk on education is the single most viewed video of all TED talks,[4] is of a similar mind. He cites a longitudinal study which actually comes as close as one might suppose is possible to actually proving that schools kill creativity. By measuring “divergent thinking,” closely linked to creativity, the study found a sharp decline as students grow older. Robinson attributes this steep decline in divergent thinking to “education”:
We’re penalizing [students] now for getting distracted–from what? Boring stuff … It seems to me it’s not a coincidence, totally, that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing … We are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them and I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn’t be putting them to sleep; we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves. But the model we have is this. I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interest of industrialism and in the image of it. I’ll give you an example. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines — ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches … It’s essentially about conformity and increasingly it’s about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula and it’s about standardization. I believe we’ve got to go in the exact opposite direction.[5]
Boredom is a topic which receives remarkably little attention for all its contemporary salience. It continues to plague our schools and belie no small portion of their difficulties, yet hardly an educator or education reformer is to be heard so much as mentioning something so obvious as this. Yet it is not just common sense. Our own local data has shown that students skip school, in large part, because it is boring.[6] This is nothing new either. As early as 1916, Bertrand Russell was writing that:
Spontaneous and disinterested desire for knowledge is not at all uncommon in the young, and might be easily aroused in many in whom it remains latent. But it is remorselessly checked by teachers who think only of examinations, diplomas, and degrees. For the abler boys, there is no time for thought, no time for the indulgence of intellectual taste, from the moment of first going to school until the moment of leaving the university. From first to last there is nothing but one long drudgery of examination tips and textbook facts.[7]
One only wonders what Russell would have made of the current obsession with ‘testing and accountability,’ which, for its contemporary relevance, deserves some of our attention here. NCLB, passed under the Bush administration with bipartisan support in 2002, adheres strictly to the doctrine of testing and accountability. According to those who hold these beliefs, we can make our schools better and our students smarter by testing them more, holding teachers more accountable by evaluating them, making it easier for principals to fire them, and harshly sanctioning schools that fail to meet its standards–in short, running schools more like factories. It is all well and good, with one minor problem, which happens to be reality. There is virtually no data to support these theories, and in fact, much of the “research” upon which the testing and accountability doctrine is based was recently shown to be totally flawed. A good deal of this work, for example, was done by Stanford researcher Eric Hanushek, who has argued that four years of consecutive good teaching can eliminate any trace of socio-economic advantage. But Anthony Cody in The Atlantic writes,
the real world is proving to be a difficult place for Hanushek’s theories to be verified. No school has ever replicated the results predicted by his […] theory. In fact, there is no real research to support the idea that we can improve student achievement this way—it is all based on extrapolations. And in fact, new data shows that in the three large urban school districts where these reforms have been given full rein, the results are actually worse … [8]
It is not surprising, then, that respected education scholar Diane Ravitch should write, “Because of its utopian goals, coupled with harsh sanctions, NCLB has turned out to be the worst federal education legislation ever passed.”[9] Because the vast majority of the nation’s schools have been labeled failures, the Obama administration has offered to grant waivers–on the condition that the state adopt its preferred remedies: privately managed charter schools, evaluations of teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores, acceptance of a recently developed set of national standards in reading and mathematics, and agreement to fire the staff and close the schools that have persistently low scores. Of these Ravitch writes, “None of the Obama administration’s favored reforms—remarkably similar to those of the Bush administration—is supported by experience or evidence.”[10]
In fact, the kind of overemphasis on testing and teacher evaluations that NCLB encourages has been shown to narrow the curriculum, and the Common Core standards which the Obama administration is urging school districts to adopt has never been field-tested. Mari Matsuda, Professor of Law at UH Richardson, and one of the most respected scholars of law in the nation, suggests “Test-driven, rote curriculum does not work. It is embittering teachers and forcing them to abandon innovation to chase scores.”[11] Indeed, Finland, which consistently ranks among the best in the world on international tests, doesn’t have standardized tests at all, and has very strong teachers unions (100% unionized)–but its child poverty rate is less than 3%, while in the U.S., it is 20% and growing.[12] And if one should require evidence that poverty plays an overwhelmingly important role, one might–aside from reviewing the vast literature on this–simply look at the United States, or the half which seems to count: the children of the affluent in the U.S. are not only not-behind the rest of the world, but even outperforms it, including Finland.[13] To summarize what research suggests, then, the doctrine of testing and accountability, which is advocated by liberals and conservatives alike, not only doesn’t work, but as in the case of Finland, what works is the exact opposite of the principles upon which the doctrine is based.
Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an alternative to the doctrine of standards and accountability, and P4C does work. In an issue of the Journal of the College of Education at the University of Hawaii, Philosophy for Children is very explicitly conceptualized as an alternative to the failure of NCLB and the dismal doctrine attached to it. In their article, Amber Makaiau and Chad Miller, two Hawaii public school teachers who are also strong advocates for Philosophy for Children, write critically of testing and accountability:
The concentration on standards and high stakes testing has had a tremendous and negative impact on classroom pedagogy. Teachers, who are under pressure to prepare students to successfully pass state examinations, have altered and developed their instruction to focus on “end products” or what their students should be able to know or do on the state assessment. In this school culture of testing, learning has become synonymous with passing “the test” and the profession of teaching has been changed. Pedagogically, educators have moved from teaching critical thinking as an integral aspect of the learning process, to efficiently providing their students with the knowledge to pass a series of exams.[14]
It is not as if they do not know whereof they speak either: Chad Miller was Hawaii’s 2012 Teacher of the Year. In contrast to the doctrine of standards and accountability, Philosophy for Children is a Dewey-inspired program which marries philosophy with meaningful education, implicitly acknowledging thereby the historical connection of the two from as early as Plato, the footnotes to whose work, claimed the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, constituted the whole of Western Philosophy. In the West, education is a question for philosophy from as early as Plato to Dewey and Russell and Friere to as late as Noam Chomsky and Cornel West today. Plato not only wrote on education extensively, but was the founder of the West’s first academy. So in a sense, the West’s first proper philosopher was also its first schoolmaster. Plato’s student Aristotle was also a schoolmaster, as was G.W.F. Hegel, whom many would argue is the greatest philosopher in history. All of this is simply to say that the marriage of philosophy and education is nothing new; it is as old as philosophy itself. John Dewey, upon whose work Philosophy for Children is based, even goes so far as to say that “philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education.”[15]
According to its website, “P4C converts traditional classrooms into reflective communities of inquiry where students and teachers continue to develop their ability to think for themselves in responsible ways.”[16] It has been implemented on a wide scale at Waikiki Elementary and at Kailua High School. Chad Miller, who was also the 2012 teacher of the year, and is a member of the P4C Council, revealed when interviewed what the secret behind his teaching success had been: “My secret is that we use philosophy. We actually do philosophy. We have the kids sit in a circle, we read something, and we talk about it. That’s pretty much my secret.”[17] As research has consistently shown that student disengagement (I.e. boredom, alienation, etc.) is one of the primary causes of misbehavior, perhaps something as simple as sitting in a circle and talking about and listening to ideas can go a long way.
Philosophy for Children, moreover, is eminently compatible with HIDOE’s own General Learner Outcomes, the guiding principles, as it were, of the whole enterprise. It hardly requires comment how the program fulfills, for instance, being a self-directed learner, community contributor, complex thinker, quality producer, and effective communicator. Surely Philosophy for Children more closely aligns with these stated goals than the doctrine of testing and accountability, which should hardly fool anyone as passing for complex thinking, if for real thinking at all. The program has even gained the accolades of His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself.[18]
A caveat must yet be made: the kind of philosophy that the program does has little to do with the abstract speculations that professional philosophers do in academic departments (aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, ethics, etc.). This is what the folks at P4C call “big-P Philosophy.” Rather the students in P4C practice little-p philosophy, emphasizing the methods and skills of philosophy rather than its canonical content (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc., etc.). Instead of studying such age-old questions as “what is real?” or “how do we know that we know things?” or “what is the Good,” students study subjects relevant to their own lives. The little-p ideal of philosophy for children bears a remarkable similitude to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it. It was Marx long before Dewey who poured scorn on the abstract speculations of the idealists, perhaps most manifestly realized in the philosophy of Plato, whose scorn for the physical world was peerless, and whose philosophy (to say nothing of the philosophy it engendered) all too easily became the preserve of academic specialists in their comfortable university enclaves–all the more tragic given that Plato’s teacher Socrates philosophized as we might say today ‘in the streets,’ whose philosophy was deeply rooted in the everyday lives of everyday people
If in the Platonic tradition, philosophy is married with education, then in the Socratic tradition, philosophy is married with democratic critique, and to raise Socratic questions means to ask the critical, uncomfortable, even ugly questions. Let us not forget that Socrates was sentenced to death by the state, in part for corrupting the youth of Athens. Cornel West, who is the closest we have to a modern-day Socrates, suggests:
The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says in line 38A of the Apology. How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions–and begin then to become a different kind of person? … [P]hilosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy–trying to keep alive very fragile democratic experiments–in the face of structures of domination.[19]
And this kind of philosophy is needed now more than ever. So deeply impoverished is our public discourse that we can hardly discuss even the most straightforward of affairs–including education itself, or the basics of what it means to have meaningful democracy, or equality. Furthermore, to the extent that discourse even exists, there is also a good deal of backwardness in it, when, for instance, a corporation (a.k.a. not a real human being) is spoken of as a legal human being whereas an immigrant (a.k.a. a real human being) does not count as a legal human being. This is even more muddled when we consider the exception to this rule. Immigrants count as legal human beings when it comes to taxing them like real human beings, but corporations do not. The business interest, which represents a fraction of a fraction of the population, is called the ‘national interest,’ while ‘special interest’ is reserved for such scoundrels as labor unions, the poor, the elderly, women, minorities, and the working classes–who happen to constitute the vast majority of the population. And the list of doublespeak extends endlessly: efficiency, freedom, defense, socialism, democracy, so on and so forth. In such circumstances as these, philosophy, critical thinking, the ability to stop and reflect, to share and engage in the spirit of understanding, could not be more urgently necessary.
Now more than ever we need to be able to ask the probing questions: do we have a democracy, or a meaningful one? What is democracy? If a democracy consists in a bi-annual process of checking off a box at a local poll and then waiting again for the next chance to ratify choices presented to you, then arguably we have a very bad democracy. In 2010, for example, 56% of registered voters in Hawaii turned out to the polls, among the lowest turnout rates in the country.[20] If democracy means substantive civic engagement, and includes the extent to which the public can meaningfully influence policy, then we are even worse off. The data are not too encouraging here either. In the 2000 elections, a report by the Vanishing Voter Project at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University) found that 75% of the population found the election to be a large game constructed by large contributors (overwhelmingly corporations), party leaders, and the PR industry.[21] Or consider, for example, that while Congress’s approval ratings are extremely low, it continues to have an usually high retention rate. What does this tell us but that voters are voting for choices they don’t like? Though in Hawaii, public opinion is not as extensively researched as national data, even the best indication we do have of public satisfaction with its own government, the governor’s approval ratings, are rather disheartening: at 30% in October 2011, the governor had the lowest approval ratings in the nation–which is not at surprising given the low voter turnout.[22] Nor is it surprising given that State Integrity Investigation, a project of the Center for Public Integrity and others, gives Hawaii a “D” grade for “Public Access to Information.”[23] If it is the case that we do not have any sort of meaningful democracy–and this is probably a qualitative judgement, though the data do help tell part of the story–the need for philosophy, for critical thinking, for deep and committed engagement, could not be more urgent. Such a commitment, moreover, must be initiated from as early on as possible. It is unsurprising, given the way we currently “education” our children, that we should have a defunctory democracy. Our mode of education encourages such a politics. In our schools, children are expected to be passive observers as opposed to actively engaged constructors of meaning, so it shouldn’t be surprising that later in life, they play the role of the observer in the political sphere. Indeed for John Dewey, upon whose philosophy the P4C program is based, democracy is more than a political exercise; it is a way of life. Betraying his deep Deweyite sentiments, Dr. Jackson suggests of P4C: “This seemingly innocuous activity —of taking turns, choosing topics, asking questions, taking votes, assessing our progress—is part of learning democracy.”[24] So if we are to have a true democracy, then we must have children who have made democracy, with its active engagement, with its deep respect for others, with its weighty sense of responsibility, a way of life.
If I am guilty of granting too much to thought and to the power of individual judgement and to what Emerson calls ‘self-reliance,’ it is because I believe, like Emerson, that “The root & seed of democracy is the doctrine Judge for yourself.”[25] In the spirit of the epigraph by Simone Weil quoted at the head of this essay, we might say that the critical and independent mind is indispensable to democracy. Where it is lacking there is no real democracy, only a poor caricature of democracy. It is the fire of the critical spirit that democracy lives on, and it is this which philosophy enkindles. We need philosophy now more than ever. We need real, meaningful education now more than ever. With philosophy for children, we might begin to substantively address such needs. Not least, it is a local program which has been shown to be, more than effective, meaningful. May we look at the best of what we’re doing, improve it, develop it more broadly, and improve it some more.
[2] For example, the first line of an interview: “Daniel Falcone for Truthout: I wanted to ask you some questions about education in the 21st century. Chomsky: Not sure the topic exists.” in Daniel Falcone, ‘Chomsky on Education and Democracy in the 21st Century,’ Truthout, 01 June 2013, Online: <http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16651-noam-chomsky-on-democracy-and-education-in-the-21st-century-and-beyond>
[3] Noam Chomsky, ‘Education is Ignorance,’ excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31. Online: <http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm>
[4] Generating 8.6 million views by 2011. Cf. http://blog.ted.com/2011/06/27/the-20-most-watched-tedtalks-so-far/
[5] Sir Ken Robinson qtd. in Maria Popova, ‘Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Changing Educational Paradigms,’ Bring Pickings, via Open Culture, Online: <http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/10/21/sir-ken-robinson-rsa/>
[6] Meda Chesney-Lind, “Arrest Trends, Gang Involvement, and Truancy in Hawaii:An Interim Report to the Twenty-Second Hawaii State Legislature,” Center for Youth Research, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Publication No. 417, February 2004. Online: <http://www.publicpolicycenter.hawaii.edu/images/PDF/gang04_1.pdf>
[7] Bertrand Russell, ‘Education’ in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961, p.409
[8] Cf. Anthony Cody, ‘Poverty is What’s Crippling Public Education in the U.S.–Not Bad Teachers,’ The Atlantic, 19 July 2013, Online: <http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/07/poverty-whats-crippling-public-education-usnot-bad-teachers/6264/>
[9] Diane Ravitch, ‘School “Reform”: A Failing Grade,’ The New York Review of Books, 29 September 2009. Online: <www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/?pagination=false&printpage=true>
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mari Matsuda, ‘The Value of Hawaii: Public Education,’ Honolulu Civil Beat, 20 September 2010. Online: <http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2010/09/20/4441-the-value-of-hawaii-public-education-by-mari-matsuda/>
[12] Diane Ravitch interviewed by Jon Stewart, Online: <http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch>
[13] Ibid., see also Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2010. Print
[14] Amber Makaiau and Chad Miller, ‘The Philosopher’s Pedagogy,’ Educational Perspectives, Vol.44, No.1&2, University of Hawaii, College of Education, 2012. p.16
[15] John Dewey, qtd. in Amber Makaiau and Chad Miller, ‘The Philosopher’s Pedagogy,’ Educational Perspectives, Vol.44, No.1&2, University of Hawaii, College of Education, 2012. p.14
[17] ‘Hawaii’s 2012 Teacher of the Year Revealed,’ KITV4 News, 29 October 2011, Online: <http://www.kitv.com/Hawaii-s-2012-Teacher-of-the-Year-Revealed/-/8906042/5616462/-/l30br5/-/index.html>
[18] Don Chapman, ‘Aloha, Dalai Lama,’ Midweek, 12 April 2012, Online: <www.midweek.com/aloha-dalai-lama/>
[19] Examined Life. Dir. Astra Taylor. Perf. Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, and Judith Butler. Zeitgeist Films, n.d. DVD.
[20] ‘Hawaii Voter Turnout and Registration 2012,’ Honolulu Civil Beat, Online: <http://www.civilbeat.com/topics/hawaii-voter-turnout-and-registration-2012/>
[21] Cited in Noam Chomsky, ‘Elections 2000,’ Z Magazine, January 2001, Online: <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200101–.htm>
[22] The logic is simple: if voters don’t turnout to vote for the candidate they want, it is less likely they will approve of his or her performance. See ‘Abercrombie’s Job Approval Rating at Lowest Level for US Governors,’ Honolulu Star Advertiser, 21 October 2011, Online: <http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/132348438.html?id=132348438>
[23] State Integrity Investigation, Stateintegrity.org, Online: <http://www.stateintegrity.org/hawaii>
[24] Thomas Jackson, qtd. in Karen Gallagher, Honolulu Magazine, May 2011, Online: <www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/May-2011/The-Wonder-Years/>
[25] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 23 November 1834
Essays 