Teorie a výzkum

Kniha zabývající se problematikou filozofie na školách.

Philosophy in school is on the one hand a contribution to the ongoing debate about our future educational system insofar as it provides lucid instructions as to how philosophy may be implemented and integrated in the grade school. Thus it explains how any schoolteacher in any subject may adopt the model of the philosophical inquiry and adapt it to the classroom situation. It sets out to demonstrate that philosophy is much better understood as a dialogical, communal practise in the spirit of Socrates than as a mere subject matter to be loaded into the memory of the child. The book construes and develops the concept of philosophy primarily as a particularly fruitful method of dialogue, between children and adults or just between children, and not as a venerable textual corpus to be learnt by rote.

On the other hand an even more important aim of this book is to point out and elaborate the Socratic attitude of non-knowledge. The book argues that philosophical openness, questioning and wonderment at the world—human qualities that we today so willingly, though often rather uncritically, applaud and embrace—may prove shallow or even counterproductive unless they spring from the Socratic, dialectical, insight that "I know that I know nothing". Strong emphasis is therefore laid on the reader's own appropriation of such an insight. This intellectual humility of Socrates—a humility on behalf of man's rational and logical access to the truth in itself—is of course equally valid and equally valuable for any person no matter where or when, not just for teachers and not just for adults and not just for children. To make the adults (viz. the readers) realise that yearning for wisdom on the one side, lack of fundamental knowledge on the other and humility as a result of both are not only correlative, but also interdependent human qualities, is perhaps on the whole the major objective of the book.

Philosophy in school is divided into two separate parts. Part I is mainly theoretical and discusses further the aforementioned issues. Moreover Part I gives an account of Matthew Lipman and his Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (at Montclair University, New Jersey, USA) as well as a description of several independent European approaches to philosophy for children over the last couple of decades. A chapter on how the Internet may be utilised to promote and implement philosophy for children is also added. Finally Part I contains detailed commentaries on the Norwegian Curriculum for the Ten Year Compulsory School and shows by way of suggesting a series of philosophical questions and exercises how the proposed general objectives in the curriculum may be reached.

Part II is entirely practical. Based on an array of different textual samples—gathered chiefly from the compartments of philosophy, literature and religion—Part II delivers comprehensive sets of philosophically intriguing questions, exercises, puzzles, experiments etc. hoping that this will evoke philosophical conversations and inquiries within the group. The authors are eager to stress, however, the importance and inevitability of the adult's own wrestling with these very questions and puzzles—before presenting them to the community of children/adults. For only the adult who personally reflects upon and is aroused by the enigmas of philosophy and the philosophical speculations will in turn be able to inspire the children to the same or even to a higher level of philosophical reflection and excitement.