When asked what happiness is, a fifth-grader in Japan said:

“Scratching an insect bite and enjoying it so much that at the moment you don’t enjoy anything else, is only one petal on the flower of happiness.”

Gareth Matthews, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of Dialogues With Children, says that children are not only capable of raising interesting philosophical issues, but should be encouraged to do so. I believe this is a very important element lacking in America’s educational system today — self-inquiry or critical thinking.

This is also known as philosophy. In his field work in preparation for his book, Professor Matthews found kids to have amazing cognitive skills and capable of serious inquiry. Some of his examples are truly compelling. See what you think about how kids think…

• Tim, six years old, while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?”

• Jordan, five years old, going to bed at eight one evening, asked, “If I go to bed at eight and get up at seven in the morning, how do I really know that the little hand of the clock has gone around only once? Do I have to stay up all night to watch it? If I look away even for a short time, maybe the small hand will go around twice.”

• John, four years old, had watched airplanes take off, rise and gradually disappear into the distance. Upon his first airplane ride when the plane stopped ascending, turned to his father and said in a rather relieved, but still puzzled tone of voice, “Things don’t really get smaller up here.”

• Ian, a six year old, when the TV was monopolized by three visiting children that kept him from watching his favorite show, asked his Mom, “Why is it better for three children to be selfish than one?”

When children are allowed to ask questions and ponder on answers, a community of inquiry is created. This prompts students to learn the crucial elements of a philosophical discussion. They have to listen carefully, think hard then make up their mind. One student will give an answer, then others will chime in. Then, all of a sudden, instead of “I”, “we” becomes the focus as children compare answers and question each other. What comes from this is an excitement and an engaging curiosity about the world.

Here is an example of a fourth grade class in a philosophic discussion when asked… “Do all questions have answers?”

• Student 1: Is there life in the center of the sun?
• Student 2: Even though we can’t go there to find out, the question still has an answer.
• Student 3: How many grains of sand are there on earth?
• Student 4: There’s a definite number even though we don’t know what it is.
• Student 3: The wind will blow them all around, and we’ll count some more than once.






• Student 5: There are too many to count.
• Student 6: How many grains of sand are there on all the planets?
• Student 7: How many trees are there on earth?
• Student 4: That’s easier than grains of sand. We could count them.
• Student 7: By the time you finish counting them, some would have fallen down and others would have started to grow.
• Student 8: Did God make time begin?
• Student 9: You mean, if there is a God, did he make time begin?
• Student 7: Does space have limits?
• Student 5: Yeah, what would happen if you got to the end of space and tried to put your hand out? If you couldn’t, what would be holding it back on the outside?
• Student 6: Maybe what would hold your hand back is on the inside. There wouldn’t be any outside.

Finally, one of the students asked, “Will time end?” The problem in answering this question, he explained, is that if time did end, no one would be able later to confirm that this was so. These are fourth graders making serious inquiries about our world — our relationship to the world, what it is about, and how it works.

I feel the above type of community of inquiry will develop children who can think for themselves, question the status quo and understand their place in the world. Bringing philosophy into the schools emphasize ways in which the entire educational experience of students can be enhanced. But the goal is more than simply introducing one more subject, it’s inviting students to reflect on relationships among different areas of inquiry and to make sense of their educational experience as a whole. Professor Matthews says that children who cannot make sense of their own experience, who cannot connect to the world by exploring it through inquiry, may find the world to be alien, fragmentary and baffling.

He goes on to say that these children may look for shortcuts to total experiences, and eventually may experiment with drugs or succumb to psychoses. Instead of schools focusing on teaching to finite test results and rigid, inflexible curriculum, our schools should be helping them understand their world and their place in it. The way to do this is to offer them ways to explore it through serious inquiry and critical thinking.

But as long as we have a bureaucratic institution like the government mandating the curriculum and standards, we will have schools that turn out students on an assembly line spitting out predigested pablum. Schools today are not a place for the mind — they are a place for regimentation, compliance and conformance.

If we continue with our current model of education, how will we ever nurture a society of minds capable of not only exploring its many mysteries and intrigues, but solving its many problems and challenges? To quote one of my favorite minds of all time, Albert Einstein…” Intellectuals solve problems geniuses prevent them.” Let’s start creating more geniuses in our schools by allowing them to think.