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 […]
Tag Archives: creative thinking
World Philosophy Day: What about the kids?
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 […]
A professional human being
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 […]
Can you kill a goat by staring at it?
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 […]
Big Questions for intergalactic philosophers
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. […]
Winter holiday highlights
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 […]
Unguided learning: Subversive Activity (Part 3)
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 […]
On Questioning and Silence: Subversive Activity (Part 2)
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 […]
Teaching as a Subversive Activity Redux (Part 1)
I’ve been reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 manifesto calling for a revolution in education. Over the past half-century, many of its radical proposals […]
Boot camp for intellectual virtues?
On the lookout for new ways to help kids improve their thinking, I came across the Intellectual Virtues & Education Project (IVEP). And the more I learnt about it, the […]
