the time of philosophizing in school: infancy and thinking as play

Abstract

In this paper we seek to share our speculations on the sustained experiences of children between the ages of four and eight years old enrolled in pre-schools and rural schools in Patagonia, Argentina that participated in the play of thinking. Considering and reconsidering the perspectives of Deleuze, Agamben, Lopez, Skliar, Lispector and others on “play”: its rules, the own word, thoughts on infancy, the infancy of thought, time, the different forms of time, especially the aionic time of the experience of thinking, we dialogue and seek to translate the emotion that emanates from participants in the game of philosophizing and the visible effects of its empowerment that proceeds from the emission of the thinker’s own words and thoughts. Our practice is that of a game, a collective game. We were deeply impressed by how play time acquired specific and distinct characteristics from that of the chronological measurement of time so appreciated within school life. Play is lived by children in school because in these moments hierarchies and evaluations disappear; a thread is stitched around a singular equality very rarely experienced. As such, we can speak and think about friendship, liberty, identity and the own name itself, about what it means to learn, and about thinking and astonishment with our own expressions. This we seek: astonishment, an interruption, an event, an experience, something that we pass through...