Are they the aliens, or are we?
Most kids find The Philosophy Club unusual, because it’s rare for them to find other opportunities – either in school or home – to think and talk about deep questions […]
Most kids find The Philosophy Club unusual, because it’s rare for them to find other opportunities – either in school or home – to think and talk about deep questions […]
(Or, This Festive Season, Teach Your Children to Believe Responsibly) Currently circulating on social media is this letter from a couple of well-intentioned parents to their questioning son, who is […]
We know that children benefit in diverse and important ways from engaging in philosophical questioning and dialogue. So why do so few primary schools in Australia dedicate class time to […]
Recently I’ve seen a spate of articles along the lines of ‘What Philosophy Can Do For You’, focusing on the high results that philosophy students score on graduate school admissions […]
(Or, Earning Your Keep in the Ivory Tower) In a memorable passage from his Essays (published in 1580), Michel de Montaigne describes philosophers as one-eyed ranters who do nothing but […]
This year’s $1 million TED Prize was awarded to a novel educational project that encourages small groups of children to work together, using the internet to answer big questions that interest them, while adult mediators intervene as little as possible in the children’s learning. In this post, I take a close look at the merits and limitations of this approach, and review some surprising examples of how children can go astray when they rely on the internet for answers to their questions.
Later this week, 52 novice philosophers will find themselves in an imaginary universe of zero-gravity waterslide parks, Brussel sprout ice cream, dragon appointments and a spectacular array of perplexing questions. […]
The Little Philosophers greeted our three holiday programs with overwhelming enthusiasm. Energy levels ran high, concentration peaked and the ideas were electric! This photo gallery offers a taste of what […]
Independent thinking rightly belongs at the heart of education, as I suggested in Part 2. As students get increasingly adept at using tools of sceptical and imaginative enquiry, they become […]
Some of the educational reforms considered radical in the late ‘60s have come to be accepted – even institutionalised – in our current school system (as we saw in Part […]