Matthew Lipman (–2010)

This is the teaching manual that accompanies Elfie by Matthew Lipman

This manual aims to help children confront, recognize and explore the problematic aspects of their experience.

It helps them formulate the questions that guide such exploration and, at the same time, it helps them question the seemingly unproblematic aspects of the world and the language they use to talk about it. The manual provides students with many opportunities to organize their experience into story form-an important prerequisite for learning to write. It also provides many discussion plans that the teacher will find useful for promoting classroom dialogue. It further provides exercises designed to help children see that statements are really the beginning of inquiry and not its end, for every statement can be understood as a tentative answer to an implicit question.

Grade Range: K-2 Target Grade: 1… (mais)

I was disappointed with this book. As an autobiography, it is average (at least for me). It is probably not until two-thirds of the way through that the author begins to develop a specific interest in philosophy and philosophy for children. Most of this period of his life story describes the various formalising strategies for the approach (eg, institutes, writing some books, media appearances, conference presentations, and academic work) with little in-depth discussion of the philosophy and his own personal engagement with the children that his approach was designed for (I'm not sure whether he taught children philosophy himself or merely developed the approach that others implemented). There's no doubt that this educational movement is important. I was just hoping for more narrative about Lipman himself worked with children in teaching philosophy himself.… (mais)