looking for one‘s own contents in philosophy with children: the construction of school subjectivity

Abstract

This paper describes the Project Filosofar con Niños, developed in Cordoba, Argentina, and functioning since 1995. It is an ongoing pedagogical and speculative experience that seeks to establish a research line in primary school education. This paper refers to an investigative task presented in this project, and some experiences of philosophizing in school are mentioned. Philosophy has recurrently identified itself as a critical and liberating tool. Wittgenstein once said: ―What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." On the other hand, it is also suggestive that philosophy, which characteristically subjects all human activities to criticism, leaves the order of schooling, where its own lessons are to be taught, out of that criticism. A project involving philosophical activity with children should include childhood‘s problems, in association with methods and techniques for understanding such situations--and it may or may not include all the areas described in the canonical tradition (metaphysics, epistemology, etc.). Each level of education requires philosophical attention of a particular kind. The Philosophizing with Children project is developing research in this direction. This paper describes both dimensions of the work—the research and the experience of philosophizing. We also describe the events that take place at the end of each project year, when we hold a workshop with parents, where we review the texts we have read and the work undertaken with children, and reflect on the school that we are all building.