{"ops":[{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"[Missed Part 2? "},{"attributes":{"bold":true,"link":"https://community.criticalthinking.org/blogPost.php?param=240"},"insert":"Read It Here"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"]"},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":" "},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"italic":true,"bold":true},"insert":"Why Children Need to Think Philosophically [1 of 3]"},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"italic":true,"bold":true},"insert":" "},{"insert":"\nThere is a sense in which everyone has a philosophy, since human thought and actions are always embedded in a framework of foundational concepts, values, and assumptions which define a “system” of some sort. Humans are by nature inferential, meaning-creating animals. In this sense, all humans use “philosophies,” and even in some sense create them. Even the thinking of very young children presupposes philosophical foundations, as Piaget so ably demonstrated. Of course, if by “philosophy” we mean explicit and systematic reflection on the concepts, values, aims, and assumptions that structure thinking and underlie behavior, then in that sense most children do "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"not"},{"insert":" philosophize. It all depends on whether one believes that one can have a philosophy without "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"thinking"},{"insert":" one’s way to it.\n \nMost children have at least the impulse to philosophize and for a time seem driven by a strong desire to know the most basic "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"what"},{"insert":" and "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"why"},{"insert":" of things. Of course parents or teachers rarely cultivate this tendency. Usually children are given didactic answers in ways that discourage, rather than stimulate, further inquiry. Many parents and teachers seem to think that they or textbooks have appropriate and satisfactory answers to the foundational questions that children raise, and the sooner children accept these answers the better. Such authorities unwittingly encourage children to assent to, without truly understanding, basic beliefs. In effect, we teach answers to philosophical questions as though they were like answers to chemical questions. As a result, children lose the impulse to question, as they learn to mouth the standard answers of parents, peers, and other socializing groups. How many of these mouthed answers become a part of children’s lived beliefs is another matter.\n \nChildren learn behaviors and as well as explanations. They learn to act as well as to speak. Thus they learn to behave in ways inconsistent with much of their conscious talk and thought. Children learn to live, as it were, in different and only partially integrated worlds. They develop unconscious worlds of meaning that do not completely square with what they are told or think they believe. Some of these meanings become a source of pain, frustration, repression, fear, and anxiety. Some become a source of harmless fantasizing and day-dreaming. Some are embedded in action, albeit in camouflaged, or in tacit, unarticulated ways.\n \nIn any case, the process of unconsciously taking in or unknowingly constructing a variety of meanings outstrips the child’s initial impulse to reflect on or question those meanings. In one sense, then, children become captives of the ideas and meanings whose impact on their own thought and action they do not themselves determine. They have in this sense two philosophies (only partially compatible with each other): one verbal but largely unlived; the other lived but mainly unverbalized. This split continues into adulthood. On the emotional level, it leads to anxiety and stress. On the moral level, it leads to hypocrisy and self-deception. On the intellectual level, it results in a condition in which lived beliefs and spontaneous thought are unintegrated with school learning which in turn is ignored in “real life” situations.\n \nAs teachers and parents we seldom consider the plight of children from this perspective. We tend to act as though there were no real need for children to reflect deeply about the meanings they absorb. We fail to see the conflicting meanings they absorb, the double messages that capture their minds. Typically our principal concern is that they absorb the meanings that we think are correct and act in ways that we find acceptable. Reflecting upon their thoughts and actions seems important to us only to get them to think or act correctly, that is, as we want them to think and act. We seldom question whether they deeply agree or even understand. We pay little attention as parents to whether or not conflicting meanings and double messages become an on-going problem for them.\n"}]}