Why philosophy for ten-year-olds?

Today’s education is becoming more and more practical. Do you want your child to become a great programmer and be able to compete for a job at Google or Facebook? Teach him math. If you want him to become famous as a doctor or scientist, let him study biology. You want him to be able to find a job in the largest and most promising market in the world – Chinese three times a day before and after meals. And everything else is rather optional and according to the residual principle.

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However, this approach is most likely wrong. And at least incomplete. Once again, this was proved by a study carried out by scientists from the University of Durham (UK) for the non-profit educational organization Education Endowment Foundation.¹. 48 British schools took part in the large-scale project. 22 of them served as a “control group” and the educational program there was the most common, and in the remaining 26 students aged 9-10 attended an additional philosophy lesson once a week.

Of course, children were not required to take notes and analyze the writings of Aristotle or Kant. The lessons were held in the form of free discussions, during which the students discussed such philosophical concepts as truth, justice, friendship or knowledge. The teachers taught them to understand and evaluate the statements of their comrades, as well as to think about new information and form their own attitude towards it. At the end of the academic year, the researchers summed up the results, and they were very clear. Children who attended philosophy classes showed much higher academic performance. Moreover, this concerned not only the English language and literature, which was quite understandable and predictable. The same picture was observed, for example, with mathematics. The “young philosophers” handled equations and formulas much more deftly and confidently than their peers, who were spared the lessons of philosophy.

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“Students who have taken philosophy classes have found new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,” said Kevan Collins, director of research programs at the Education Endowment Foundation. “They thought more logically and found relationships between different concepts and phenomena more easily.” According to teachers’ estimates, the success in mathematics shown by children from the “philosophical classes” could be achieved in no less than 3 months of additional lessons on the subject. But these activities were not! And there were successes.

No less surprising was another circumstance. Children from disadvantaged and low-income families included in the philosophy study program showed even higher results in all other subjects than their socially well-off comrades. In addition, according to the observations of teachers, these children became much more self-confident by the end of the school year and gained the ability to listen more carefully to other people’s opinions.

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It should be noted that this is not the first study of its kind. Back in the 1970s, such experiments were undertaken, for example, by the American philosopher Matthew Lipman. And the results were so positive that they inspired Lipman to create the social movement Philosophy for Children (“Philosophy for Children”). Yet schools around the world still regard philosophy classes for elementary school students as a strange fad at best. For which, with all the desire, it is impossible to find a place in the extremely compressed curriculum. To be in time with mathematics and foreign languages ​​…

¹ S. Gorard et al. «Philosophy for Children Evaluation report and Executive summary». Опубликовано на портале educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk