Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People
On Tuesday, the fifth grade students with whom I’ve been doing philosophy and I spent about 40 minutes talking about dreaming. We started with the students’ questions, which included: What is a dream? Can dreams affect your everyday life? How do dreams work? Why do we dream? How do we know we’re not dreaming right […]
The House in WinterHere,in the year’s late tidewash,a corner cupboard suddenly waversin low-flung sunlight,cupboard never quite visible before. Its jarsof last summer’s peacheshave come into their native gold—not the sweetness of last summer,but today’s,fresh from the tree of winter.The mouth swallows peach, and says gold. Though they dazzle and are gone,the halves of fruit, the […]
People often ask me about finding philosophy resources online. There is now a multiplicity of online resources available for free — online philosophy classes, lectures, materials, etc. This is a sampling: http://www.epistemelinks.com/index.aspx (thousands of links to philosophy audio and video, course materials and other philosophy resources) http://broodsphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/06/15/online-videos-of-philosophical-lectures/ (list of online videos of various philosophy lectures) […]
When, in our first class together, I asked the fifth grade students with whom I’m doing philosophy this winter what they imagined was the definition of philosophy, one student volunteered that he thought philosophy was “a way of life.” Of course, I loved the sophistication of this answer, and there are philosophers who hold this […]
Yesterday I showed up in the fifth grade classroom in which I’ve been teaching, prepared to talk with the students about whether you can get something form nothing, whether everything has a beginning, and related questions. When I arrived, the class informed me that they had just had a discussion about an ethical problem related […]
On Friday I had a marvelous discussion with a group of students in an eighth grade English class about The Book Thief, a novel by Markus Zusak. The story is told from the perspective of Death, who describes his experiences during the Holocaust, and in particular the story of a young girl living near Munich. […]
Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Since 1995 she has taught philosophy in classrooms from preschool to college and beyond. A frequent writer and speaker about precollege philosophy, Jana is the founding president of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People. Follow her on Twitter: @JanaMohrLone