The Philosophical Child

by Jana Mohr Lone

Indeed, much K–12 education discourages questioning. Educator John Holt noted the ways in which schools train children to be what he called “answered-centered” instead of “problem-centered”—a problem is an announcement that there is an answer to be found, often by prying it out of the teacher or by guessing, as opposed to a puzzle requiring reflection and analysis—because schools “run on right answers.”[5] Typically, when a teacher asks a question in a classroom, he or she is not attempting to initiate a dialogue about the question or to demonstrate the value of questioning but rather is seeking a specific answer from the students. Students spend significant portions of their schooling, in fact, trying to ascertain the right answers to questions asked by teachers (whether aloud in class or on tests). Adults sometimes see children’s questions as having the potential to undermine adult authority, especially in content-driven, teacher-centered, traditional K–12 classrooms.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Iowa, decided to implement an exercise in her classroom to help her students understand racism and discrimination. She divided the class into students with brown eyes and students with blue eyes; she then spent one day discriminating against the brown-eyed students and the next discriminating against the blue-eyed students, and encouraged the students to discriminate against each other. In 1970, the exercise was filmed by PBS. Fourteen years later, the students in the film reunited to watch it and discuss the effect of the exercise on their lives. Watching the film today, it’s striking how quickly the students who are labeled as the “superior group” for the day take to discriminating against their peers. In a very short time, Jane Elliott created an enormous gulf in her class. The exercise powerfully demonstrates the effect of the us-versus-them mentality on a community.

Encouraging children to think about ethics is not about getting them to do what we think is right; it’s about helping them to think for themselves about why certain things are right or wrong and what considerations matter when making moral decisions. Providing children with rules and guidance about moral behavior and good character is useful, but many difficult moral decisions can’t be resolved simply by

applying a rule or principle. To be prepared to face such decisions, young people need to understand when their choices raise difficult moral problems and be able to approach them thoughtfully. We want our children to become reflective and sensitive moral adults. Discussing with them their thoughts and ideas about moral questions will help them get there.