the encounter of philosophy and childhood in the experience of teaching and learning philosophy as an issue of foundation

Abstract

This paper asserts that teaching philosophy is a philosophical problem, one which entails a concept of philosophy as an activity that denaturalizes the obvious, and far from stabilizing meanings, displaces them. In this way it inquires into and queries those meanings that seem settled and crystallized, and in this way it questions the concept of teaching philosophy itself: ‘teach’, ‘learn’, ‘give to read’, ‘evaluation’, ‘problem’, ‘question’, ‘experience’, ‘knowledge’, ‘ignorance’, ‘truth’, ´knowledge´, ‘examination’, ‘text’, ‘write’. All of these concepts are denaturalized. In this article we present some tensions ensued by this conception of philosophy. We also propose a space for the teacher: she becomes someone who is able to allow herself a distance that enables the emergence of questions; in this way she actually philosophizes and becomes a critical intellectual about her own knowledge: a teacher that creates a space in which difference can spring from repetition. She is someone who teaches a philosophical attitude and doesn’t elude the constitutive antinomies of her task (Derrida, 1986). Finally we consider the impact on our work that one teacher- creator, Matthew Lipman, has had. In particular we look at the contribution that his work has made as a philosophy in education.