Lipman, Dewey, and the Community of Philosophical Inquiry
نویسنده
چکیده
The revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two dimensions. The first—introducing philosophy as a subject matter in the elementary school—is based on the assumption that childhood is an appropriate stage of life to read, think, and talk about philosophical issues like justice, friendship, what we mean by self, and so on. As such, it represents a change in the way some adults understand children as thinkers, meaning makers, communicators, and moral agents. The second dimension is pedagogical. It is the idea that a guided, openstructured, dialogical speech community which he called “community of philosophical inquiry” (CPI)--is the most appropriate way to practice the philosophical curriculum that he had developed with students. This paper explores CPI as a concrete application of John Dewey’s educational theory, which posits a drive towards the reconstruction of habits—including, and perhaps primarily, the reconstruction of habits of belief—as an ongoing result of the dialectical relationship between our current habits and what he calls “impulse,” and works to overcome through dialogue the gaps Dewey identified between child and curriculum, the “psychological and the logical,” and ultimately, between child and adult. 36 E&C/Education & Culture 28 (2) (2012): 36-53 Lipman, Dewey, and the Community of Philosophical Inquiry 37 Volume 28 (2) 2012 Normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood [sic]. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other. —Dewey, Democracy and Education The quiet revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two inseparable dimensions. The first—introducing philosophy as a subject matter in the elementary school through a series of philosophical novels written for children1—is curricular. Of course this is more than just curricular, because it is based on the idea—contested by “real philosophers” since Plato—that childhood is an appropriate stage of life to read, think, and talk about philosophical issues like justice, friendship, what we mean by self, the nature of thinking, the body-mind relation, what it means to be “good,” and so on. As such, it is an idea that follows from a change in the way some adults understand children as thinkers, meaning makers, communicators, and moral agents; it is a philosophical idea itself. What is more, it also opens naturally into the realization that all school curriculum—each of the disciplines—has a philosophical dimension, and that this dimension is the very one that makes it most meaningful, and, therefore, most necessary for education to be meaningful for children. The second dimension is pedagogical. It is the idea that a guided, structured, dialogical speech community—a theory and a practice that Lipman, taking a cue from his friend and mentor Justus Buchler, developed and called “community of philosophical inquiry”—is the most appropriate way to practice with students the philosophical curriculum that he had developed. This idea is also a philosophical one, and it has far reaching implications, both practical and theoretical—for learning theory, for a theory of teaching, for argumentation theory, for a theory of knowledge, for group psychology, for moral education, and perhaps ultimately of the greatest importance, for grounded political theory and practice. Moreover, this is true not only in classrooms and schools, but also in a society peopled by the human subjects that emerge from those classrooms and schools. Lipman’s community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is not just a pedagogical device, but rather the projection of an ideal speech community dedicated to a normative form of democratic practice—one that mediates the relationship between democracy as a form of social inquiry and dialogical philosophical inquiry as a form of communicative practice. My goal in this article is to explore the relationship between these two inaugural educational ideas—the second one in particular—and the transformational
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