1. P4C and the Case for Teaching Philosophy in
K-12 Classrooms
BY ROSS M. ALLEN MARCH 19, 2015
As seems to be perennially the case, debates surrounding education are prominent in the public
discourse. Parent protests of the Common Core driven "Smarter Balanced Assessment" computer
testing system recently caused a stir in Connecticut, New York, Florida, and Utah. Louisiana school
districts are standing together against new statewide math standards. Republican Presidential
contenders Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, in squaring up for the 2016 primaries, alternatively
reminded us of their respective "staunch support for" and "grave concerns with" nationalized
testing standards last week in New Hampshire and Iowa.
Questions about how school kids should be assessed abound, but we might wonder if the question
of how students are tested should come second to the one about what material they are taught in
the first place. Even more central a question than what is taught; however, is how the student is
able to make use of the content. Book smarts vs. street smarts. Theoretical vs. practical knowledge.
No matter how you slice it, we intuitively recognize a need for some mechanism which transforms
taught or technical information into usable knowledge. Why should we assume that this
transformation can only occur in the “real world”? Why couldn’t we teach children how to make use
of their learning in the classroom through formal reasoning and argumentation?
Is it important that we show children how to abstract moral claims from a story, or is it a sufficient
exercise for them to list the names of the main characters, the setting, and a theme from a
paragraph about the tortoise and the hare? Should the young merely be taught that Martin Luther
King Jr. was a hero and that democracy means “everyone gets a say” or should they be invited to
critically reflect on how we cash out justice and why the consent of the governed is valuable? These
are the questions that our system fails to resolve and they need answers. It is for this reason that we
must reignite a national conversation about the role of formal philosophy in K-12 education.
Teaching philosophy to children isn't a new proposition. The "Philosophy for Children" movement
(often abbreviated to P4C by proponents) began back in the 1970's when Dr. Matthew Lipman, a
Philosophy professor at Columbia, first argued for the introduction of early-childhood logic
curriculum in elementary schools. Lipman gained short-term notoriety in ‘74 with the founding of
his Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) which he dedicated his efforts
toward after witnessing a lack of critical reasoning in the way his college-aged students debated the
Vietnam War. Lipman's work piqued a relatively fruitful international interest in educating
youngsters about philosophizing. There are still ongoing collaborations between philosophy
departments at Witwatersran University in South Africa and the University of Leeds in the United
Kingdom and elementary schools in their respective communities, for instance, and nearly 4,000
schools in the U.S. used curriculum developed at the IAPC.

2. When implemented, this curriculum had demonstrably beneficial learning outcomes. A study of
3,000 New Jersey middle-schoolers, conducted in 1983 by the Educational Testing Service, found
that those who completed one of Lipman’s courses made double the academic progress in a year
than those students who did not take part in the course. Even as the data seemed to indicate its
meaningful potential as a learning tool, Lipman’s pedagogy never gained significant traction
domestically, being implemented in just under 4% of our nation’s 98,817 public schools.
While over forty years have come and gone since Dr. Lipman first sounded the alarm, the problem
he recognized still exists. Our politicians prattle on about the flawed character of their opponents to
garnish support for their own agendas. Lenders manipulate unwitting borrowers by rattling off the
interest rates on a 30 year fixed mortgage and then insisting that they “refinance now, before rates
go back up!” The biggest problem with the aforementioned prattlings and rattlings is that the
public is responsive to them, often to our collective detriment.
Would politicians still throw mud and loan sharks still prey, even if everyone were taught how to
recognize the scare tactic and ad hominem logical fallacies? Yes; they probably would, but having a
basic understanding of what makes an argument sound and valid could help many people avoid
deceptions which burden their lives with ills like bad leaders and insolvable debt. It could also
lessen the need for reactive measures which weigh on our society, like tedious investigations by our
legislature and burdensome financial regulations. Simply put, we need to instill acumen into our
nation’s argumentation, and we need to start doing so with our children.
You will note that this article does not offer a policy proposal. It doesn’t promote specific teaching
methodologies that could be nationally implemented. It doesn’t even offer a specific outline of
which philosophers’ work should be taught in schools. It would make for a much longer piece to
address these questions and would approach subject matter well-beyond the scope of this writer’s
expertise. Nevertheless, the claim offered earlier still stands: it’s time to restart the conversation.
Our education system must improve. Our schools must get further with kids than helping them
meet a minimum proficiency in “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic”. If we want our society to be filled
with thinkers and innovators, we must go beyond merely drilling into students’ heads the
responses they will be asked to parrot back on a scantron when the standardized assessment day
comes. We need to train children in how to think and how to weigh-up what other people think. We
need to teach students how to agree meaningfully and disagree objectively. We need to teach
philosophy.