SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.17sobre nascimentos e partos: derivas ético-política da figura do “proffesor-parteiro" na filosofia com/ para crianças.A infância e o (in)dizível: poder ubuesco, resistência e a possibilidade da justiça índice de autoresíndice de assuntospesquisa de artigos
Home Pagelista alfabética de periódicos  

Serviços Personalizados

Journal

Artigo

Compartilhar


Childhood & Philosophy

versão impressa ISSN 2525-5061versão On-line ISSN 1984-5987

child.philo vol.17  Rio de Janeiro  2021  Epub 18-Jul-2021

https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2021.61025 

Dossier Ethical Implications of Practicing Philosophy with Children and Adults: Irony, Misogyny and Narcissism on Debate

some ethical implications of practicing philosophy with children and adults

algumas implicações éticas de praticar filosofia com crianças e adultos

algunas implicaciones éticas de la práctica de la filosofía con niñas y niños, y personas adultas

Imontclair state university, montclair, new jersey, united states - E-mail: dkeleutheros@gmail.com

IIuniversidade do estado do rio de janeiro, rio de janeiro, brasil - E-mail: wokohan@gmail.com


resumo

Este artigo serve de introdução a um dossiê centrado nas implicações éticas da Prática da Filosofia com Crianças e com pessoas adultas. Identifica temas éticos no movimento FpC ao longo de três gerações de teóricos e praticantes, e argumenta que, histórica e materialmente, a transição para uma "nova" hermenêutica da infância que se produziu dentro do movimento FpC pode ser uma resposta à pressão sempre crescente do neoliberalismo e de um capitalismo armado para construir políticas públicas na educação sobre uma super-regulamentação. Um novo relacionamento com a infância poderia proporcionar a agenda ética e política que nossos tempos exigem para fazer filosofia com as crianças com integridade? Poderia uma escuta e uma abertura radical à infância - que tem sido uma característica intrínseca da pedagogia de FpC desde o início - sustentar o movimento através destes tempos sombrios? Finalmente, o texto apresenta um conjunto de artigos escritos em resposta a estas perguntas: Quais deveriam ser, se houver, os compromissos éticos do facilitador de FpC? A neutralidade política/ideológica é exigida do facilitador do FpC? A neutralidade política é possível? O que constitui doutrinação em ambientes educacionais? As crianças são mais vulneráveis à doutrinação do que os adultos e, em caso afirmativo, quais são as implicações desse fato para a prática de FpC? Quais são os usos do FpC no cenário ideológico dramaticamente polarizado em que vivemos atualmente? Quais, se houver, são as responsabilidades éticas de um professor ou professora envolvido em práticas filosóficas? As responsabilidades éticas do praticante filosófico são semelhantes ou diferentes quando os sujeitos são crianças ou adultos? Toda metodologia tem um "currículo oculto"? Se sim, o que é o currículo oculto do FpC? O que distingue a prática dialógica da prática monológica? Uma pode ter a aparência da outra? O "método socrático" (Elenchus), como o concebemos, é dialógico? Quais, se houver, são os usos da ironia na prática filosófica? Sócrates (ou qualquer outro filósofo) deve ser considerado um modelo para os praticantes de PpC?

palavras-chave: filosofia para crianças; ética; infância.

abstract

This paper acts as an introduction to a dossier centered on the ethical implications of Practicing Philosophy with Children and Adults. It identifies ethical themes in the P4C movement over three generations of theorists and practitioners, and argues that, historically and materially, the transition to a “new” hermeneutics of childhood that has occurred within the P4C movement may be said to have emerged as a response to the ever-increasing pressure of neoliberalism and a weaponized capitalism to construct public policies in education on an over-regulated, prescribed, state-monitored, model. Could a new relationship to childhood provide the ethical and political agenda that our times require for doing philosophy with children with integrity? Could a radical listening and openness to childhood-which has been an intrinsic confessional characteristic of P4C pedagogy from the beginning--sustain the movement through these dark times? Finally, the paper presents a set of articles written in response to these questions: What, if any, should the ethical commitments of the P4C facilitator be? Is political/ideological neutrality required of the P4C facilitator? Is political neutrality possible? What constitutes indoctrination in educational settings? Are children more vulnerable to indoctrination than adults, and if so, what are the implications of that fact for the practice of P4C? What are the uses of P4C in the dramatically polarized ideological landscape we currently inhabit? What, if any, are the ethical responsibilities of a teacher engaging in philosophical practice? Are the philosophical practitioner’s ethical responsibilities similar or different when the subjects are children or adults? Does every methodology have a “hidden curriculum”? If so, what is the hidden curriculum of P4C? What distinguishes dialogical from monological practice? May one have the appearance of the other? Is the “Socratic method” (Elenchus) as we conceive it dialogical? What, if any, are the uses of irony in philosophical practice? Should Socrates (or any other philosopher) be considered a model for P4C practitioners?

keywords: philosophy for children; ethics; childhood

resumen

Este artículo sirve de introducción a un dossier centrado en las implicaciones éticas de la Práctica de la Filosofía con niñas y niños, y personas adultas. Identifica temas éticos en el movimiento de la FpN a lo largo de tres generaciones de teóricos y practicantes, y argumenta que, histórica y materialmente, la transición a una "nueva" hermenéutica de la infancia que se ha producido dentro del movimiento de la FpN ha surgido como respuesta a la presión cada vez mayor del neoliberalismo y de un capitalismo armado para construir políticas públicas en educación sobre una base excesivamente regulada. ¿Podría una nueva relación con la infancia proporcionar la agenda ética y política que nuestro tiempo requiere para hacer filosofía con niñas y niños con integridad? ¿Podría una escucha y apertura radicales a la infancia -que ha sido una confesada característica intrínseca de la pedagogía de la FpN desde el principio- sostener el movimiento en estos tiempos oscuros? Por último, el documento presenta un conjunto de artículos escritos en respuesta a estas preguntas: ¿Cuáles deberían ser, en cada caso, los compromisos éticos del animador de FpN? ¿Es necesaria la neutralidad política/ideológica del facilitador de FpN? ¿Es posible la neutralidad política? ¿Qué es el adoctrinamiento en el ámbito educativo? ¿Son las niñas y niños más vulnerables al adoctrinamiento que los adultos y, en caso afirmativo, qué implicaciones tiene este hecho para la práctica de FpN? ¿Cuáles son los usos de FpN en el paisaje ideológico dramáticamente polarizado que habitamos actualmente? ¿Cuáles son, en su caso, las responsabilidades éticas de un docente que ejerce la práctica filosófica? ¿Son las responsabilidades éticas del practicante filosófico similares o diferentes cuando los sujetos son niñas y niños que cuando son adultos? ¿Tiene toda metodología un "currículo oculto"? Si es así, ¿cuál es el currículo oculto de FpN? ¿Qué distingue la práctica dialógica de la monológica? ¿Puede una tener la apariencia de la otra? ¿Es dialógico el "método socrático" (Elenchus) tal y como lo concebimos? ¿Cuáles son los usos de la ironía en la práctica filosófica? ¿Debe considerarse a Sócrates (o a cualquier otro filósofo) como un modelo para los practicantes de FpN?

palabras clave: filosofía para niños; ética; infancia.

some ethical implications of practicing philosophy with children and adults

Philosophy for/with children, a movement conceived within the emancipatory ferment of the 1960’s in the West, has experienced slow but steady growth over the course of the last half a century. Originating in the U.S. in Matthew Lipman’s initiative and expanding across the 70’s, it slowed with the ascendancy of neoliberalism in U.S. politics and education in 1980. The right wing’s technocratic creedal text, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform” (1983), effectively if implicitly categorized the practice of philosophizing with children as a “frill,” and it has been quietly, tacitly even, devalued by the state and suppressed by the religious right ever since. Ironically enough, the “risk” alluded to in 1980 was described as a technologically superior “unfriendly foreign power,” a threat that has proven to be spurious, while the risk of internal moral, ethical, class-based conflict and decline and the emergence of political fascism has not. Twenty percent of the U.S. population believes that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation, and that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” This being the case, one wonders, what would constitute a more effective inoculation against the risk of the rule of unreason-dialogical philosophical deliberation, in which the simple tools of critical thinking constitute the basic rules of the road, or a math, physics or chemistry course? Although both would be optimal, if one had to choose, which would it be?

However, and as if by some compensatory principle, even as P4C was quietly sidelined by dogged U.S. anti-intellectualism, cultural warfare and paranoid politics, the movement was growing and diversifying elsewhere around the planet, thanks in great part to the untiring efforts of co-founder Ann Sharp, to where it is now represented in some form in around 40 countries. That relatively rapid expansion over half a century, elapsing in the ever-accelerating tempo of the digital age, has tested the boundaries and even the definition of P4C as a practice, forcing it into a prolonged period of self-reflection; most particularly, reflection on the ethical and political implications of the practice of talking with children spontaneously, without a prepared script, about fundamental beliefs and persuasions, whether conscious or unconscious, about self, world, fairness, justice, purpose, rules, responsibility, good and evil, and so on; that is, in doing philosophy as a form of group deliberation set in an ideal speech situation as exemplified formally in Roberts Rules of Order, and non-formally in Habermasian discourse theory and Plato’s Socratic dialogues.

The hesitancy of the North Americans in adopting P4C may be attributed at least in part to the same fears expressed during the reign of the Values Clarification Movement (Raths, 2020), also of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which encouraged, albeit in a very different way, the frank expression of student belief. Both in that case and this it was the extreme value polarization that characterizes American cultural politics that led to charges by the Right of indoctrination and insidious relativism, and which became a major theme in philosophy of educational circles. Until recently, P4C had attempted to avoid direct confrontation with the troubling issue of educational indoctrination by identifying itself as a dialogical pedagogy, and furthermore as based entirely on the question rather than the statement. The movement understood itself as offering an emergent curriculum whose only indoctrinatory goal is an epistemological one: to foster in the young good thinking-or in Lipman’s term, “reasonableness,” which we may think of as an optimal combination of what he called “critical,” “creative” and “caring thinking.”

And indeed, philosophy-especially philosophy practiced as communal thinking in a co-constructed speech situation-has been an enemy of the Right since Socrates was issued a death sentence for “corrupting the youth” almost 2400 years ago. But more recently, that charge, or something like it, has been leveled by critics on the Left, who look beyond its self-positioning as value neutral and identify what they understand as a hidden curriculum that tends to silence, ignore or shy away from the interrogation of structural racism and neo-colonialism, patriarchy and androcentrism, structural poverty, climate change, gun violence and permanent war, and therefore, albeit passively, acts to interpellate the student into a ruthless, heedless and ultimately disastrous capitalist ideology. If capitalism is corrupting the youth and P4C is not clear and explicitly confronting capitalism, then what can we expect from it?

P4C as defined and organized by Lipman and Sharp, say these critics, acts as an agent of political domestication in the name of “critical thinking,” “democracy” or “reasonableness”-as, in the striking imagery offered by Darren Chetty of the educational community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) as an epistemological “gated community,” (Chetty, 2018) a discursive location in which the difficult issues are avoided, and the structural relations of race, class, power, privilege and politics of difference into which children are already being interpellated are tacitly avoided. Although the implication that the “gated” CPI is somehow in the genetic materials of Lipman and Sharp’s theory and practice has been ably and convincingly refuted by Maughn Gregory (2011), the issue of an hidden ethnocentric curriculum still haunts P4C. Paul Elicor for example, in a paper published in this journal, expresses concerns about the “epistemicide” of indigenous and other forms of knowledge that P4C ignores in its universal pretension of reconstructing the whole history of philosophy (Elicor, 2019).

The critique of indoctrinatory hidden curriculum intersects thematically with the burgeoning of the “childism” movement in academia (Wall, 2021). The terms “voice” and “agency” have become catchwords for a critique of adultism itself in the way adults listen to and understand children and by implication, either afford children their natural rights or do not (Kellet, 2021). The child in conventional schools suffers, these critics maintain, from “epistemic injustice” (Haynes & Murris, this issue)-her way of thinking is either not recognized or trivialized, which places her in the ranks of the oppressed: her agency is foiled, her voice unheard or over-ruled, her autonomy blocked, her developmental potential thwarted. For at least some of these critics, the child is a potential activist, and the school is potentially the place in which new values are invented and discovered, and existing regimes of knowledge interrogated and reconstructed (Kennedy, forthcoming).

In order to emancipate childhood, this argument goes, adults are necessary who are ready to deconstruct the school’s indoctrinatory power as an ideological state apparatus, and to rebuild it as an ideological democratic apparatus. The school, these critics hold, is actually a potential emancipatory site for childhood forms of being and knowing, whereas it has been just the opposite-the site of her suppression, where she is “dumbed down” and interpellated by a particular style of social character, above all of a docile, apolitical citizen/worker/consumer.

Compulsory mass schooling has, since its inception roughly 200 years ago acted to repress (in the Freudian sense of “drive out of awareness”) what Hannah Arendt (1958) called, “natality,” the open human space for the emergence of new, better-adapted forms of personal, social and political life. Ironically enough, Arendt, in a very influential paper (1961) makes the traditional argument from the conservative (but not the radical right) side that children need to be protected from the public political world of action and agency in order more effectively and autonomously to participate in it in adulthood-an argument that tends to clash with an increasing number of those involved in childhood studies, who argue for a re-evaluation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) to include an increasing need for encouraging and accommodating child agency (Kellet 2021-a concept which, the more it is used in academic settings, the more potentially controversial its meaning becomes.

The overriding implicit assumption among those advocates of childhood agency who practice CPI seems to be that the distinctives of a dialogical pedagogy and an emergent curriculum are not enough for the emancipation of children, and indeed for the integrity of P4C as a program, unless they are embedded in an ideological context that is free-or at least more free--from cultural hegemony, of which the conventional school is a primary institutional apparatus. This gradual realization among practitioners--that practicing CPI in educational contexts that are structurally racist or unconsciously embedded in neoliberal values is fundamentally compromised--has led to the onset of a prolonged period of reflection within the movement. The search is on, so to speak, for a form of CPI practice that is compatible with the hunger for a paradigm that is more sensitive both conceptually to childhood and empirically to social justice. We might speak of this epoch in the life of the movement as its second generation. This generation made critique of Lipman’s relatively unreflective use of analytic reasoning and his political quietism reflected in his privileging of a tepid philosophical neutralism over a more direct confrontation with the (un)ethics of late stage capitalism. This critique-albeit not that accurate or nuanced--has resulted in a medley of approaches, with a variety of methods, techniques and strategies. The program of Philosophy for Children, known for its methodological “plain vanilla”-read a text aloud, pose questions, choose a question to begin with, discuss-has given way to a diversity of ways of doing philosophy with children.

This situation can be verified inside and outside of the US: P4C has also followed a complex path elsewhere. It is also the case for example in Eurocentric Europe--if readers will allow this explicit pleonasm as a way of calling our attention to what many P4C practitioners do not seem to perceive. Europe has a stronger tradition in philosophy than the U.S., and a longer history of political warfare between Left and Right, and yet the P4C movement entertains those tensions with a troubling equanimity. The same situation also prevails in regions where European colonialism is still alive in one degree or another, like Australia, Africa, and Latin America. In all these cases, P4C does not seem to have the capacity to fulfill the decolonizing promise that in some way, whether explicitly or implicitly, seemed to be part of its birthright. Stated in other terms: in its expansion around the world, P4C hasn’t been as childlike and decolonial as it needs to be, especially in those infantilized and colonized contexts in which the emancipatory potential of “critical, creative and caring thinking” is relativized and coopted by a toxic blend of authoritarian culture and capitalist exploitation.

In any case, some might be ready and willing to think beyond these old binaries and tired metaphors and speak about a third generation of the movement, and it might be the time to do so, at least in the Northern academic world, most especially since the issues of child agency and voice have been gaining rapid pride of place not just in schools but in other areas of child study, where a steady stream of papers, clinical studies, ethnographic reports and new academic communities such as the Childism Institute (https://www.childism.org/) are steadily increasing. And in at least rudimentary preparation for that, this issue of childhood & philosophy has collected a clutch of papers that might encourage us to reflect on some ethical and political issues that are implied in the transition already referred to. The move from philosophy for children to philosophy with children might be seen, from the dominant North, as implying a decentering from pragmatism to European continental philosophy with its critique of traditional ideas of modernity, ideas which include “democracy,” “critical thinking” and “citizenship.” From the outside South, the shift from “for” to “with” suggests a path towards decolonized forms of inhabiting education and philosophy that might, in collaboration with children, lead to less oppressive, ugly, and unjust worlds. The Foucaultian critique, which focuses on the hegemonic biopolitical structure of so-called Western societies, was, apparently at least, either unconvincing or invisible to either Lipman or Sharp, firmly rooted as they were in both the more optimistic and the more politically naïve Deweyan Pragmatist tradition; it did not appear in the early development of P4C.

Historically and materially, the transition to an emergent hermeneutics of childhood that occurred both within the P4C movement and within what might be called the “child agency movement” may be said to have emerged as a dialectical response to, among other things, the ever-increasing pressure of neoliberalism and a weaponized capitalism to construct public policies in education on an over-regulated, prescribed, state-monitored model, thereby moving from a society of discipline to a society of control, of which children are often the first victims, and even to what Byung-Chul Han (2020) calls “the society of tiredness.” There has been a progressive conditioning of the forms of subjectivity cultivated inside and outside educational institutions, and a coopting of private life and spaces of resistance that has led to an age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). To put it in more concrete terms, philosophy as an educational discipline that is dedicated to forming democratic citizens has been coopted and sidelined, and no longer offers the basis for any real political transformation. As such, democracy in theory and practice no longer provides a clear political focus for philosophical practices with children; as democracy as a political ideal suffers decline together with the concrete billions of lives impoverished or just eliminated with the necropolitical (Mbembe, 2018) use of pandemic, the politics of doing philosophy for/with children have become both more controversial and less relevant to neoliberal (not to speak of emergent fascist) values as they are enacted in schools.

However, a new question emerges: could a new relationship to childhood provide the ethical and political agenda that our times require for doing philosophy with children with integrity? Could a radical listening and openness to childhood-which has been an intrinsic confessional characteristic of P4C pedagogy from the beginning--sustain the movement through these dark times? Philosophy for/with children in theory and practice may, in fact, be identified as the intersectional space in which philosophy of childhood emerged, in its early articulation by Gareth Matthews (1994), and the two discursive fields are intrinsically interactive. Their confluence also makes space for the increasing radicalization of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), and the new emphasis on child agency that is emerging in so many Northern academic circles (Kellet, 2020). It takes, after all, a shift in the way one sees children to allow for the ethical possibilities and risks associated with child activism: the suicidal folly of the Children’s Crusade and the child soldier, not to speak of the perennial schoolyard bully, are never far from awareness. What saves the notion from the very real specter of indoctrination, and what may mitigate the Arendtian critique of too-early exposure of children to public space is the possibility of the (re)construction of school as a “prefigurative” environment, which has been defined as “the embodiment within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are the ultimate goal” (McCowan 2020, 16)-a social and political environment, in other words, where moral and ethical means and ends coincide. Such an environment is in fact invoked materially in the curriculum and pedagogy characteristic of the contemporary “democratic schools” movement (Democratic Education, Wikipedia), and in the growing invocation of the archetypal form of gathering known as skhole-school as free-time, an adult-child collective as a place apart, operating in the suspension of the social neocapitalist order (Masschelein & Simons, 2012), apart from the world of office, factory, production, and in which the practice of CPI assumes the role of a master discourse (Kennedy 2017).

This notion is isomorphic, it would appear, with Dewey’s (1907) of the school as a possible “miniature community” or “embryonic society,” embodied to an extent in Lawrence Kholberg’s “just community” movement (inspired by an Israeli kibbutz) (Oser et al, 2008); assayed as an emergent form in the Free School movement of the 1960’s and 70’s (Deal & Nolan 1978); and articulated further in Democratic Schools, which are self-governed by a weekly meeting in which critical issues are under collective deliberation in a community of speech and affect, and in which every member of the community has one vote. Here the same principles that rule the community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) are applied in collective governance, and as such the dialogical circle is a space where politics and philosophy can meet, as the principles and forms of CPI are practiced school wide. This prefigurative egalitarian and open order embodies the possibility for the rebirth of what Benjamin Barber (2004) called “strong” democracy in the wider world, much like the martyred anarchist Gustave Landauer’s (2010) notion of “building a new society under the shell of the old” It is, we would suggest, those who are invoking CPI as a kind of rebirth of the Socratic community, both apolitical and political, and who are deeply concerned to liberate children’s voice and children’s agency, who are the driving force behind both the critique of first-generation P4C, and a new attention to opening issues of social and economic justice, environmental integrity, offering anti-racist and anti-homophobic forms of life and the possibility of a new and peaceful world to children’s gaze, consideration, and action-in short, a third generation.

This should come as no surprise to P4C practitioners-at least to those of us who have found over the years of educational philosophical practice that to follow the argument where it leads in the Socratic sense arrives sooner or later at ethical and political issues, which are fundamental to justice, integrity and peace, and which invoke action as finally the only adequate response to the present situation in our communities and on our planet, where suffering proliferates and danger-whether political or environmental or both--increases.

Even in the best of times, philosophy eventually asks, with Tolstoy (1899), “What then must we do?” and with Lenin (1901), “how can we live together?” Children’s responses to this question and children’s new and unexpected questions are already emerging as the situation of crisis deepens. It is our conviction that the third wave of CPI practitioners are hungry to ask this question of children and to be attentive not only to children’s responses but to their requestioning, and to follow out the activist implications that their answers imply and their new questions urge us to look at. We have, we may say, come to a moment of real and committed applied childlike ethics, albeit we have also always been there.

Given the situation, we consider this moment to be a good one for a special dossier of the journal to host a broader discussion around the ethical implications of practicing philosophy with children and adults-hence “Ethical Implications of Practicing Philosophy with Children and Adults.” In calling for papers for this dossier, we posed questions like: What, if any, should the ethical commitments of the P4C facilitator be? Is political/ideological neutrality required of the P4C facilitator? Is political neutrality possible? What constitutes indoctrination in educational settings? Are children in fact more vulnerable to indoctrination than adults, and if so, what are the implications of that fact for the practice of P4C? What are the uses of P4C in the dramatically polarized ideological landscape we currently inhabit? What, if any, are the ethical responsibilities of a teacher engaging in philosophical practice? Are the philosophical practitioner’s ethical responsibilities similar or different when the subjects are children or adults? Does every methodology have a “hidden curriculum”? If so, what is the hidden curriculum of P4C? What distinguishes dialogical from monological practice? May one have the appearance of the other? Is the “Socratic method” (Elenchus) as we conceive it dialogical? What, if any, are the uses of irony in philosophical practice? Should Socrates (or any other philosopher) be considered a model for P4C practitioners?

This invitation to think collectively about the ethical implications of engaging with children (and teachers and adults in general) in communal philosophical experience has resulted in seven papers--four in English, two in Spanish and one in Portuguese, each addressing different dimensions of the topic from different perspectives. Among the papers in English, Arie Kizel, president of the International Council for Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) and arguably one of the exponents of the third generation of P4C actors, in “The facilitator as liberator and enabler: ethical responsibility in communities of philosophical inquiry,” reflects on the power struggles prompted by diverse identities that can affect communities of philosophical inquiry. In order to combat this, Kizel presents a two-phase model of ethically responsible facilitation by CPI facilitators. In the first phase, “they should free themselves from assumptions and closed-mindedness. They should liberate themselves from pedagogy of fear and “banking education” in order to act freely in an educational space characterized by improvisation that cultivates participation of the children … in order to ensure openness and inclusiveness.” In the second phase, they should embrace enabling-identity views and practices, recognizing and legitimizing the participants’ identity differences. Here, the ethical commitment is to recognize multiple identities and difference as fundamental to the human environment, and epistemic justice as fundamental to social justice, and therefore to peace in the world.

In his paper “I am keeping my cultural hat on: Exploring a ‘culture-enabling’ philosophy for/with children practice,” Peter Paul Elicor appears to be building his paper entirely in what Kizel calls the second phase of the facilitator’s role. He is especially concerned for culturally/ethnically-diverse groups where prejudice and negative stereotypes of minorities are prevalent. Elicor considers the promise of philosophical practice to empower children from those minorities to think for themselves and with others while staying grounded on their cultural backgrounds. In such contexts, the CPI is considered a caring space, where intercultural understanding and critical affirmation of cultures are encouraged and sustained. In order to foster such achievements the main ethical commitments of a PfwC teacher are: a) openness to various cultural resources and frameworks, b) a sense of critical positionality, and c) a partiality to the culturally marginalized. In this regard, Elicor moves substantially away from Matthew Lipman, who considered that CPI facilitators should be impartial. On Elicor’s second generation account, impartiality in the social context is a myth used by the “gated community” in the service oppression.

From a different perspective and background, Simone Thornton, Mary Graham and Gilbert Burgh in “Place-based philosophical education: Reconstructing ‘place’, reconstructing ethics” share many points in common with Elicor’s paper. For example, they also critique concepts like impartiality and neutrality, which were so valuable for the first generation. Their main argument is that a stance of neutrality is to claim a position beyond criticism. They defend the philosophical community of inquiry pedagogy, and advocate for the addition of place-based experiential education. Part of the task of the educator is, on their account, in helping students to develop a “sense of place”--a deeply attached and meaningful relationship to a certain space. This is discussed in the context of the Australian indigenous peoples spiritual understanding of place, which informs what the authors consider a “pathway to ethical education.”

In “Right under our noses: The postponement of children's political equality and the Now” Joanna Haynes and Karin Murris, two well-known exponents of the second generation of philosophy with children and pioneers of the third, analyze the political implications of what might be termed the “ideology of time” of facilitators in the P4C movement. When facilitation is enacted as a chronological practice of fostering children’s pre-identified, stage-based progress and development, it works against the political agency of the child. From a radical posthumanist perspective, the paper examines the ethical and political implications of conventional facilitation practices in the context of affect, and calls for a shift from “ethics” to “ethos,” and from ‘zipped’ to ‘unzipped’ bodies.

Among the two papers offered in Portuguese, Vanise Dutra Gomes and Paula Alexandra Vieira accept the invitation to philosophize offered by the dossier, and describe an exercise in questioning that emerged from children with whom both educators philosophize regularly. The authors explore multiple dimensions of this exercise in terms offered by multiple philosophical lenses: the notion of skolé as a particular “prefigurative” form of intentional community, a concept garnering increasing attention; the Heideggerian notion of consummation; the Freirean pedagogy of the question: and the Rancierean notion of equality of intelligence.

One of the two papers in Spanish is offered by Félix García Moriyón, a first generation P4C supporter. Here, he recovers Lipman’s categorization of kinds of thinking-- critical, creative and caring-- and his emphasis on rigorous dialogue. On Moriyón’s account, P4C is an intrinsically ethical endeavor with precise ethical commitments. The asymmetrical power relationship between students and teachers is considered by Moriyón to be the main risk to the community of philosophical inquiry, and overcoming its dangers requires radical questioning and a shared, articulated commitment to equality.

Finally, a text from a third generation young scholar, “On childbirths and births: Ethical-political derivations of the figure of the ‘teacher-midwife’ in Philosophy with/for children” by Julián Macías concentrates on different narratives and metaphors of the role of the teacher as facilitator of philosophical practice among children. To the classical Socratic image of the Socratic-Platonic midwife as facilitator, he opposes Arendt’s notion of natality, which, he argues, promises to the open the ethical and political dimensions of the communal philosophical practice, and to challenge and inspire his or her own role in that process.

The papers in this dossier sample, to be sure, no more than a tentative, preliminary approach to the ethical issues that are unavoidable when we talk about the adult-child or adult-youth relationships in the context of schooling: issues of asymmetrical power relationships, indoctrination, freedom, autonomy, rights, voice, agency, of the role of the school as an ideological apparatus and, most especially in an age of planetary crisis, of the boundaries between children and adults in the realm of political or proto-political identities and activities. If, in the words of the prominent teen-age climate change activist Greta Thunberg, we live in an age in which “we [the children] have become the adults in the room” (Breaux & Smith 2019), this does not suggest so much premature adultification on the part of children as it does what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called “becoming-child” on the part of adults, where, in their Spinozan formulation “child” (of any age) represents an affective capacity or capacity to be affected, and to grow and connect in new ways, which can be activated at any stage of life. This, in turn, represents a new balance between youth and age, especially as applied to the realm of education. The charmed circle of communal philosophical dialogue is one co-constructed space where, we would suggest, this new balance has a place to develop, and contribute to the ethical reconstruction for which the human species, whatever its chronic corruptions and pathologies, lives in continual expectation and longing.

references

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk , last edited on 26 March 2021, at 17:46 (UTC). [ Links ]

Arendt, Hannah (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press. [ Links ]

Arendt, Hannah (1961), The crisis in education. In Between past and future, Chapter 5. London: Penguin Classics. [ Links ]

Barber, Benjamin R. (2004). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. Oakland: University of California Press. [ Links ]

Breaux, Aimee; Smith, Zachary Oren (2019). Greta Thurnberg took a Tessla to Iowa: Here’s what she had to say. Iowa City Press-Citizen. https://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/2019/10/04/greta-thunberg-speech-transcript-iowa-climate-strike/3868695002/Links ]

Chetty, Darren. Racism as ‘Reasonableness’: Philosophy for children and the gated Community of Inquiry. Childhood & Philosophy 13, 2018. [ Links ]

Deal, Terrence E; Nolan, Robert R. (1978). Alternative schools: Ideologies, realities, guidelines. Chicago : Nelson-Hall. [ Links ]

Deleuze, Gilles.; Guattari, Felix. (1987). A thousand plateaus. B. Massumi, Trans. University of Minnesota Press. [ Links ]

Democratic Schools (2020). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_education. And (http://www.idenetwork.org), [ Links ]

Dewey, John (1907). The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [ Links ]

Elicor, P. philosophical inquiry with indigenous children: an attempt to integrate indigenous forms of knowledge in philosophy for/with children, Childhood & Philosophy 2019. [ Links ]

Gregory, Maughn (2011). Philosophy for children and its critics: A Mendham dialogue. Journal of Philosophy of Education45(2) [ Links ]

Han, Byung-Chul (2020). The Burnout Society. Redwood City CA: Stanford University Press. [ Links ]

Kellett, Mary (2021), Voice, Participation, and Agency. Oxford Bibliographies, Childhood Studies.https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791231/obo-9780199791231-0013.xmlLinks ]

Kennedy, David (2017). An archetypal phenomenology of skhole. Educational Theory 67, 3: 273-289. [ Links ]

Kennedy, David (forthcoming 2021). Schooling the new sensibility: Communal philosophical dialogue, play, and social democracy. In Urban, Petr; Koubová, Alice. Eds. Play & democracy: Philosophical perspectives. London: Routledge. [ Links ]

Landauer, Gustav ( 2010). Revolution and other writings: A political reader. Gabriel Kuhn Ed. & Trans. Oakland, CA: PM Press. [ Links ]

Lenin (1901) What is to be Done. E-Book https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/Links ]

Masschelein, Jan; Simons, Maarten (2013). In defense of the school: A public issue, Jack McMartin Trans. Leuven, Belgium: Education, Culture & Society. [ Links ]

Matthews, Gareth 1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [ Links ]

Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics. Duke: Duke University Press. [ Links ]

McCowan, Tristan (2010). Prefigurative approaches to participatory schooling: Experiences in Brazil. In Cox, Sue; Dyer, Caroline; Robinson-Pant, Anna; Schweisfurth, Michele (Eds). In Children as decision-makers in education: Sharing experiences across cultures. New York: Continuum. [ Links ]

Oser, Fritz K.; Althof, Wolfgang; Higgins-D'Alessandro, Ann (2008). The just community approach to moral education: System change or individual change? Journal of Moral Education 37, 3(Sept): 395-415. [ Links ]

Raths, Louis (2020). Values Clarification. https://louisraths.wordpress.com/values-clarification-2/. [ Links ]

Tolstoy, Lev (1899). What Shall We Do?https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38690/38690-h/38690-h.htm. [ Links ]

United Nations (1959), Declaration of the Rights of the Child (originally drafted for the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland 1934). [ Links ]

Wall, John (2021). The Childism Institute: http:/childism.orgLinks ]

Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. New York: Public Affairs. [ Links ]

Recebido: 30 de Junho de 2021; Aceito: 09 de Julho de 2021

Creative Commons License Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto sob uma licença Creative Commons