SpringerBriefs in Education

Key Thinkers in Education

Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo

Matthew Lipman and

Ann Margaret Sharp
Philosophy for Children’s
Educational Revolution
SpringerBriefs in Education

Key Thinkers in Education

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Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo

Matthew Lipman and Ann

Margaret Sharp
Philosophy for Children’s Educational
Revolution
Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo
Escola de Educação e Humanidades
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná
Curitiba, Brazil

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Education
ISSN 2211-937X ISSN 2211-9388 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education
ISBN 978-3-031-24147-5 ISBN 978-3-031-24148-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

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I wish to dedicate this book to my children,
Paolo and Giulio, to my former students of
the “Soleri-Bertoni” High School (Saluzzo,
Italy), and to the dear memory of Lorenzo
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) and the

Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS, Brussels), which funded my
research stay at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC)
at Montclair State University (New Jersey) in 2018 and to Maughn Gregory, David
Kennedy, and Chelsea Corcoran, for providing access to IAPC’s archive and helping
me with my research. I am especially grateful to Maughn Gregory, Director of the
IAPC, for authorising me to use unpublished documents preserved in the IAPC
archive. Finally, my gratitude goes to Brian Calcott, who revised the text, and
the publishing team, Marianna Pascale, Prashanth Ravichandran, Lay Peng Ang,
Nick Melchior, Sophie Li, Cynthia Kroonen, Aarthi Padmanabhan, and Vishnu
Muthuswamy for their support and assistance in preparing this book.

vii
Introduction

In 2002, I was writing the introduction to the proceedings of a congress on envi-

ronmental ethics which had taken place in Italy the year before. I was dealing with
environmental complexity with the aim of finding effective ways of coping with it
from an ethical perspective. One of the possibilities was to develop a type of multidi-
mensional thinking, which, with the inclusion of care and emotions, could mobilise
our will to behave more responsibly. This idea was discussed in an online article
on education for complexity (Striano, 1996) which presented Matthew Lipman’s
philosophical-educational perspective in an intriguing way. This was when I first
heard of “Philosophy for Children”. I browsed the web again and read everything I
could find on this subject, including the history of the Institute for the Advancement
of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). I also found Lipman’s email address and decided
to write to him, asking for additional information on a publication of his mentioned in
Striano’s article. It was not long before I received his reply, sent by the conventional
postal service. It included a hard copy of the typescript he had published in 1995 on
“Moral Education Higher-Order Thinking and Philosophy for Children” (Lipman,
1995), which I eagerly read and enjoyed.
At that time, I was a secondary school teacher of humanities and philosophy, and
I was in search of inspiring and unconventional teaching methods. With the support
of an Italian cultural association, I conceived of the idea of organising a teacher-
training course in Philosophy for Children, which I planned to attend myself. I thus
contacted the Centro di Ricerca sull’Indagine Filosofica (CRIF), the Italian research
and training centre in Philosophy for Children, which had encouraged the transla-
tion to Italian of the novels and instructional manuals of the P4C curriculum. As a
result, in 2005, the personnel from CRIF, including Antonio Cosentino, Pierpaolo
Casarin, Maura Striano, and Silvia Bevilacqua, supervised a teacher-training course
in northern Italy. I still remember the first meeting. At the start of the session, Antonio
and Pierpaolo asked the teachers to change the classroom setting and sit in a circle.
They introduced P4C in a classical way with the aid of some slides. After the presen-
tation, a number of participants asked for bibliographical references, since the slides
had none. Antonio and Pierpaolo provided a few, but quickly moved on to the second
phase of the class, which was a session of P4C. It was at this point that something

ix
x Introduction

odd occurred. The participants started to manifest puzzlement, discontent, and impa-
tience. During the session, teachers, including myself, repeatedly posed questions
like: “What should I do when my pupils ask this or say that?” and “What is the
best thing to do if the children in my class start quarrelling?”. I do not remember
Antonio and Pierpaolo’s replies, but I recall my increasing frustration as the fellow
participants and myself manifested their incapability to understand the meaning of
what they were doing. Suddenly, I realised something. What if all that Antonio and
Pierpaolo were asking us to do was that we changed our mindset, stopped playing the
part of the teacher, and finally launched ourselves into the discussion? As I learned
afterwards, this was indeed their intention—something they had learnt at the school
of Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. After I had that insight and changed
my posture, I started to really enjoy the sessions with fellow teachers, as well as the
subsequent training activities with my pupils. Over time this interest continued to
flourish and eventually developed into an academic research interest.
During this strange and peculiar encounter with P4C, I learned that Philosophy for
Children was markedly different from a standard educational technique or method-
ology; one that would be acquired in an educationally aseptic environment and then
simply applied to real classrooms. I started to doubt that education was anything
like this kind of business. I learned that it was not through the mastery of a tech-
nique that I could improve my teaching, but by means of a radical change of mindset
and paradigm; a revolution in my educational vision and practice. I also had the
presentiment that this revolution entailed some kind of uncertainty, and that I had to
acquire the capacity to deal with this on a daily basis. But what was the nature of
this uncertainty?
I felt that conducting a communal philosophical inquiry was a complex business,
involving both philosophical and relational abilities. It would involve trying to listen
and understand what other people were trying to say, acquiring a feeling of how
the discussion was evolving, perceiving the rhythm of communal inquiry and the
change within my personal thoughts, and developing the capability to accompany all
these movements. In short, there was an uncertainty related to the fact that dialogic
interactions stimulated me to go beyond my comfort zone and compelled me to
think for myself in a sense I was not accustomed to, despite my academic graduation
and Ph.D. studies in philosophy. Indeed, the kind of philosophy practised in the
“community of philosophical inquiry” was somehow different from the philosophy
I had studied at university or the one I was teaching at school. Instead of simply
applying the thoughts of others to certain contexts, this kind of philosophy compelled
participants to clarify their own thoughts through dialogic interaction with others.
This was a new practice to me, and a demanding one, although definitely liberating,
creative, and stimulating.
Over the years, I had the opportunity to interweave the practice of P4C with
academic research and, as a result, decided to write this book on Philosophy for
Children’s “educational revolution” (Lipman, 1996, xv), whose origins date back half
a century. This extensive time span enables both a historical and a critical assessment
of the P4C worldwide educational movement, and this is especially urgent today
when education is undergoing problematic changes related to social, economic, and
Introduction xi

political challenges. In particular, Lipman and Sharp’s educational-philosophical

perspective provides a repertoire of experiences and reflections which are relevant to
current debates on educational issues such as interculturality, social and ecological
sustainability, the future of democracy, issues related to social justice and gender,
the development of individual and interpersonal abilities, and the need to mobilise
philosophy against the current reductive trends in teaching and education.
The approach I chose for this book is historical-genealogical, in the sense that
I try to connect Lipman and Sharp’s views on education and philosophy with their
biographical (Chap. 1) and historical contexts (Chap. 2). I then focus on the main
ideas of their philosophical-educational vision (Chap. 3) and finally try to clarify
the specificity of the educational curriculum they devised (Chap. 4). In conclusion
(Chap. 5), I propose a critical and comparative appraisal of P4C’s achievements as
well as its future perspectives.
Finally, one of the aims of this book is to underline that the whole of Philosophy
for Children, including its curriculum, educational practice, widespread success, and
overall educational philosophy, relies entirely on the fruitful cooperation between
Lipman and Sharp—an enduring interpersonal and philosophical partnership that
has been generally overlooked by scholars until the recently published In Community
of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp, which claimed that an equilibrium between the
cofounders had to somehow be re-established (Gregory & Laverty, 2018). Needless to
say, I totally agree with this perspective, which I tried to develop further in this book,
especially regarding the origins and development of key concepts and practices of
Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophy for Children, such as caring thinking, the community
of philosophical inquiry, and teacher education.

References
Gregory, M., & Laverty, M. (Eds.) (2018). In Community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp:
Childhood, philosophy and education. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Lipman, M. (1995). Moral education higher-order thinking and philosophy for children. Early Child
Development and Care, 107(1), 61–70.
Lipman, M. (1996). Natasha: Vygotskian dialogues. New York: Teachers College Press.
Striano, M. (1996). Per un’educazione al pensiero complesso. Bollettino della Società Filosofica
Italiana, 159, 55–67.
Contents

1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Matthew Lipman’s Early Years (1923–1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Ann Margaret Sharp’s Early Years (1942–1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 Lipman and Sharp’s Providential Encounter in 1973 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Four Decades of Fruitful Cooperation (1973–2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2 The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution . . . . . . . 17
2.1 The 1960s: Political and Social Tensions in the US . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 The Widespread Need for Educational Renovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3 Philosophy’s Contribution to Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.1 “Inside-Out Philosophy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 The Challenge of Democracy and Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.3 Intellectual Autonomy and Community-Based Philosophical
Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative,
and Caring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.6 Moral Education and Appreciation of Diversities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.1 The First Novel: “Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery” (1969) . . . . . . . . 71
4.2 The Demand for Empirical Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical
Inquiry” Practice and Educational Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.4 Training Supervisors and Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

xiii
xiv Contents

5 An Open-Ended Educational Proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

5.1 Philosophy for Children’s Global Dissemination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
5.2 The Reasons for P4C’s Worldwide Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.3 Towards the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
About the Author

Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo (PhD in Science of Culture, Modena 2005, and PhD in
Philosophy, Torino 2011) is Professor adjunto (Associate professor) of philosophy
of the post-graduate programme in philosophy (PPGF) at the Pontifícia Universi-
dade Católica do Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil). From 2015 to 2018 he served as F.R.S.-
FNRS Chargé de recherche (Postdoctoral researcher) at the Université catholique de
Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), and from 2010 to 2015 he was Assegnista di
ricerca (Research fellow) in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Universitaria Supe-
riore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy). Research interests: continental philosophy (esp. Hans
Jonas), ethics and politics of responsibility, philosophy for children/communities
(p4c), interculturality, landscape studies. The complete list of publications is avail-
able at: http://lattes.cnpq.br/2000641112553851 and at https://scholar.google.com/
citations?user=yE9jfisAAAAJ&hl=en.

xv
Chapter 1
Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

1.1 Matthew Lipman’s Early Years (1923–1972)

Matthew Lipman was born in Vineland (New Jersey) on 24 August 1923 and grew up
in Woodbine (New Jersey), a town founded by Russian peasants of Jewish origins in
the late nineteenth century and less than 200 miles from New York City. His father,
Wolf Lipman, was born in Germany. He later moved to Western Siberia where he
was trained as a machinist in Orenburg (Russia) and finally arrived to the US, where
he settled in Philadelphia. While there, he met his wife, Sophie Kenin, whose family
had previously emigrated from Lithuania to the US. Both Matthew’s parents were of
Jewish origins, although not particularly religious (Lipman, 2008, 8), and this might
be one of the reasons why they decided to move to Woodbine when Matthew was
two years old; the other was that Wolf’s competence as a machinist could be usefully
employed in Woodbine’s agricultural and manufacturing development in the 1920s.
Matthew did not enjoy his school years, finding them rather boring (Lipman,
2008, 2). However, he did enjoy reading and spending his afternoons in his father’s
machine shop, an experience from which—as Lipman stated in an autobiographical
note relevant to his future educational and practical interest in philosophy—he “came
to prefer a world of principled practicality, while considering theory empty and
sterile” (Lipman, 2008, 11).
When World War II broke out, Matthew decided to volunteer for the army and
was assigned to the infantry. Before being sent on his first mission to Europe, he had
the opportunity to attend two semesters at Stanford University (California), where
he had his first encounter with philosophy, a discipline he had never studied before.
This experience was soon interrupted by the military authorities, who demanded that
Lipman be sent to France as an office staff member of Company E. At the beginning
of 1945, the company moved from France to Austria (where soldiers helped open
the Gunskirchen Lager for Hungarian and Romanian Jews) before returning to Ulm
and Neu Ulm for a rest when the war ended.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

R. Franzini Tibaldeo, Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp,
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_1
2 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

After being discharged from the army at the beginning of 1946 and returning
home, Lipman could finally attend to his academic future. In the fall of the same
year, he enrolled in the School of General Studies at Columbia University (New
York).1 It was here that Lipman developed his interest in philosophy, thanks also
to his personal acquaintance with the art historian Meyer Schapiro, and with John
Dewey, who had served on the faculty of the Philosophy Department at Columbia
from 1904 to 1928. Lipman recalls that
the members of the Philosophy Department still lived very much under his shadow: some
were still devoted to his approach, while others were more critical. The younger ones who
were those most receptive to the analytical philosophy emerging out of England were now
most likely to consider Dewey passé. (Lipman, 2008, 54)

As for Lipman, he had no doubt that Dewey’s philosophy was still a reference point
for a meaningful enquiry into “thinking about thinking”, and particularly “thinking
about educational thinking”, as means of reaching “a more objective understanding
of the world” (Lipman, 2008, 58–59). Indeed, Lipman’s Ph.D. thesis, which he
defended in the spring of 1950 under the title Problems of Art Inquiry (final version
deposited in 1954—Lipman, 2008, 66) and then published as What Happens in Art
(Lipman, 1967), relies heavily on Dewey’s discussion of “tertiary qualities” and their
relevance to the artistic experience (Dewey, 1931; Lipman, 2003, 86). Among other
significant studies during this period, Lipman recalls in his autobiography reading
the works of the psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Lipman, 2008, 53), to whom he would
eventually dedicate a book (Lipman, 1996c).
Before beginning his teaching at Columbia, Lipman had the opportunity to spend
two fruitful years in Paris (from the summer of 1950 to the summer of 1952) thanks to
a Fulbright fellowship. In this period, Lipman was introduced to French culture and
philosophy. His acquaintance with Gabriel Marcel, Yvon Belaval, Vladimir Yankele-
vich, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gaston Bachelard, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty
was definitely inspiring (Lipman, 2008, 68–82, 2012, 23). It is thanks to the input
provided by Merleau-Ponty that Lipman refined research he had previously carried
out on the “status of body-imagery” (Lipman, 2008, 76) and turned it into a paper
to be submitted for publication.2 During his stay in Paris, Lipman met with another
US researcher, Wynona Moore, a doctoral candidate from the French department
at Columbia. Wynona and Matthew married in Paris in January 1952, and their
marriage lasted until the beginning of the 1970s when they divorced, due mainly
to divergences related to their careers (Matthew’s academic career in Montclair and
Wynona’s political vocation in the Democratic Party, which culminated in her election
as State Senator for Newark in 1971).3

1 Lipman was to receive his bachelor’s degree in 1948 (Lipman, 2012, 23).
2 Lipman did not succeed in publishing this interesting paper, but fortunately a hard copy under the
title The Concept of the Schema is kept in the IAPC archive (Lipman, 1948). This text provided
material for both Lipman’s doctoral dissertation and in his first academic publications.
3 Wynona Moore was the first woman of African-American origins to be elected to the Senate

(1971), and her twenty-seven years of service made her the Senate’s longest-serving member at the
time of her death (1999). The couple had two children, Karen and Will, born respectively in 1959
1.1 Matthew Lipman’s Early Years (1923–1972) 3

After his return from France in the summer of 1952, Lipman began searching
for teaching positions in philosophy. After a couple of years, he was assigned a
position in General Education at the Columbia College of Pharmacy, where he came
in close contact with Justus Buchler (1914–1991) who was known as a follower
of Ch. S. Peirce and at that time engaged in a philosophical project focused on
human judgement. Thanks to Buchler’s mediation, Lipman was assigned additional
undergraduate teaching in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization course. He
very much enjoyed this experience, especially the programme’s lively educational
environment, where each class resembled “a model of inquiry rather than of mere
teaching and learning” (Lipman, 2008, 87). The highly interactive and discussion-
based didactics employed in this interdisciplinary course relied greatly on Buchler’s
educational views (Buchler, 1954).
Two other biographical episodes are worth noting. The first is Matthew and
Wynona’s decision to become members of the Montclair Unitarian Church in 1960,
which was chosen because of its tolerance to interracial marriages, and where Lipman
volunteered as a philosophy teacher to children (Lipman, 2008, 95). Second was
Lipman’s disagreement with Hannah Arendt as regards the so-called “Little Rock
Crisis” (1957–1958). Some months later, the magazine “Dissent” published a harsh
comment by Arendt, who claimed that it was a mistake to exploit education in order
to overthrow racial segregation (Arendt, 1959–2003). This seemingly conservative
stance provoked Lipman’s reaction, who wrote a reply to Arendt’s article. Although,
in the end, Lipman’s contribution remained unpublished, he wrote to Arendt, and
they had a rather unfruitful exchange (Lipman, 2008, 92–94).4 Despite the result,
this event raised Lipman’s awareness and sensitivity to children’s education and the
crucial role played by education with regard to democratisation; issues that he would
shortly start tackling.
It was indeed in the “apocalyptic era of the 60s” that Lipman and many other
university colleagues began asking themselves whether their children “might be
receiving inadequate schooling” and, if so, how children could be made more “reason-
able” thanks to education, and how the classroom could become more “democratic”
(Lipman, 2008, 107); something suggested long before by Dewey (1916–2014).
Thus, Lipman began envisioning how philosophy—and not only scientific inquiry,
as previously suggested by Dewey—could contribute to fostering children’s educa-
tion, while at the same time helping them deal with the ambiguities related to the
increasingly powerful propaganda and advertising of consumerism (Lipman, 2012,
26). His main idea was that through the dialogue with classmates and the toolkit
Western philosophy had developed over time, it could be possible to enhance chil-
dren’s ability to think for themselves instead of being manipulated by society. For this
purpose, in 1967 Lipman started writing a novel in dialogue form, which could spark
the children’s interest and accompany their education to support thinking. A few

and 1960. Will died of cancer at the age of twenty-four. Eventually, Lipman married Theresa (Teri)
Smith in 1974.
4 A copy of Arendt’s reply to Lipman dated 30 March 1959 is stored in the IAPC’s archive at

Montclair State University (Arendt, 1959).

4 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

years later, this novel was published under the title Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery
(Lipman, 1969; the protagonist’s name, Harry Stottlemeier, was an intentional play on
the name of Aristotle). It was the first of a long series of didactic materials published
afterwards.
However, by 1969, it was quite clear to Lipman that Columbia University, where
he held a tenure position, was not willing to support his philosophical-educational
project addressed to children. Therefore, he started making inquiries and sparked the
interest of Montclair State College (New Jersey), where he was eventually given the
title of Full Professor and the possibility to start an institute for children’s philos-
ophy. By the end of 1972, Lipman had effectively transferred from Columbia to
Montclair, although before this date, he had already started to develop his ideas and
put them into practice with the support of the National Endowment for the Human-
ities (NEH). For instance, in the fall of 1970, Lipman conducted an experiment to
examine the effects of his nascent philosophical curriculum (based on twice weekly,
forty-minute readings and discussion sessions) with a group of fifth-grade students
from a local public school. The experiment was successful and showed that chil-
dren who engaged in philosophical classes achieved better scores across all school
subjects (Lipman, 2008, 121–123).5 Lipman then obtained another grant from the
NEH covering 1971–1973 and continued the project under the auspices of the Depart-
ment of Philosophy at Columbia University. He developed a teaching manual and
arranged for the preparation of a children’s workbook (Lipman, 1976a, 17–18).
Following these initial achievements, Lipman devoted himself entirely to this new
adventure which had to be further developed as its possibilities still had to be explored
philosophically. At the same time, it required organisation, funds, and personnel, but
fortunately it was in this very moment that Lipman made the acquaintance of Ann
Margaret Sharp.

1.2 Ann Margaret Sharp’s Early Years (1942–1972)

Ann Margaret Sharp—the future cofounder with Matthew Lipman of the “Philosophy
for Children” curriculum—developed her convictions on the relevance of philosophy
and philosophical inquiry for education by following a parallel path to Lipman’s.
Ann Margaret Shoub was born on 31 May 1942 in Brooklyn (New York), where
she grew up in an Irish Catholic neighbourhood. Her mother, Dolores McCarthy,
was an Irish immigrant, and her father was a young man of Dutch origins who
grew up in Palenville (New York). During her childhood, she loved listening to
the stories of immigration told by her mother and aunts, and in turn, she enjoyed
reading stories to her younger brother and sister, Edward and Eileen. Since the age of

5This pilot experiment was the embryonic form of the “New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills”
developed a decade later by Virginia Shipman, the senior research psychologist of the Educational
Testing Service (ETS), Princeton (NJ), with support from the Division of Research, Planning and
Evaluation of the New Jersey Department of Education (IAPC, 1987b; Lipman et al., 1977–1980,
217–224; Shipman, 1983a, 1983b).
1.2 Ann Margaret Sharp’s Early Years (1942–1972) 5

thirteen, she showed a keen interest in teaching; her first pupils were neighbourhood
children, whom she tutored for the entrance examination for Catholic high schools.
She herself attended a Catholic high school, where she developed an interest in
theology (especially St. Augustine), which would eventually bring her to philosophy.
At the age of eighteen, she started attending the Catholic College of New Rochelle,
where she deepened her knowledge of continental philosophy (Ancient, Medieval,
and Modern European Philosophy; Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Maritain) and at the
same time continued her tutoring activity for her classmates. In 1963, she eventually
graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Intellectual History, before moving to the
Catholic University of America in Washington (DC), where she completed her Master
of Arts in American and Latin American history in 1966. It was during this time that
Ann was introduced to American philosophy through the works of Emerson, Thoreau,
Fuller, Peirce, James, and Dewey, as well as the works of the anarchist political activist
and writer Emma Goldman, who would have a strong influence on her (Sharp, 2012,
39). While attending university, Ann continued her tutoring activities in English and
American history, working with a group of Franciscan priests from Brazil who were
enrolled as doctoral students.
In the meantime, Ann also continued to teach: in 1965–1966, she was appointed
Instructor in World History and US history at Fayetteville State College (North
Carolina), and the following year (1966–1967) Assistant Professor in US and World
Intellectual History at the Virginia Union University in Richmond (Virginia). These
were two of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) established
before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving the African
American community. In the years of Ann’s service in these institutions, the Black
Pride movement was at its apex, and there, confessed Ann as regards her first experi-
ences in Fayetteville, “for the first time, I found myself in the minority. I was a White
professor at a Black College and a rebel as far as the rest of the town was concerned.
For a young white woman to teach at a black college in Fayetteville, North Carolina
in 1966 was something that just was not done” (Sharp, 2012, 36). Nevertheless, her
enthusiasm and her pedagogic abilities helped her out.
Ann sought to develop new and effective teaching methods based on collaboration
between students, including “storytelling, group discussion, collaborative writing,
and compacts of mutual student support”. The aim of her “multifaceted approach”
was “to reveal to her students their own value” (Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 6). Her
core educational conviction was indeed Socratic, since she “came to believe that
the first step in becoming a person is to recognize one’s ignorance and prejudice,
and that the first step in doing that is to be in conversation with others” (Laverty &
Gregory, 2018, 6). Moreover, this teaching experience helped her to clarify her polit-
ical consciousness as regards forms of injustice, “including patriarchy, paternalism
towards children, imperialism, war and poverty” (Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 6).
During her years at the Catholic University of America, Ann had met Vincent
Sharp, with whom she eventually married in 1966. In 1966–1967, while teaching
at the Virginia Union University, Ann had the chance to deepen her knowledge of
modern theology and contemporary European philosophy (especially existentialism)
6 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

at the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond (VA), which was a protestant insti-
tution. In 1967, Vincent obtained a scholarship to study forestry at the University
of New Hampshire, so Ann took a position as Associate Professor of Humanities
and Intellectual History at the Notre Dame College for Women in Manchester (NH),
where she taught philosophy and theology until 1970. In the meantime, she also
continued her education by studying philosophy, psychology, sociology, political
theory, and educational theory at the University of New Hampshire. In the summer
of 1967, Ann and Vincent became the members of the Shaker Village Work Group
in New Lebanon (NY) and were asked to counsel a group of about 100 teenagers as
part of a residential experience in the village.
In 1968, Vincent started teaching biology at the Hampshire Country School in
Rindge (NH). At the same time, the Sharps were also hired as house parents to
thirteen teenagers with various degrees of mental problems, probably related to the
fact they were high-IQ kids who were dysfunctional in a standard classroom setting.
These children did not go to school on a regular basis and house parents were there to
provide them with some education. This unconventional schooling proved a unique
experience, since “that’s where I learned about community of inquiry” (Sharp, 2018,
18). On her return home, exhausted, from teaching at the Notre Dame College for
Women, Ann used to correct her college seniors’ essay exams with the help of these
teenagers. They used to read the papers aloud and discuss the criteria to assess them.
And then we’d fight and fight and fight. I wouldn’t let them just give an A, they had to give
the reason […]. I found it very challenging, but I liked them […]. And I think that they were
kind of proud that they were grading senior papers. (Sharp, 2018, 19–20)

The same happened when Ann discussed music with her teenagers (Tchaikovsky,
the Beatles, Bob Dylan). As a result, Ann confesses that she
was much more receptive to popular music after having had that experience with them. So
I owe them a lot […]. But the main thing I owe them is the sense of working in community
[…]. I think I learned more about living in community from them than from anybody else.
(Sharp, 2018, 21)

So, instead of providing these brilliant, albeit challenging, teenagers with tradi-
tional classes (namely, taking material and making it accessible), Ann simply “made
the resources available to them and set the borders, and kind of gave them a sense
of the parameters of what we were working on” (Sharp, 2018, 23). After all, these
boys were very capable of talking, expressing, and doing research for themselves.
In the end, this dialogic experience of “indirect teaching” (Sharp, 2018, 23) not only
generated beneficial pedagogical consequences in the long run, but also stimulated
Ann to turn her college courses into seminars. Sharp described how these seminars
were designed:
We would have a text and usually some had read it, some hadn’t, and so I always had
some means of recalling what was in the text; and then we would discuss it in terms of its
appropriateness, whether we thought it made sense, etc. And I would try to problematize it,
whatever the issue was, so that they could have something to hassle about. And once they
got the hang of it they did very well – and not only did they discuss well, they wrote well.
(Sharp, 2018, 23)
1.3 Lipman and Sharp’s Providential Encounter in 1973 7

In many respects, this educational experience appeared to be an anticipation of

the development of Philosophy for Children to come.
In 1970, the Sharps moved to Massachusetts where Vincent took a position at
the Bement School (Deerfield), while Ann began her doctoral studies (Ed.D.) at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst (MA), advised by the historian and philosopher
of education, Robert L. Wellman. The title of her dissertation, which she concluded
in 1973, was: The Teacher as Liberator: An Analysis of the Philosophy of Education
of Friedrich Nietzsche. This work served as the basis of her earliest publications
on Nietzsche’s educational philosophy. In these years, Ann read the works of John
Dewey and developed her consciousness of belonging to an American philosophical
tradition. In this context, Ann fully developed her pedagogical credo; indeed, she
was convinced that what teachers and students needed in order to “make sense of
the tradition so that it could make a difference in how they saw their world” (Sharp,
2012, 39) was philosophy. Provided, of course (as Dewey had already theorised),
philosophy itself could be translated and reconstructed for this purpose. By the end
of her doctorate, Ann was in search of a way to put this project into practice.
Immediately upon graduating from the University of Massachusetts in 1973, Ann
was hired as Assistant and then Full Professor of Education at Montclair State College
(now University)6 in Montclair (NJ), where she remained until shortly before her
death in 2010.

1.3 Lipman and Sharp’s Providential Encounter in 1973

Although Matthew Lipman does not seem to recollect it, the first time he and Ann
Sharp met was in 1972 or early in 1973 in Amherst, where Lipman participated
in a meeting at the Center for High School Philosophy. Lipman “had travelled up
from Montclair, New Jersey, to discuss his interest in elementary school philosophy”
(Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 9) and was introduced to Sharp by her advisor, R. L.
Wellman. In an unpublished correspondence with Megan Laverty, Sharp recalled
thinking that “this is something that I would be interested in very much” (Laverty &
Gregory, 2018, 9).
The decisive meeting occurred in November 1973 at Montclair State College,
among whose faculty belonged both Lipman and Sharp. Sharp’s memory of the
encounter is the most detailed and ironic. On 8 November 1973, Lipman had organ-
ised an important event on “Pre-College Philosophy” at the Student Center of Mont-
clair State College (Lipman, 1972),7 with the aim of raising “public consciousness
about the possibility of teaching middle-school, junior high school and secondary
school students philosophy” (Lipman, 1993a, 37). As we know, at that time,
Lipman’s contribution to elementary school philosophy, namely Harry Stottlemeier’s

6In 1994, Montclair State College was renamed Montclair State University.
7Although the journal issue containing the succinct report of the conference discussion is dated
before the event, it actually appeared the following year, in 1974 (Lipman, 1993a, 37).
8 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

Discovery (1969), had been published, but only in a small and not yet universally
known off-print version, so Lipman had to reduce the scope of the event. However,
his book circulated among the congress audience, among whom was Ann Sharp.
That very night, after the conference, she read Lipman’s novel and was thoroughly
impressed. This is Megan Laverty and Maughn Gregory’s account of what happened
afterwards:
Upon finishing it, she telephoned Lipman in the middle of the night to congratulate him
on a powerful philosophical and pedagogical innovation and to express her desire to join
forces with his project from across campus. Their conversation began with Sharp introducing
herself and asking, “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!” to which Lipman replied,
“Do you have any idea what time it is?!” She arrived in his office the next day. (Laverty &
Gregory, 2018, 10)

At this point, we can proceed with Lipman’s recollection of their meeting: Ann
“approvingly walked into my office, sat down at my typewriter, and asked if she could
be of assistance” (Lipman, 2008, 124–125). Sharp’s proactive, straightforward, and
pragmatic attitude, along with her educational competence, was indeed a blessing.
Lipman needed help to develop the project and overcome the resistance of many of his
faculty colleagues. Sharp brought to the project “the desperately needed combined
perspectives of Education and Philosophy, had a prompt understanding of what I
was trying to do with Harry and had a strong sympathy for children” (Lipman, 2008,
125). Moreover, she helped Lipman clarify his own philosophical view of the project:
She brought a rich philosophical understanding as well – one which I was only just beginning
to understand myself, and to understand the need for […]. [W]hen she got to Montclair State,
to the School of Education in particular, she knew that something was missing there, that
there was a need that the present faculty was not addressing. (Lipman, 2010, 14)

On her part, Sharp remembers there was always a terrible tension between the
professors of philosophy and education:
They didn’t see education the same way; they didn’t see dialogue in the same way. The
curriculum people were all connected up with methodology and very little substance; the
[philosophers] had all the substance but absolutely no methodology […]. And I was the
mediator[,] maybe because technically I came from both worlds […]. [B]ut [also] I just
don’t think it’s Mat’s style to go mediating… I tend to be much more social, particularly if
there is a problem like that on the table that threatens to rupture the community. (Unpublished
manuscript of Peter Shea’s interview with Ann Sharp in 2008, quoted in Laverty & Gregory,
2018, 11)

From that moment onwards, Lipman and Sharp joined forces. From a philosoph-
ical point of view, they succeeded in combining American philosophy (Lipman) with
the Catholic and Continental philosophical traditions (Sharp) (Lipman, 2010, 16).
Moreover, Lipman’s intuition that philosophy needed to be reconstructed “in the
form of narratives for children” (Sharp, 2012, 41) and translated “for people outside
the discipline” (Sharp, 2012, 38) went hand in hand with Sharp’s enthusiasm and
capability to unify theory and practice and shape the “community of inquiry”, as “a
working cooperative model of education that combines pragmatism with the thinking
of all the people who were working to open a new approach to philosophy” (Lipman,
2010, 15–16).
1.4 Four Decades of Fruitful Cooperation (1973–2010) 9

1.4 Four Decades of Fruitful Cooperation (1973–2010)

One of the first tasks Lipman and Sharp undertook was to provide their activity with
a name. They quickly settled on the somehow provocative “Philosophy for Children”
(P4C), which—recalled Lipman—
I especially liked because it seemed dramatically to contradict itself: if it was really philos-
ophy, people would say that children couldn’t do it; and if children could do it, then people
would say that it couldn’t really be philosophy. (Lipman, 2008, 125)

In 1974, the Board of Trustees of the Montclair State College formerly established
a philosophy for children centre capable of offering graduate courses.8 The centre
was sponsored by the Schools of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education and
was given the name of “Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children”
(IAPC). Lipman was appointed Director and Sharp, Associate Director. Lipman and
Sharp organised their efforts in order to develop their project: Lipman focused on
administration, fund raising, and academic writing, while Sharp took responsibility
for recruiting people, teaching, developing degree programmes, and disseminating
P4C nationally and then internationally (Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 2). It is worth
noting that this division of labour partly explains the reason why for many years
Sharp’s scholarly contribution to P4C, her unique contribution in conceptual and
creative terms, has been overlooked9 ; the other reason being the peculiar “anecdotal
style” of her publications, which “was regarded by many as whimsical, perhaps less
serious than systematic academic writing” (Glaser, 2018, 221). It is only in recent
times that Sharp’s philosophical contribution to P4C has been finally recognised,
especially in terms of her relentless enquiry into the meaning of the “exemplary
experience” of philosophy, which was perfectly in line with Dewey’s warning against
abstract thinking (Glaser, 2018, 220).
Lipman and Sharp’s main business was the joint development of an educational
curriculum focused on philosophy. The first step was to attain funds to publish Harry
Stottlemeier’s Discovery, which occurred in 1974 thanks to the financial support
of the Brand Foundation (Lipman, 1974). Soon afterwards, thanks to a Schumann
Foundation grant, the accompanying teacher’s manual was also published (Lipman &
Sharp, 1974). Eventually, the manual was further developed in cooperation with Fred-
erick S. Oscanyan, who was equally interested in philosophy for children and joined
forces with Sharp and Lipman in 1975. As a result, a second edition was later released

8 In 1992, Lipman and Sharp conceived of a doctoral programme in philosophy (Ph.D.) with special-
isation in Philosophy for Children and wrote an “informal recommendation for the establishment of
a Ph.D. program in P4C” (IAPC, 1992). However, they afterwards changed their mind and in 1996
required the institution of a doctoral course in Education (Ed.D.) with concentration in Pedagogy
and specialisation in Philosophy for Children, directed by Sharp (1996). In 1998, the Ed.D. was
included in the new academic programme.
9 For instance, specific contributions by Sharp include the focus on personhood, feminism, as well as

the aesthetic, corporeal, spiritual, religious, imaginative, and ecologic relevance of the community
of philosophical inquiry, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapters.
10 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

under the title Philosophical Inquiry: An Instructional Manual to Accompany Harry

Stottlemeier’s Discovery (Lipman et al., 1979–1984).
In Newark in 1975, the first teacher-training experience took place, due to support
from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The following years were
devoted to testing the efficacy of P4C in the development of children’s reasoning
skills. A positive result in this regard could indeed help the educational programme
attain special accreditation and thus secure its future; as actually happened when, in
1987, the National Diffusion Network of the US Department of Education recognised
P4C as “exemplary”.
Returning to the early years, in 1976–1978 the first assessment research was
conducted in Newark and Pompton Lakes (NJ); a second one was carried out in
1980–1981, in ten New Jersey communities and in Bethlehem (PA). In both cases,
the results were highly encouraging. This evaluative work was finally completed
in 1983 and led to the development of a specific test called the “New Jersey Test
of Reasoning Skills” (IAPC, 1987b; Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 217–224; Shipman,
1983a, 1983b).10
During the same period, Lipman and Sharp worked hard to develop their educa-
tional curriculum. Their aim was to write and publish materials to be employed
from elementary to secondary grades. These materials would consist of novels like
Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery being read and discussed with pupils, supported by
instructional manuals to help teachers to facilitate classroom discussions11 ; espe-
cially those teachers who did not have a philosophical background. Lipman would
write the novels, while Sharp would develop the instructional manual (Lipman, 2008,
132–133). However, it was Sharp who generally provided Lipman with the specific
“aspect of human experience” to be developed in each novelistic chapter (Lipman,
2010, 17). The Lipman–Sharp duo completed the following works, which became
integral parts of the P4C educational curriculum (IAPC, s.d.), in addition to the
already mentioned Harry (for 5th and 6th graders) and Philosophical Inquiry:
● The novel Lisa (Lipman, 1976b) for junior high school (7th and 8th graders) and
the teacher manual on Ethical Inquiry (Lipman et al., 1976).
● The novel Suki (Lipman, 1978) designed for secondary school (grades 9 and 10)
and the instructional manual on Writing How and Why (Lipman & Sharp, 1980a).
● The novel Mark (Lipman, 1980) for secondary school (grades 11 and 12) and
Social Inquiry: Instructional Manual to Accompany Mark (Lipman & Sharp,
1980b).
● The novel Pixie (Lipman, 1981) for elementary school (grades 3 and 4) and the
manual Looking for Meaning (Lipman & Sharp, 1982a).
● The novel Kio and Gus (Lipman, 1982) for 2nd and 3rd graders and the manual
on Wondering at the World (Lipman & Sharp, 1982b).
● The novel Elfie (Lipman, 1988a) for 1st graders, whose manual on Getting our
Thoughts Together Lipman edited with Ann Gazzard (Lipman & Gazzard, 1988).

10 More on the results of these experiments will be said in Chap. 4.

11 The in-depth analysis of a P4C dialogic session will be carried out in Chap. 4.
1.4 Four Decades of Fruitful Cooperation (1973–2010) 11

● The novel Nous (Lipman, 1996a) for 4th to 6th graders and the manual Deciding
what to Do (Lipman, 1996b).
Below is the graphical representation of the novels for the P4C curriculum in 1987
(IAPC, 1987a, 31), before Nous was published in 1996:

Additionally, Lipman wrote the novel Harry Prime (1987) for adult education,
while Sharp wrote The Doll Hospital (1998), Geraldo (1999), and Nakeesha and
Jesse (2002, 2005c) novels for early childhood (kindergarten and 1st graders) and
Hannah (2005a), a novel for middle school students, along with the instructional
manuals (Sharp, 2005b, 2005d; Sharp & Splitter, 2000a, 2000b).12
Alongside the development of the curriculum, Lipman and Sharp put huge efforts
into academic publications, with the aim of increasing the reflective awareness of their
educational philosophy and, at the same time, foster P4C’s worldwide knowledge and
impact. In 1979, they launched “Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children”,
whose issues were continuously published until 2014. The following books proved to
be of equal importance: Philosophy for Children (Lipman & Bynum, 1976), Philos-
ophy in the Classroom (Lipman et al., 1977–1980), Growing up with Philosophy
(Lipman & Sharp, 1978a), Philosophy Goes to School (Lipman, 1988b), Thinking
in Education (Lipman, 1991, 2003), Studies in Philosophy for Children (Sharp &

12Additionally, the IAPC archive also contains other unpublished novels, such as Lipman’s
Ashaka (“adult novel, prison population”, dated 1985) and Relations (“Adult novel; undergraduates,
prospective teachers”, dated 1972), and Sharp’s Why Should I Care? (s.d.) and Mieke (s.d.).
12 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

Reed, 1992), Thinking Children and Education (Lipman, 1993b), Teaching for Better
Thinking (Splitter & Sharp, 1995), Natasha: Vygotskian Dialogues (Lipman, 1996c),
Studies in Philosophy for Children: Pixie (Reed & Sharp, 1996), and A Life Teaching
Thinking (Lipman, 2008). Also, the renowned philosopher and professor at the
University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Gareth Matthews, who came in contact with
Lipman and Sharp in the 1980s, contributed to their effort by devoting his later
publications to philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood.13
However, since the very beginning of their cooperation, Lipman and Sharp devoted
special attention to putting their philosophical-educational vision into practice. After
their first teacher-training experience in Newark in 1975, they relentlessly engaged
in teacher education as a means of contributing “significantly to the creation of a
community of inquiry” (Lipman & Sharp, 1978b, 86). They started disseminating
the programme to New Jersey school districts, thanks to the help of specially trained
personnel (Lipman, 2008, 134–135). A grant from the NEH enabled Lipman and
Sharp to organise, in January 1976, an initial one-week training seminar at Rutgers
University (NJ). Thanks to additional support (by the Schultz and Rockefeller Foun-
dations among others), further training seminars were subsequently organised at
Fordham University, Yale University, Harvard University, University of Illinois at
Urbana, Michigan State University, Albion College in Michigan, and Pocono Envi-
ronmental Education Center (IAPC, 1983; Lipman, 2008, 135–136; Sharp, 1996).
The workshops started to be organised annually and from 1983 onwards were even-
tually relocated to St. Marguerite’s Retreat House in Mendham (NJ), where they still
take place each summer.14 Among the results of these teacher-training activities was
a movement in the direction of affiliate P4C centres around the US, the first of which
was the Oregon (then Northwest) Center for P4C at Western Oregon State College.
In 1978, to facilitate the operation and administration of the IAPC, the philosopher
of education, Philip C. Guin, was hired as a resident teacher educator and Director
of Field Services for P4C, a role he carried out until 1998. He eventually became
Ann Sharp’s second husband, and they remained married until his death in 2008.
In the 1980s, the IAPC succeeded in attaining global resonance (Lipman, 2008,
141–152); especially Ann Sharp, who became Associate Director of International
Dissemination at the IAPC and was in charge of coordinating international develop-
ment. Over the years, Sharp directed teacher-training workshops in Nigeria, Chile,
Costa Rica, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Austria, Russia, Brazil,
Mexico, Argentina, Canada (Quebec), Bulgaria, Spain, Iceland, former Yugoslavia,
Portugal, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Italy, and South Africa (Sharp, 1996, 2012,
41). Over the years, some of these experiences proved to be very fruitful; as was

13 On Matthew’s relationship with Lipman and Sharp’s P4C, see Matthews (1994, 3–9), Gregory &
Laverty (2022).
14 Such was the importance of these teacher-training workshops that at a meeting organised by

the UNESCO in 1998, Lipman declared that “[w]e cannot lose the paradigm of the community
of inquiry that Mendham and San Cristobal represent without pre-adults philosophy being struck
a serious blow” (UNESCO, 1999, 78). San Cristóbal de Las Casas was the Mexican city, where,
thanks to the support of the IAPC and Ann Sharp, Eugenio Echeverria had founded the “Centro
Latinoamericano de Filosofía para Niños” in 1993 (http://www.celafin.org).
References 13

the case in Canada, where the local organisation, called La Traversée, was “devoted
to helping women and children who have been victims of sexual aggression” and
successfully used P4C “as an integral part of its preventive and therapeutic approach”
(Lipman, 2008, 143). Incidentally, an entire P4C curriculum in French for elementary
school, focused on non-violence, was developed in Quebec under the supervision
of Marie-France Daniel and Michel Sasseville and published by the University of
Laval Press (Sasseville, 2017).15 Another example was in Nigeria, where Lipman
and Sharp (with the help of M. Sasseville) had a wonderful experience of intercul-
tural exchange (Lipman, 2008, 144–147). In 1985, Sharp promoted the formation
of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC), and
in 1994 with María Teresa de la Garza, Sharp promoted the creation of a doctoral
programme in philosophy, concentrating on Philosophy for Children, at the Univer-
sidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Finally, Lipman and Sharp also gained the
recognition of UNESCO, which invited them to participate in a meeting of experts
on “La philosophie pour les enfants/Philosophy for Children” held in Paris on 26
and 27 March 1998 (UNESCO, 1999).16

References

Arendt, H. (1959). Letter to M. Lipman dated 30 March 1959 preserved in the IAPC archive.
Arendt, H. (1959–2003). Reflections on Little Rock (1959). Republished in Arendt, H. (2003).
Responsibility and judgment, pp. 193–213. Schocken.
Buchler, J. (1954). What is a discussion? The Journal of General Education, 8(1), 7–17.
Dewey, J. (1931). Qualitative thought. In J. Dewey (Ed.), Philosophy and civilization (pp. 93–116).
Minton.
Dewey, J. (1916–2014). Democracy and education. Aakar Books.
Glaser, J. (2018). Social-political dimensions of the community of philosophical inquiry in an age
of globalization. In M. Gregory & M. Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret
Sharp: Childhood, philosophy and education (pp. 217–229). Routledge.
Gregory, M., & Laverty, M. (2022). Gareth B. Matthews. The child’s philosopher. Routledge.
IAPC. (s.d). IAPC Catalogue. Accessed March 30, 2022. https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/wp-con
tent/uploads/sites/200/2019/03/iapc-catalogue.pdf
IAPC. (1983). History of the IAPC. IAPC archive.
IAPC. (1987a). The IAPC curriculum. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 7(1), 31.
IAPC. (1987b). New Jersey test of reasoning skills, Form B. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy
for Children, 7(1), 43–45.
IAPC. (1992). An informal recommendation for the establishment of a Ph.D. program in P4C,
written by Lipman, M. & Sharp, A. IAPC archive.
Laverty, M., & Gregory, M. (2018). Ann Margaret Sharp: A life teaching community. In M.
Gregory & M. Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp: Childhood,
philosophy and education (pp. 1–17). Routledge.

15 In 2004, among other activities, Sasseville promoted a TV series focused on children doing
philosophy, which became the text for an online introductory course in P4C for teachers (https://
philoenfant.org/serie-documentaire/).
16 An important UNESCO research paper on Philosophy: A School of Freedom, published in 2007,

pays due homage to Lipman and Sharp’s educational philosophy and P4C curriculum.
14 1 Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

Lipman, M. (1948). The concept of the schema. Copy of the unpublished paper preserved in the
IAPC archive.
Lipman, M. (1967). What happens in art. Meredith Publishing Company.
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Montclair State University.
Lipman, M. (1996c). Natasha: Vygotskian dialogues. Teachers College Press.
Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in education. Cambridge University Press, second revised edition.
Lipman, M. (2008). A life teaching thinking. IAPC, Montclair State University.
Lipman, M. (2010). Ann Sharp’s contribution: A conversation with Matthew Lipman, D. Kennedy
(Ed.). Childhood & Philosophy, 6(11), 11–19.
Lipman, M. (2012). Matthew Lipman: An intellectual biography, F. García Moriyón (Ed.). Thinking:
The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 20(1–2), 22–32.
Lipman, M., & Bynum, T. (Eds.). (1976). Philosophy for children. Blackwell.
Lipman, M., & Gazzard, A. (1988). Getting our thoughts together: Instructional manual to
accompany Elfie. IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (1974). Instructional manual to accompany Harry Stottlemeier’s
discovery. IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (Eds.). (1978a). Growing up with philosophy. Temple University Press.
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Oxford Review of Education, 4(1), 85–90.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (1980a). Writing: How and Why. Instructional manual to accompany
Suki. IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (1980b). Social inquiry: Instructional manual to accompany Mark. IAPC,
Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (1982a). Looking for meaning: Instructional manual to accompany Pixie.
IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. (1982b). Wondering at the world: Instructional manual to accompany
Kio and Gus. IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., Sharp, A., & Oscanyan, F. (1976). Ethical inquiry: Instructional manual to accompany
Lisa. IAPC, Montclair State College.
Lipman, M., Sharp, A., & Oscanyan, F. (1977–1980). Philosophy in the classroom. IAPC, Montclair
State College, 1977; second edition, Temple University Press, 1980.
References 15

Lipman, M., Sharp, A., & Oscanyan, F. (1979–1984). Philosophical inquiry: An instructional
manual to accompany Harry Stottlemeier’s discovery. IAPC, Montclair State College, 1979;
University Press of America, 1984.
Matthews, G. (1994). The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard University Press.
Reed, R., & Sharp, A. (Eds.). (1996). Studies in philosophy for children: Pixie. Ediciones de la
Torre.
Sasseville, M. (2017). Showing that children can do philosophy. In S. Naji & R. Hashim (Eds.),
History, theory and practice of philosophy for children (pp. 89–101). Routledge.
Sharp, A. (1996). Curriculum vitae. IAPC archive.
Sharp, A. (1998). The doll hospital. Acer Press.
Sharp, A. (1999). Geraldo. Acer Press.
Sharp, A. (2002). Nakeesha and Jesse (pilot version). Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for
Children, 16(2), 4–8.
Sharp, A. (2005a). Hannah. Presses de l’Université Laval.
Sharp, A. (2005b). Rompre le cercle vicieux: Guide pédagogique du roman Hannah I et II. Presses
de l’Université Laval.
Sharp, A. (2005c). Nakeesha et Jesse. Presses de l’Université Laval.
Sharp, A. (2005d). Chair de notre monde: Guide pédagogique du roman Nakeesha et Jesse. Presses
de l’Université Laval.
Sharp, A. (2012). Philosophy for children: An educational path to philosophy. Interview with Ann
Sharp by Maura Striano and Stefano Oliverio. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children,
20(1–2), 33–43.
Sharp, A. (2018). Ann Margaret Sharp in conversation with Peter Shea. In M. Gregory & M. Laverty
(Eds.), In Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp: Childhood, Philosophy and Education
(pp. 18–25). Routledge.
Sharp, A., & Reed, R. (Eds.). (1992). Studies in philosophy for children: Harry Stottlemeier’s
discovery. Temple University Press.
Sharp, A., & Splitter, L. (2000a). Making sense of my world: Teacher manual for the Doll Hospital.
Acer Press.
Sharp, A., & Splitter, L. (2000b). Discovering our voice: A manual to accompany Geraldo. Acer
Press.
Shipman, V. (1983a). New Jersey test of reasoning skills, form A. Totowa Board of Education.
Shipman, V. (1983b). Evaluation replication of the philosophy for children program final report.
Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 5(1), 45–47.
Splitter, L., & Sharp, A. (1995). Teaching for better thinking: The classroom community of inquiry.
Acer.
UNESCO. (1999). La philosophie pour les enfants/philosophy for children. Report of the Meeting
of Experts held in Paris on 26–27 March 1998.
UNESCO. (2007). Philosophy. A school of freedom. Unesco. Accessed March 31, 2022. http://une
sdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001541/154173e.pdf
Chapter 2
The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s
Educational Revolution

2.1 The 1960s: Political and Social Tensions in the US

At the end of World War II, the US reversed the isolationist attitude taken prior to the
war and became actively involved in world affairs (Kupchan, 2020, 303–321). The
following decades were characterised by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, whose
first phase culminated in the Korean War (1950–1953). The subsequent period was
characterised by other international events like the Hungarian Revolution (1956),
the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs Invasion (1959–1961), the Berlin Crisis
(1961), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). In the meantime, another conflict, which
had begun in 1955, was to create great resonance in the US until its end in 1975: the
war in Vietnam.
These international affairs aiming at ensuring globally the country’s sphere of
influence went hand in hand with social, political, and cultural events within the US.
Among these, the remnants of the polarising effects of McCarthyism on society, the
enthusiasm for the “New Frontier” announced by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and its
downturn after the president’s assassination in 1963, the outburst of racial issues and
the growth of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968, and the consequent protests across the US, which occurred in conjunction
with the global university protests of 1968 and with local racial issues, along with
the student strikes and occupations of Columbia University in New York.
While teaching at Columbia’s College of Pharmacy, Lipman took part in these
demonstrations for the democratisation of society and education—a value which he
thoroughly supported (Lipman, 2008, 94). On the occasion of a teach-in organised
by students in 1968, he “suggested the possibility of student representation on the
Pharmacy Board of Trustees, a movement that was starting to happen all over the
country” (Lipman, 2008, 104). However, his declaration “had a disturbing effect upon
several members of the College’s administration. What I thought was a reasonable
step to take, the Dean apparently interpreted quite otherwise; in fact, it was for him
the waving of a red flag” (Lipman, 2008, 104). As a result, when Lipman applied

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 17

R. Franzini Tibaldeo, Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp,
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_2
18 2 The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution

for a grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities in the following year, the
dean “refused to put his signature on it, and I wrote a letter to the president of the
university charging the dean with violating my freedom of inquiry” (Lipman, 2012,
30).
Ann Sharp’s political and social views were also quite progressive, as testified
by her early teaching experiences in Black Colleges and her involvement as house
parent to teenagers (see Chap. 1). The source of inspiration for her radicalism was
the lives and works of remarkable women like Simone Weil, Emma Goldman, and
Dorothy Day (Sharp, 1984; see also Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 10). It was in close
dialogue with these thinkers and writers that Sharp developed her keen interest in
feminism’s capacity to foster social and political change (Sharp, 1978, 1984, 2017,
40).

2.2 The Widespread Need for Educational Renovation

By the end of the 1960s, as a result of diverse existential and professional experiences,
both Lipman and Sharp became aware that in order to effectively tackle the social and
political issues of their times, it was first necessary to focus on education and promote
its radical renovation. In this regard, they were totally in line with many community-
based educational groups which in the same period were nurturing similar projects
(Sharp, 2018, 22; Speer & Perkins, 2003). As regards the US, these views gave radical
answers to educational dilemmas prevalent in the post-war period and still crucial
nowadays, such as the following:
What shall be taught and to whom? Who shall control the curriculum? Who shall support
the schools and various programs? Are standards being lowered? What is needed not only
for today’s conditions of life but also for tomorrow’s? Are we abandoning traditional moral
and spiritual values in our education? Are the schools trespassing increasingly on the time-
honored prerogatives of the home, the church, and the society’s formal and informal organi-
zations? Are we holding our own, through the building of an educated citizenry, with other
nations? What can we do to provide equal educational opportunities for all our citizens?
(Noll & Kelly, 1970, 282)

Especially this last aspect was problematic, since whatever “the deficiencies of
an educational system may be, it is apparent that they most cruelly and harshly
affect precisely those portions of the population that are already educationally disad-
vantaged” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 3). And this resulted in political, social, and
economic inequality. Lipman and Sharp knew that education and schooling had to be
changed, as to restore their democratic meaning as “hallmarks of equal opportunity”,
and sites of “upward mobility in American society” (Tronto, 2013, 130).
Lipman experienced the dysfunctions of the educational system both as a parent
and a university professor, while still at Columbia. As for Sharp, she tackled them
directly as a university student of education. They eventually came up with the idea
of redesigning education through a kind of “compensatory education”, which they
2.2 The Widespread Need for Educational Renovation 19

conceived of as a meaningful “educational excellence for all young people” (Lipman

et al., 1977–1980, 5).
There is however an additional problem to be pointed out; one which both Lipman
and Sharp recognised as the major political and educational threat of their time:
consumerism. Indeed, Lipman was “alerted to the need for protecting children from
types of advertising and propaganda that foreclosed on their freedom of choice rather
than opening it up” and “was beginning to think of the dangers of children’s minds
being open to manipulation” (Lipman, 2008, 103). Henceforth, he started to think
that children’s “ability to defend themselves intellectually was definitely something
that needed to be and could be strengthened” (Lipman, 2008, 103), and this was also
required in order to achieve social integration and defeat racism.
Sharp was equally concerned about the “political, economic, sexual, and moral
messages that infiltrate so much of our space and time through the technologies of
mass communication” (Sharp & Gregory, 2009–2018, 147). In particular, she was
aware of the following gender issue:
The commercial success of the fashion and cosmetics industries testifies to the effectiveness
of commercial media encouraging women to think that the good life is one of sensation,
consumerism, and devotion to projecting a certain image for the public (masculine) gaze.
(Sharp & Gregory, 2009–2018, 147)

Education had to provide children and adults, and especially girls and women,
with the means to deal with this threat and confront its force, in order to achieve
“cognitive and moral growth” (Sharp & Gregory, 2009–2018, 147). Indeed, this
experience, concluded Sharp, could “lead to unique forms of intelligent struggle”
(Sharp & Gregory, 2009–2018, 147).
According to Lipman and Sharp, school was the proper place for children to
acquire the abilities to “think for themselves”, “share their thinking”, and “express
their views verbally, in a reflective manner” (Sharp, 1996–2018, 174), which would
eventually boost their “cognitive self-defense” (Lipman, 2008, 103; Lipman et al.,
1977–1980, 46, 171) against consumerism, propaganda, and manipulation, and thus
culminate (as suggested by Dewey) in “an enormous social reform aimed at revising
society into a world order in which people lived democratically as naturally as they
walked upright” (Lipman, 2017, 13). However, both formal and informal education
in the US were far from being satisfactory in this regard:
Schools are often places where teachers do most of the talking and children mostly listen.
If children do talk, they talk about things that teachers think they should talk about. Rarely
is the classroom a place where teachers and children engage in meaningful conversations
about matters of mutual concern […]. Co-inquiry with children is rare in elementary schools.
Similarly, families are often places where parents do the talking and children do the listening.
(Sharp, 1996–2018, 175–176)

As a result, education was incapable of protecting children from the media’s

tendency to “transform active, inquisitive, curious, wondering children into passive
consumers” (Lipman & Sharp, 2017, 48; see also Lipman, 1976, 21–23).
Lipman and Sharp were not alone in being aware of the dysfunctions of the existing
educational situation, but they gradually developed a vision of how things should be
20 2 The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution

changed in order to meet the challenges of their times. Clearly, their first thought was
for the addressees of education, namely children, who needed “other children who
are also willing to speak their own thoughts, share their own imaginings, and take
their own intellectual risks” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 193). But a more systemic reform
in teacher education was also required, since what was needed were teachers “who
not only know the culture which they have inherited, but who have appropriated
it for themselves and who have an understanding of how one goes about fostering
reasonable, imaginative dialogue among children” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 193). These
comments suggest that “existing teacher-training programs completely fail to prepare
the teacher” for this new philosophical-dialogic responsibility (Lipman et al., 1977–
1980, 46). At the same time, Lipman and Sharp were addressing a wider issue,
namely the teachers’ lack of capacity or willingness to innovate and revolutionise
education—a problem that in the following decades became even more evident and
troublesome (Tronto, 2013, 132; Woodhouse, 2023, 56–81).
How could the goal of renovating education be achieved? Moreover, could it be
attained through a gradual reform in education, or through a more radical educational
stance? Lipman and Sharp came to clarify their radical standpoint on education due
to their interaction with the existing historical context.

2.3 Philosophy’s Contribution to Education

This is when philosophy hit the scene. Indeed, the specificity of Lipman and Sharp’s
approach to education was one with philosophy at its core; it was their belief that
philosophy had to play a leading role in education. In what sense was this to be
understood? And what did they mean by “philosophy”?
Lipman and Sharp broadened and revolutionised the meaning of philosophy. They
broadened its scope in order to include children and revolutionised its form with the
result that philosophy turned out to be a practical communal experience of inquiry.
But before detailing this further, we need to take a look at the relationship between
philosophy and education at large.
It is certainly true that since the Enlightenment, education had been perceived
as central to the attainment of responsible citizens. On her part, philosophy could
contribute to this effort by providing citizens with the proper reasoning competencies
required by communal life. This idea was revived at the beginning of the twentieth
century in the US by the pioneering work by John Dewey, whose aim was to foster
“critical” or “reflective thinking” in children through the employment of the method
of scientific inquiry (Lipman, 2003, 34–38).1 Dewey’s effort resulted in a widespread
didactic movement, characterised by theoretical research (e.g. Ennis, 1962; Smith,
1953), textbooks to make logic and critical thinking accessible to students (e.g. Beard-
sley, 1950; Stebbing, 1939), educational experiments to assess the effectiveness of

1To be true, according to Lipman (2003, 33), the first American thinker who had engaged in and
developed critical thinking was Josiah Royce (1881).
2.3 Philosophy’s Contribution to Education 21

such approach (e.g. Glaser, 1941), and attempts to develop taxonomies of educational
objectives (e.g. Bloom et al., 1956). Also, the informal logic movement stemming
from the works by Ryle (1954–2015, 95–111) greatly contributed to the increase of
critical thinking up until the earlier 1990s (Lipman, 2003, 40–42), when the “visi-
bility of critical thinking had been successfully established” and “was assimilated
into all levels of education” (Lipman, 2003, 45).
However, according to Lipman and Sharp, something important was still missing,
since a “curriculum in which all disciplines were to be taught critically and learned
communally was as far off as ever” (Lipman, 2003, 45). The reason the educational
curriculum had not yet been developed was that critical thinking had been assimilated,
“but only by first making it a toothless tiger” (Lipman, 2003, 45). As a result, Lipman
stated that “critical thinking has not fulfilled its promise” (Lipman, 2003, 5), and this
was especially true for “the vast majority of elementary school students” (Lipman,
2003, 5).
Why elementary school students? Were these students simply unfit for philosophy,
as Jean Piaget asserted decades earlier and whose developmental psychology was still
very influential? To be true, what Lipman became aware of in the late 1970s and early
1980s, was that “Dissatisfaction with Piagetian orthodoxy was beginning to emerge.
The most stirring influences seemed to be Vygotsky and Bruner, and the magic words
were thinking, cognitive skills, and metacognition” (Lipman, 1976, 2003, 30). Not that
there was anything wrong with these concepts; indeed, in their educational efforts,
Lipman and Sharp focused on these very notions.2 Rather, the point was that without a
thorough renovation of education pivoting on philosophy, those ideas would not have
been able to fulfil their educational promise. Thus, Lipman and Sharp’s challenge
required them to set up a philosophy-centred educational curriculum capable of also
including elementary school students; this possibility was no longer prohibited given
Piaget’s overthrow. However, in order to do this successfully they had, at the same
time, to carry out a thorough and comprehensive revision of the very meaning of
philosophy, including its educational role (Lipman, 2003, 3).
Given the widespread influence of critical thinking in education, their first task
was to understand the reasons for its failure. Only after this, they could attend to the
pars construens of their project.
According to Lipman, critical thinking could not keep its educational promises for
the following reasons. Firstly, its educational application was based on an excessively
narrow (i.e. strictly logical) vision of thinking, which excluded other less clear-cut
aspects such as judgement or creative and imaginative thinking. Secondly, it had not
been capable to “construct a valuational component, in which students would be able
to talk together freely about the different sorts of values, and how they were to be
appreciated” (Lipman, 2003, 5). Thirdly, teacher’s preparation was insufficient, and
fourthly, since it had not been supported by an appropriate pedagogy, the critical
thinking movement evidenced a lack of educational self-awareness and was eventu-
ally incapable of “upgrading the whole of education” (Lipman, 2003, 6). As a result,
although critical thinking had been successfully included in many educational (high

2 More will be said in this regard in Chap. 3.

22 2 The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution

school and college) curricula, it had mostly been reduced to a school subject among
others, taught in a traditional educational context.
Lipman and Sharp were in search of an alternative approach, revolving around
an “organising principle” capable of systematising the characterisations of critical
thinking “in a consistent and coherent way” (Lipman, 2003, 58) and thus boost
students’ thinking as a whole. Indeed, it was Lipman’s opinion that
we will not be able to get students to engage in better thinking unless we teach them to employ
criteria and standards by means of which they can assess their thinking for themselves. I do
not see this coming about through teaching about critical thinking as it is now understood
and practiced […]. Teaching students about critical thinking is about as likely to create a
nation of critical thinkers as having students learn the results of research into bicycle riding
is likely to create a nation of bicycle riders […]. Paradoxical as it may seem, teaching the
facts about a subject cultivates a distanced, theoretical attitude toward that subject rather
than a practical one. (Lipman, 2003, 75–76)

Therefore, something less abstract than solely critical thinking based on logic was
required. Lipman and Sharp were in search of a more meaningful, practical experi-
ence capable of fostering reflection and self-reflection, and this is why they conceived
of the educational practice of philosophical inquiry through interpersonal dialogue.3
Instead of sticking to the traditional or “standard paradigm of normal practice”, they
envisioned something radically different, namely a “reflective paradigm of critical
practice” (Lipman, 2003, 18, 2017, 12–13; see also Sharp, 1986–2018, 191).
Their aim was not to get rid of critical thinking altogether, since there
is nothing wrong with attempting to infuse critical thinking into the teaching of the disci-
plines. But these efforts at infusion are bound to be fumbling, haphazard and unavailing
as long as children are not permitted to examine directly and for themselves the standards,
criteria, concepts, and values that are needed to evaluate whatever it is they are talking and
thinking about. (Sharp, 2017, 37)

In this regard, Lipman significantly added:

When I first became interested in this field, I thought that children could do no better than
“Critical thinking” – that is, having their thinking trained to make it more rigorous, consistent
and coherent. But critical thinking contains no concept formation, no formal logic, and no
study of the works of traditional philosophy, all of which I have endeavored to supply in
Philosophy for Children […]. Critical thinking seeks to make the child’s mind more precise;
philosophy deepens it and makes it grow. (Lipman, 2017, 4–5)

Lipman and Sharp’s reflections also intertwined with a debate which characterised
the US educational debate in the 1980s. In those years, some addressed the possibility
of achieving an overall reform in education based on the notions of “higher-order
thinking” and “higher-order thinking skills”. This idea was based on hierarchical
learning taxonomies, like those developed earlier by a team of educators chaired
by Bloom et al. (1956), which ended up being very influential.4 However, there

3The meaning of this expression will be analysed in detail in Chap. 3.

4As regards the history of the effects of Bloom’s taxonomy, including many proposals of revisions
and modifications, see Anderson et al. (2001), Marzano & Kendall (2007), among others.
2.3 Philosophy’s Contribution to Education 23

was no unanimity that “higher-order thinking” should be promoted at all educa-

tional levels, including elementary school. Indeed, according to some, it would have
been more appropriate if schooling levels respected and were consistent with the
sequential progress from lower-level to higher-order skills. The debate culminated
in an interesting report by the US National Research Council and authored by the
educational psychologist Lauren B. Resnick (1987), who summarised the results of
a workshop held in 1984 with the participation of a working group of psychologists,
educators, computer scientists, and philosophers. While writing her report, Resnick
had consulted many experts, among whom was Matthew Lipman (Resnick, 1987,
60). The relevance of this report was twofold: first, it provided a working definition
of “higher-order skills” capable of challenging the simplistic linearity of sequential
developmental views which failed to recognise the intrinsic complexity of thinking
(Resnick, 1987, 3), and second, it consequently refused to separate “higher-order”
and “lower-order” skills and thus advocated the teaching of higher-order skills at
the elementary school level (Resnick, 1987, 8), since it was the goal of schooling
to cultivate a “broad disposition to higher order thinking” (Resnick, 1987, 48). It is
worth noting that this entailed rejecting the persistent educational idea that “knowl-
edge must be acquired first and that its application to reasoning and problem solving
can be delayed” (Resnick, 1987, 48).
Lipman and Sharp shared this non-dualistic view of the “intimate relationship
of subject matter knowledge and reasoning processes” (Resnick, 1987, 49), and the
echo of the debate on “higher-order thinking” reverberated in their work. In particular,
the first edition of Lipman’s Thinking in Education (1991, 68–98) dealt extensively
with this topic. However, in the second edition of the same book, Lipman erased all
references to the “higher-order thinking” debate and focused on “multidimensional
thinking” instead (Lipman, 2003, 229, 238, 274–276), which will be analysed in the
next chapter (Sect. 3.5).
As a result, Lipman and Sharp were seeking an effective way of developing philos-
ophy’s full educational potential. Also, young children should not be excluded from
this project, but quite the opposite; they had to become its very protagonists, since—as
also Gareth Matthews had underlined—they were indeed capable of philosophising.
This is why Lipman and Sharp conceived of “Philosophy for Children”—“for” and
not simply “with” children, “in the sense that philosophy with children utilizes discus-
sion of philosophical ideas, but not through specially written children’s stories”
(Lipman, 2017, 4; Sharp, 2017, 30–31). What is more, there was a difference as
regards the role played by philosophy in education:
What is called “Philosophy for Children” represents an effort to develop philosophy so that
it may function as a kind of education. It becomes education that employs philosophy to
engage the mind of the child so as to try to satisfy the hunger of the child for meaning […].
Philosophy with children aims to develop children as young philosophers. Philosophy for
children aims to help children utilize philosophy so as to improve their learning of all the
subjects in the curriculum. (Lipman, 2017, 4)
24 2 The Context of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution

By opting for a specific preposition (“for” instead of “with”),5 Lipman and Sharp
wanted to stress that to include philosophy in an educational curriculum entailed more
than just simplifying or adapting its content to the age of the students. It also meant
more than reducing it to critical thinking and definitely more than merely turning it
into just another school subject to be added to the traditional educational curriculum.
As we shall examine in the next chapter, the reconstruction of philosophy in terms
of “communal inquiry” was precisely the process through which the integration of
education and philosophy could be successfully accomplished.
However, reconstructing philosophy this way entailed carrying out various tasks
simultaneously: (1) to elaborate a renovated image of philosophy as communal
inquiry; (2) to rewrite the history of philosophy “as a rich intellectual and cultural
resonance children could use to work out the meaning of their experience and
articulate alternative visions for the future” (Laverty & Gregory, 2018, 12); (3) to
design a practical way of implementing and operationalising the new educational-
philosophical proposal; (4) to educate teachers to change their mindset and acquire
the facilitation abilities to transform their classrooms into communities of philosoph-
ical inquiry; (5) to enrich the didactic proposal with the proper theoretical, reflective,
and meta-philosophical awareness, as well as empirical research; and (6) to envision
ways of achieving a broad educational reform in order to maximise the impact of the
philosophical-educational proposal.
As one can easily perceive, Lipman and Sharp’s project was much more than just
a renewed “philosophy of education” (Gregory et al., 2017, 189). Indeed, since the
IAPC’s very inception, their “philosophy in the school” plan consisted of a threefold
effort: (a) “Inquiry into Educational Philosophy” (see the above-mentioned tasks n.
1 and 5)6 ; (b) “Philosophy for Children Programming” (tasks n. 2, 3, 4); and (c)
“Educational Reform” (task n. 6) (Gregory, 2008, 15–16). In the following chapters,
I will detail and clarify the innovative meaning of these expressions employed by
Lipman and Sharp.

5 On the other hand, the difference between “for” and “with” ought not to be interpreted in the terms
of a contraposition. For instance, the ICPIC, which stemmed from Lipman and Sharp’s efforts, uses
both terms indistinctly (“Philosophy for/with Children”, P4WC; https://www.icpic.org/) to include
a wider range of experiences of doing philosophy with children. For a different interpretation of the
shift from “philosophy for children” to “philosophy with children”, focusing on both generational
and philosophical reasons, see Vansieleghem & Kennedy (2011, 178–179). By the way, a similar
debate had taken place in 1998 at a meeting on Philosophy for Children organised by the UNESCO.
6 Therefore, due to the reasons detailed above, I do not agree with Figueiredo (2022, 146), who states

the following: “Being primarily an educational programme, P4C does not imply the ‘Philosophy of
P4C’”.
References 25

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Sharp, A. (1986–2018). Is there an essence of education? (1986). Reprinted in M. Gregory & M.
Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp. Childhood, philosophy and
education (pp. 186–194). Routledge.
Sharp, A. (1996–2018). Silence and speech in Pixie (1996). Republished in M. Gregory & M.
Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp. Childhood, philosophy and
education (pp. 174–185). Routledge.
Sharp, A. (2017). Philosophy in the school curriculum. In S. Naji & R. Hashim (Eds.), History,
theory and practice of philosophy for children, (pp. 30–42). Routledge.
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Sharp, A. (2018). Ann Margaret Sharp in conversation with Peter Shea. In M. Gregory & M. Laverty
(Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp. Childhood, philosophy and education
(pp. 18–25). Routledge.
Sharp, A., & Gregory, M. (2009–2018). Towards a feminist philosophy of education (2009).
Reprinted in M. Gregory & M. Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret
Sharp. Childhood, philosophy and education (pp. 145–158). Routledge.
Smith, B. O. (1953). The improvement of critical thinking. Progressive Education, 30(5), 129–134.
Speer, P., & Perkins, D. (2003). Community-Based organizations, agencies, and groups. In J. Guthrie
(Ed.), Encyclopedia of education (Vol. 2, pp. 431–441). Macmillan.
Stebbing, S. (1939). Thinking to some purpose. Penguin.
Tronto, J. (2013). Caring democracy. Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.
Vansieleghem, N., & Kennedy, D. (2011). What is philosophy for children, What is philosophy with
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Woodhouse, H. (2023). Critical reflections on teacher education. Why future teachers need
educational philosophy. Routledge.
Chapter 3
Lipman and Sharp’s
Philosophical-Educational Vision

3.1 “Inside-Out Philosophy”

We ended the previous chapter with the allusion to Lipman and Sharp’s educational
philosophy as an alternative to a mere philosophy of education, since it foresaw a
project of thoroughly introducing “philosophy in the school”. Another integral part
of this programme was to conduct a self-reflective and metacognitive inquiry into
this project, with the aim of clarifying its reasons, features, and specificity. As we will
see, both Lipman and Sharp knew that the soundness, solidity, and success of their
revolutionary project relied on their philosophical awareness in this regard. Indeed,
their reflections on the historical development of their ideas provided them with such
an understanding, as well as offering us unique insights into their project.
In an interesting passage of his autobiography, Lipman recalls, while he was
visiting an exhibition of children’s art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
being suddenly stricken for the first time by the power of children’s “form of thinking”
(Lipman, 2008a, 105).1 The children were students at Alexander S. Neill’s Summer-
hill School, which was an example of a radical democratic free school (Neill, 1960).
Lipman started asking himself:
if children could contrive such powerful works in this medium, what were they capable of in
other media? […] Could there not be certain topics on which children’s thinking approached
or perhaps even exceeded the thinking of adults? Could there not be in children what Dewey
called “qualitative thought” – thought in sounds and in colors, for example, and not just in
words, concepts or logical relationships? (Lipman, 2008a, 105)

Indeed, in future years these reflections proved to be central to Lipman and

Sharp’s project, whose endeavour to build on pioneering work by Dewey in order
to philosophise with children sounded like a challenge to the validity of Piaget’s
influential views on cognitive development.

1Indeed, the MoMA had hosted an art exhibition of this kind under the title Young People’s Art
Work From an English School in 1948.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 27

R. Franzini Tibaldeo, Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp,
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_3
28 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

Lipman confessed that after visiting the art exhibition, he started nurturing “a
lively scepticism about the reduction of all thinking about thinking to linguistic
discourse (a phenomenon that was very popular in the philosophy of those days)”
(Lipman, 2008a, 106).2 And he provided an interesting example of this “curious
power” of children’s capacity to think: “My own son, Will, managed to under-
score this point one day as he stepped out of the bath around age two. As I handed
Will his pajamas, he noticed that they were inside-out and immediately exclaimed,
‘Oh, japamas!’” (Lipman, 2008a, 106). Lipman mentioned this anecdote to Rudolf
Arnheim, the author of the influential essay on Visual Thinking (1969), who imme-
diately understood it as an indirect confirmation of his thoughts on the unity of
perception and thinking.3 What is more, in his autobiography, Lipman immedi-
ately connected this episode with the definition, provided twenty years later by the
Bulgarian philosopher Alex Andonov, of P4C as “inside-out philosophy” (Lipman,
2008a, 106). Lipman concluded: “What a wonderful insight on Andonov’s part of the
relationship between philosophy for children and traditional philosophy!” (Lipman,
2008a, 106).
What, according to Lipman, did this “inside-out” transformation mean? It entailed
two radical changes, in education and philosophy, respectively. This turn in educa-
tion implied the following by drawing attention to the processual, student-centred,
and meaningful nature of learning, as a means to overcome traditional educa-
tion’s reductive, unidirectional, dispenser-like, and content-transmission character
(Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 7), as well as the erroneous image of the human mind as
“an empty passive vessel that must be stuffed with information or content in order
to be ‘educated’” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 83). In this regard, Sharp significantly
added that: “If one views education as necessarily serving life, then one can make
no sense of current educational practices that start with content and assume that the
child’s experiences and interests are irrelevant” (Sharp, 1975–2018, 84). This did
not mean that educational contents had to be ipso facto disregarded or erased; quite
the contrary. But indeed, contents had to renounce their absoluteness and exclusive
centrality in the educational process and be reconnected with pupils’ daily experi-
ence: (a) “In order to advance in culture, an education of discipline and great content
is essential, but it must be related to experience” (Sharp, 1975–2018, 85, Sharp,
s.d.a, 9)4 ; (b) by encouraging the pupils’ active involvement in the formative process,

2 On the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, see Rorty (1967–1992).

3 Coherent with this very perspective is also James J. Gibson’s “ecological psychology” (2015),
whose research paradigm strikingly contrasted with the contemporaneous cognitivist mainstream.
4 That the debate regarding the content of educational curricula is still a very hot topic within and

outside the P4C community is testified by the lively debate which took place at the ICPIC conference
held in Madrid in 2017 and was stimulated by Gert Biesta’s critical intervention on how contempo-
rary education, including views like P4C, incurred in problematic trends like “mentalisation” and
being too narrowly “learning-focused” (Biesta, 2017; Kennedy & Kohan, 2017). When in other
writings Biesta (2022, 3) levels equal criticism at the “pure child-centred education”, on the one
hand, and the “pure curriculum-centred” one, on the other, he seems closely in line with Lipman
and Sharp’s educational vision.
3.1 “Inside-Out Philosophy” 29

instead of simply considering them passive addressees; and (c) by shifting educa-
tion’s pivot from the individual to the community.5 This entailed shifting educational
goals away from boosting individual performance towards developing “higher-order
thinking” (Lipman, 1995a), cooperation, and relational capabilities. As a result (and
as will be analysed further in the next sections), education was to foster moral growth
(Lipman, 1995a; Sharp, 1995–2018a) and educators were responsible for promoting
children’s intellectual liberation: “The educator must consciously take it upon himself
to liberate, rather than indoctrinate” (Sharp, 1975–2018, 80; see also Sharp, 1976,
1981).
As regards philosophy, the above-mentioned turn also implied the thorough revi-
sion of its meaning. Firstly, it entailed focusing on philosophy’s continuous and
widespread effort towards existential clarification and on its “ongoing attempt to
make comprehensive sense of our world and our lives”, rather than principally
regarding it as an intellectual product of the Western “mainstream tradition” (Cam,
2018, 30). In the words of Rorty (1982, xv), it entailed distinguishing between
“capital-P Philosophy and lowercase-p philosophy” (Cam, 2018, 30) and empha-
sising the existential and educational relevance of the second over the first. Secondly,
Lipman and Sharp offered a portrait of philosophy quite different from the traditional
one which was mostly abstract and theoretical. Indeed, in their view, philosophy
was relevant to the concreteness of real life, namely a reflective effort involving
the flesh and body of human existence. In this regard, North American pragmatism
provided them with a convenient background on which they consciously built. For
instance, Lipman and Sharp revived Dewey’s notion of “passionate intelligence”
(Dewey, 2013, 73; Sharp, 1995–2018a, 112)6 and developed it into a “multidimen-
sional thinking approach” (Lipman, 2003, 197–203), as a means to overcome the
traditionally narrow and primarily logical idea of “mere rationality” (Sharp, 1995–
2018a, 112). Not that there was something wrong with the logical structure of ratio-
nality fostered by Western philosophy; quite the contrary. Indeed, Lipman and Sharp
subscribed to the importance of formal logic for rationality and thinking. But they
also pointed out that the true educational challenge was to underline logic’s rele-
vance to two additional contexts: “language and the world” (Lipman, 2012, 28; see
also Lipman, 1988, 52) and ordinary life. How could this result be achieved? Surely,
teaching logical skills was “necessary but not sufficient” (Sharp, 1987–2018, 46,
2012, 41). But more than this, what had to be redesigned was the very meaning and
role played by formal logic in the educational process. Therefore, Lipman and Sharp
conceived of the possibility to present formal logic “in a novel instead of a text” and
encourage children “to think up their own examples to illustrate the rules” (Lipman
et al., 1977–1980, 132). As a result, these rules were “not presented in an abstract
system”, but were “discovered individually in a broad variety of settings” related to

5 It is worth mentioning that all three aspects were also shared by other contemporary radical
pedagogists and educational innovators, such as Paulo Freire.
6 In the late essay “Philosophy for Children’s Debt to Dewey”, Lipman carried out a comparison and

a critical analysis of Dewey’s pedagogy and P4C approach. As a result, he stated that “Philosophy
for Children is built unapologetically on Deweyan foundations” (Lipman, 2008b, 150).
30 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

children’s ordinary life (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 132). Besides, it was the practical
and concrete (or informal and contextual) situations in which the problematic issue
was experienced that provided pupils with a meaningful and genuinely philosophical
understanding of how to apply their logical toolkit (Lipman, 1976, 25). Lipman and
Sharp’s conclusion in this regard was indeed remarkable:
Formal logic can contribute to the development of organized thinking because its rules are
rules about sentences. Acquiring and using such rules can readily encourage children to
think about what they and others say […]. Use of the rules can thus help foster critical
thinking, but such thinking is not yet philosophical. It would be a mistake to suppose that
formal logic alone will promote philosophical thinking. While formal logic can serve as an
effective means for helping children realize that they can think in an organized way, it gives
no clues as to when thinking by the rules of formal logic is useful and appropriate and when
it is simply absurd. Critical thinking only becomes philosophic thinking when it is aware
of limitations to its own critical standards. And formal logic alone does not provide such
insight. (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 133)

As we will see, this is the reason Lipman and Sharp’s P4C revolved around
“reasonableness”, rather than solely on rationality. What is more, this readjustment
explains why elementary school children (who according to Piaget’s developmental
psychology and strictly abstract and formal view of philosophy were incapable of
philosophising), could successfully be given this capacity instead (Green, 2017;
Lipman, 1996, 102–103; Walczak, 2019)7 ; a view Lipman and Sharp shared with
their friend and colleague Gareth B. Matthews.
The two above-mentioned semantic revisions of philosophy carried out by Lipman
and Sharp lead us to the third, namely the shift from theory to reflective practice
(Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 209). Although the Western philosophical tradition never
completely relinquished the concern for, and engagement in, practical matters, it is
nevertheless true that philosophy has almost exclusively been understood as a theo-
retical discipline, often characterised by a specialist attitude to knowledge. Instead,
in Lipman and Sharp’s view, philosophy was no longer to be primarily understood
in terms of pure theory, but as a specific way of reflecting on everyday experience
and an endeavour to clarify its ethical challenges. And it was precisely because of its
practical relevance that philosophy could and had to be made accessible to everyone,
including children. This is how Sharp summarised her idea of “doing philosophy”:
One would be correct in saying that as the children engage in doing philosophy well, they aim
at the celebration of the forms in their practice. Children are not only invited to consider the
ideas and ideals of major philosophers, presented in a dialogical mode in language they can
understand, but are encouraged to dramatize creation myths of the pre-Socratics and Plato.
These myths are attempts to represent the redemption of all particular things which, although
contingent, are touched by the ethical. Such myths serve as a reminder for children that the
most ordinary things of everyday life can become morally significant. (Sharp, 1995–2018a,
110; see also Lipman, 1985)

In this regard, Lipman and Sharp can be considered among the forerunners of
present-day philosophical practice, along with Leonard Nelson, Michel Foucault,

7For a different, non-conflicting view of the relationship between the Piagetian theory and teaching
philosophical thinking to children, see Haas (1976).
3.2 The Challenge of Democracy and Citizenship 31

Pierre Hadot, and Gerd Achenbach. Worth noting is that this trend has culminated in
the attention recently devoted by UNESCO (2007) to philosophy and in the clarifica-
tion of the latter’s turn to practice in terms of its social, civil, political, and educational
relevance.
As a result, we can say that the “inside-out” swing in Lipman and Sharp’s proposal
relied on the complementarity between a philosophical turn in education and an
educational turn in philosophy. As will be seen in the next section, Lipman and
Sharp endorsed this twofold convergence for the sake of urgent challenges and crucial
contemporary issues related to democracy and citizenship.
But before proceeding to this topic, there needs to be a mention of the dialog-
ical device through which Lipman and Sharp endeavoured to enact this twofold
philosophical and educational renovation, namely the “community of philosophical
inquiry” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 53), whose meaning will be clarified further on in this
chapter, as well as in Chap. 4. Faithful to the ideas that philosophy “doesn’t always
have to be serious” and that adults “can learn from our enabling children to study it
with us” (Lipman, 2008a, 162; see also Lipman, 1995a, 69, 1996, 36; Sharp, 1992–
2018, 94), Lipman and Sharp envisioned the community of philosophical inquiry in
the following passionate terms: “The classroom community of inquiry itself, with its
procedures and discussions of philosophical concepts, is a celebration of coopera-
tive, attentive and reflective minding—a manifestation of mind in nature in all of its
wonderfulness” (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 110–111).
According to Lipman and Sharp, turning philosophy inside-out was at one with
another, similar shift in education. Since the very beginning of their cooperation, they
were aware that the new paradigm of education called for by P4C went against the
grain of both traditional education and academic philosophy. Moreover, they knew
that their ideas entailed a radical transformation and the need to rethink the entirety of
“the components of traditional education […], including the curriculum, the role of
the teacher, the purpose of grading, individual vs. social inquiry, competitive activities
in the school, the architecture of schools and classrooms and the aims of education
itself” (Sharp, 2017, 32). No wonder then, that their ideas were “quite upsetting for
those who thought they understood the nature of education as the accumulation of
knowledge” (Sharp, 2017, 32). However, according to Lipman and Sharp there was
really no alternative to the radical change they had in mind: “Ultimately, to refuse to
change is to be left alone in the ‘dark ages’” (Sharp, 2017, 32). Therefore, they were
resolute in their case for an educational-philosophical revolution.

3.2 The Challenge of Democracy and Citizenship

As was shown in the biographical sketch portrayed in Chap. 1, both Lipman and Sharp
were convinced supporters of democracy. Their first-hand experiences associated
with issues related to racial, cognitive, and gender diversities helped them define
where they “stood with regard to democratisation” (Lipman, 2008a, 94). Then, as
we saw in Chap. 2, the historical context gave them the opportunity to develop their
32 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

educational awareness of this challenge. As a result, they became convinced that

“the way to make education better was to make the classroom more ‘democratic’”
(Lipman, 2008a, 107). The way they chose to put this idea in practice was dialogical
and philosophical: “The contention and deliberation that this process would stir up in
the classroom would lead students to have opinions they would turn into judgments,
and discussions they would turn into dialogues” (Lipman, 2008a, 109).
In this regard, Lipman and Sharp explicitly acknowledged their debt to John
Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and especially to the idea that achieving democ-
racy required citizens to be properly educated. Indeed, according to Dewey, a
democracy was
more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who partic-
ipate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider
the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down
of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the
full import of their activity. (Dewey, 1916–2014, 93)

Yet, this “democratic ideal” (Dewey, 1916–2014, 93) as well as the very concept
of “democracy” was—according to Lipman—“permeated with vagueness and ambi-
guity that an improved educational system had to identify and reconstruct” (Lipman,
2008a, 107). And this was precisely what Lipman and Sharp endeavoured to work
out.
From a systematic point of view, Lipman’s Philosophy goes to School (1988)
probably provided the most effective account of this reconstruction. Firstly, Lipman
understood school as being geared towards “active citizenship”. It was due to school
education that children were to “become quite well prepared to engage in the kinds of
evaluation of institutions that democratic citizens must be able to perform” (Lipman,
1988, 22). Secondly, education could substantially benefit participatory democracy
and social change by helping society become more equal:
Instead of democratic practice being limited to the annual pull of a lever in a ballot box, there
is an increasing emphasis on participation and community at a variety of grass-roots levels,
thereby avoiding the noxious extremes of rampant individualism and collectivism. If this
direction of social change is to prosper, it must have an educational component. (Lipman,
1988, 42)

Thirdly, democratic education was oriented towards the acquisition of “civic

values” (Lipman, 1988, 47) and embedded in the North American tradition which
focused on a pluralism of values and the freedom of choice.8 In this regard, Lipman
clearly stated that “in a democratic society, committed to pluralism and diversity,
no one set of values can be taught at the expense of other sets of values, without
infringement on someone’s constitutional rights” (Lipman, 1988, 48). However, that
the acknowledgement of plurality and freedom was not understood by Lipman and
Sharp in merely relativistic terms will be clarified shortly as regards their normative
stance on democracy. But before this, a final feature of democracy underlined by

8 As regards the contribution of religious pluralism to this tradition, see Boisi (2007).
3.2 The Challenge of Democracy and Citizenship 33

Lipman and Sharp needs to be highlighted, namely its demands on the citizens who
were expected to develop a dialogic disposition and a genuine commitment to learn
from each other. In this regard, the model of community and dialogue-based inquiry
provided by philosophy could indeed furnish a substantial image of how democracy
ought to resemble:
One of the most valuable contributions philosophy has to make to the conversation of
mankind with regard to civic education is the model philosophers offer of a community
of inquiry in which the participants are profoundly aware of how much they can learn from
other participants with whom they strongly disagree. So long as we think we have nothing
to learn from each other, democracy becomes merely a pluralistic détente. (Lipman, 1988,
72)

On her part, Sharp reiterated the political relevance of the above-mentioned

“commitment to freedom, open debate, pluralism, self-government and democracy”
(Sharp, 1991–2018, 247) and concluded that:
It is only to the extent that individuals have had the experience of dialoguing with others
as equals, participating in shared, public inquiry that they will be able to eventually take an
active role in the shaping of a democratic society. (Sharp, 1991–2018, 247)

These reflections, stemming from the need to detail Dewey’s “democratic ideal”,
resulted in Lipman and Sharp’s reshaping of democracy as “a regulative idea for the
development of the social structure” (Lipman, 2003, 204). This idea turned into one
of the educational cornerstones of the P4C curriculum, since it provided the proper
normative framework to develop “democratic citizens” capable of thinking flexibly,
responsibly, and independently (Lipman, 2003, 208–209).
One last word on Lipman and Sharp’s “normative” view of democracy. What is
meant by this expression is the belief that interacting in a public sphere “in which
individuals come together to participate in reasonable debate for the sake of arriving
at a truly public opinion” (Glaser, 2018, 217) is better than interacting and living in
a social environment lacking these characteristics. Therefore, democracy is “a qual-
itatively better society aimed at justice and global flourishing”, where its members
are seen as “change agents” (Glaser, 2018, 225). By inheriting this way of thinking
from John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, Lipman and Sharp revived it by stressing
its educational implications. Indeed, their P4C proposal entailed the interpersonal
involvement of each participant in an effort of dialogical thinking and communal
inquiry. However, this did not mean that Philosophy for Children told “the child
what to think”, because “ultimately that is up to the child” (Sharp, 2017, 26). And
this was because “substantial values”, or the “what of the dialogical thinking and
communal inquiry is always open” (Sharp, 2017, 25). But for a community to func-
tion dialogically, another set of values was required, namely “procedural values”, like
“questioning, egalitarianism, non-indoctrination, critical judgement-making, open-
ended inquiry, self-correction and democratic procedures” (Sharp, 2017, 25), which
shaped the “how of the dialogical thinking, the how of communal inquiry” (Sharp,
2017, 25). Lipman and Sharp’s normative stance on democracy ultimately relied on
the conviction that “the criteria that govern how the doing of philosophy proceeds
34 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

in the classroom” (Sharp, 2017, 25) were indeed ethical values. Maughn Gregory
summarised Sharp’s thinking in the following statements:
We are committed to procedures of inquiry, and practices of political and ethical interdepen-
dence that we take to be normative; and, as I said, to the aim of practical wisdom, or better
ways to live. But these commitments aren’t dogmas. If someone wants to challenge them,
we should give that challenge a fair hearing. But there’s a presumption, let’s say, in favour of
these aims and these procedural norms, based on how well they have served us in the past.
We don’t pretend to be neutral about them, and we don’t pretend they are compatible with
every idea we might discuss. But of course, they are neutral with regard to all kinds of other
questions. So I guess I’d say our practice is relatively value-neutral. (Gregory, 2011, 206)

Moreover, the distinction between procedural and substantial values enabled the
combination of value inquiry and pluralism in P4C (Lipman, 1988, 47 ff.). Both
Sharp and Lipman strongly emphasised this innovation, along with its educational
implications. As for Sharp, she underlined that P4C gave
children the intellectual, social and emotional tools they need to think well, to think judi-
ciously and reasonably and, by means of the classroom community of inquiry, fosters the
care, commitment and courage to act on their thinking. (Sharp, 2017, 26; see also Lipman,
1995b, 7)

For his part, Lipman reinforced Sharp’s statements in a way that pre-emptively
responded to the opposite criticism levelled decades later against P4C by those who
disliked its relativistic attitude towards values (e.g. Brenifier, 2007, 225–254), and
others who rejected its implicit preference for “a normative model of human subjec-
tivity among many, without any objective or foundational reasons to privilege it over
others” (Gregory, 2011, 208):
This, then, is the narrow pass between Scylla and Charybdis, between authoritarian indoc-
trination and mindless relativism: to stimulate children to think, to improve their cognitive
skills so that they reason well, to engage them in disciplined dialogues with one another
so that they reason together, to challenge them to think about significant concepts from
the philosophical tradition, and yet to develop their ability to think for themselves so that
they may think reasonably and responsibly when actually confronted with moral problems.
Trained to think critically, they will no longer be defenseless when efforts are made to
indoctrinate them. And yet, trained to listen carefully to others and to take into account other
people’s points of view and perspectives, they will no longer be an easy prey to mindless,
cynical alternatives because they will have come to appreciate the advantages of objectivity.
(Lipman, 1988, 82–83, 1996, 95).

3.3 Intellectual Autonomy and Community-Based

Philosophical Inquiry

In the story of a girl named Mieke, which Sharp had written in 1980, we find the
following statement: “A child is free when she has the tools to think for herself”
(Sharp, 1981, 203), and the following one: “Teachers should help girls, as well as
boys, to think, to think for themselves in an imaginative and creative way” (Sharp,
1981, 206), because it is indeed “this intellectual autonomy that constitutes their
3.3 Intellectual Autonomy and Community-Based Philosophical Inquiry 35

personhood” (Sharp, 1981, 208). Finally, Sharp provokingly asked: “Would civiliza-
tion crumble if we taught children to think for themselves? If we taught them to
question the ways of society?” (Sharp, 1981, 209).
Lipman shared Sharp’s urge to develop children’s autonomy and developed it,
following his acquaintance as a parent and teacher with dyslexic, blind, and suffering
children (Lipman, 2008a, 90, 95–97). He significantly recalled being “deeply moved
by how children suffer, and how little they can do about it” (Lipman, 2008a, 96), and
he added:
I think it was at that time that I was beginning to see the importance of freedom of inquiry,
not simply for teachers, but for children as well […]. What could be done, I wondered, to
help children not merely to think, but to think for themselves? (Lipman, 2008a, 96–97)

Lipman was aware of an additional threat to children, related to the kind of society
they lived in: “I was alerted to the need for protecting children from types of adver-
tising and propaganda that foreclosed on their freedom of choice rather than opening
it up” (Lipman, 2008a, 103). This was how he conceived of the idea of developing
children’s “cognitive self-defense” (Lipman, 2008a, 103):
If I was beginning to think of the dangers of children’s minds being open to manipulation, I
was also beginning to think that their ability to defend themselves intellectually was definitely
something that needed to be and could be strengthened. (Lipman, 2008a, 103)

This was precisely the point Sharp and Lipman wanted to address. Indeed, the
consumeristic society they lived was problematic; therefore, its ways had to be ques-
tioned and ultimately changed. This was one of the reasons why Lipman and Sharp
decided to focus on children’s education, which is still a powerful trend today; a
recurring educational temptation. But Sharp and Lipman averted this impulse by
addressing the topic in a unique way. Educating children was not a surreptitious way
of laying on their young shoulders the burden of responsibility adults had failed to
meet themselves. Indeed, no effective social transformation could ever be fostered in
this way; quite the contrary. Education was to provide children with the proper means
to defend themselves from the adult-centred consumeristic society. The capacity to
think for themselves, achieved through philosophy, was the intellectual tool children
needed to defeat societal manipulation and gain their autonomy and liberation.
The following step was to decide how to achieve this goal. Given his academic
and conventionally text-centred background, in the 1960s, Lipman started reflecting
on how a specifically designed philosophical text could help children foster their
autonomy. His initial idea was to achieve this goal at the expense of adults by writing
a “story in double-function language” (Lipman, 2008a, 108; see also Asch, 1958)
that teachers and adults would understand “as lending support to the established
order”, while children would conversely understand “as critical of that order” and
capable of inspiring their desire to change it (Lipman, 2008a, 108; Strauss, 1952).
But this was not the right way to sort the problem out, since it entailed overcoming
manipulation by means of a text which was itself “manipulative” (Lipman, 2008a,
108). The goal had to be achieved in a more transparent way. The result of this effort
was a twofold improvement, since: (1) Lipman succeeded in writing a philosophical
36 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

text for children, and (2) he matured methodological awareness of the innovative
and careful role this text had to play in the educational context. Indeed, the text had
to be dethroned of its centrality in children’s education and, instead, be used as a
support to communal inquiry, dialogue, integration, and social change: “It would be
far better, I concluded, to write a text that would allow both teachers and children
to engage simultaneously and openly in inquiry at the same time in the classroom”
(Lipman, 2008a, 109). Additionally, this text could serve as “transitional literature
[…] to prepare the way for the encounter with primary texts in later schooling”
(Lipman, 1988, 23).
After their providential meeting in 1973, Lipman and Sharp endeavoured to put
this idea into practice (Lipman, 2012, 27). Indeed, thanks to her previous educational
experiences and her interpersonal sensitivity, Sharp helped Lipman give a visible
form to his intuition by engaging children in “constructive social criticism” (Sharp,
2004, 179). As already mentioned, the result of this effort was their conception of
a “community of philosophical inquiry”, whose tangible embodiment and structure
will be analysed in Chap. 4. First, however, a few words on the theoretical background
of this expression.
Lipman and Sharp acknowledged their debt to pragmatism, especially to Charles
S. Peirce, whose essay on “The Fixation of Belief”, published in 1877, combined
the ideas of “inquiry” and “community” (Cam, 2018). According to Peirce, who was
interested in clarifying the relationship between logical reasoning and experiential
states of mind such as habit, opinion, doubt, and belief, “inquiry” was the “struggle
to attain a state of belief” in response to “the irritation of doubt” (Peirce, 1955a,
10). The “sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, 1955a, 10)
or, to put it another way, the achievement of a “belief that we shall think to be
true” (Peirce, 1955a, 11). Regardless of how human beings accomplish this task
(the author mentions four methods of settling opinions and fixing belief: the a priori
method, the method of authority, the method of tenacity, and the method of scientific
investigation), Peirce stresses that inquiry always presents a social feature, arising
“from an impulse too strong in man to be suppressed, without danger of destroying
the human species” (Peirce, 1955a, 12–13). The social and interpersonal dimension
of inquiry is exemplified by the fact that human beings “necessarily influence each
other’s opinions” (Peirce, 1955a, 13). As a result, “the problem becomes how to fix
belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community” (Peirce, 1955a, 13).
Indeed, Lipman and Sharp’s “community of inquiry” embodied the pragmatist
idea of inquiry as a practical and communal quest for knowledge, whose educational
relevance they endeavoured to develop. At the same time, they carried out a significant
revision of the two notions implied in this expression. As regards “inquiry”, they
extended its meaning beyond the mainly logical and scientific structure Peirce, as well
as Dewey (1933, 1938a) had conferred upon it. For instance, when Dewey developed
his idea of inquiry-based education, he chose the model of scientific education. But
Lipman wondered: “What about philosophy? Could it do this sort of thing? When
Dewey tried imagining philosophy in the role of practice he must have had to shake
his head decisively” (Lipman, 2008b, 147). And again: if “good thinking is to become
a prime objective in the classroom, is it to be along the lines of scientific inquiry or
3.3 Intellectual Autonomy and Community-Based Philosophical Inquiry 37

philosophical inquiry?” (Lipman, 2003, 36). Lipman and Sharp had no doubt that
philosophy, not science, was the key. And this was because they were persuaded that
philosophical inquiry was more than scientific inquiry (Sharp, 2017, 39).
Not that Dewey failed to recognise philosophy’s specificity; quite the contrary.
Sharp praised his idea of philosophy as a “special non-scientific form of cognition that
is concerned with the judgement of value as a unique form of inquiry” (Sharp, 2017,
39). Moreover, she openly appreciated Dewey’s ethical theory, namely “his attempt
to reconstruct the teaching of values for modern society” (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 115),
as well as the active characterisation of this effort:
Dewey stresses the reality of the social or human problematic, the need for human interven-
tion, intelligent reflection, and subsequent formation of effective hypotheses in action. He
utilizes both aesthetic and religious experience to animate his faith in democracy and his
vision of the moral life. (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 115)

It is no wonder that Sharp eventually referred to P4C as “ethical thinking in action”

(Sharp, 1995–2018a, 115) in a Deweyan sense; and Lipman counted Dewey among
the forerunners of an educational view whose aim was to “strengthen the capacity of
children to think for themselves and thereby be in a position to defend themselves in
a world in which irrationality is rampant” (Lipman, 1988, 75). Rather, Lipman and
Sharp’s disagreement with Dewey was that his inquiry-based proposal had resulted
in him neither recognising philosophy’s educational potential, nor conceiving of the
possibility of enacting it with children: “Dewey got some direct experience in the
classroom early on, but he never wrote curriculum, and for that matter, he never
advocated using philosophy in the elementary school” (Lipman, 2012, 27).
Lipman and Sharp reframed the meaning of “community” as well. Although they
agreed with Peirce’s view of the interdependence of community members, Lipman
and Sharp also endeavoured to steer clear of the general concept of community as
an organic and totalising relationship (see for instance Ferdinand Tönnies’ well-
known reflections). Indeed, their purpose was to recognise the unique insight each
person contributed to sense-making experiences and cooperative efforts. Theirs was
the twofold conviction that, on the one hand, the individual could neither flourish
nor be understood without reference to his or her relationship with others, while,
on the other hand, the community ought not take over the individual’s freedom and
capacity for self-determination or aim to get rid of differences between individuals.
In this regard, the “community of philosophical inquiry” enacted the dynamic rela-
tionship between freedom and commitment, willingness and obligation, truthfulness
and respect, inclusion (of diverse individuals, groups, modes of expression, ideas,
beliefs) and dissent. Lipman stressed that a community-based inquiry had to be char-
acterised by “a deep commitment to the social solidarity” that should prevail among
the inquirers, and by “a sense of respect […] in the manner in which the participants
addressed their remarks to one another, even when the waters of disagreement ran
deep” (Lipman, 2008a, 118–119). These relational circumstances were indeed rele-
vant, since any individual engaging in philosophical inquiry with an eager and open
mind is vulnerable to the criticism of others (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 132). It was
38 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

therefore important to encourage the development of “mutual trust” as a precondi-

tion for both the individual’s and the community’s “commitment to reasonableness”
(Lipman, 2003, 111; see also Sharp, 1991–2018, 1996–2018b, 174). However, the
opposite was also true, since it was precisely due to the individual’s participation
in a philosophical inquiry aiming at “violence reduction” (Lipman, 2003, 105–124)
through the strengthening of judgement that the community developed group soli-
darity and the individual developed his or her own thinking skills and flourished
(Lipman, 2003, 102, 116–119).
As a result, Lipman and Sharp’s “community of philosophical inquiry” was the
embodiment of a new pedagogy, which enabled individuals to develop their humanity
through communal philosophical dialogue. It entailed reviving the Socratic idea that,
rather than being an inert content,
real philosophy […] is each person’s committed search for wisdom, where what matters is
not just the acceptance of certain conclusions, but also the following out of a certain path to
them; not just correct content, but content achieved as the result of real understanding and
self-understanding. (Nussbaum, 1985, 13)

Finally, it was Lipman and Sharp’s conviction that this was how the narrow-
minded, individualistic paradigm characterising consumeristic society could be
overcome:
Because their members are committed to one another’s fostering and flourishing, such
communities of inquiry are more promising for developing global consciousness than atom-
istic, individualistic pedagogies that focus on autonomy, self-realization and self-reliance.
(Sharp, 1995–2018b, 237)

Not that these three characteristics were unimportant. Lipman and Sharp’s
contention was that children and adults alike had to acquire the capability to “think
for themselves” and “become fully persons, capable of autonomous action, creativity
and self-knowledge” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 45). However, the educational perspective
underlying these efforts truly made a difference, and individualism was certainly
not the view Lipman and Sharp defended, nor had it been capable of stimulating
promising educational results. Without doubt, individualism had to be overcome,
and as a result, the notion of “community” came to the fore, along with its inter-
personal, dialogic, and transformative potential. Indeed, the metamorphosis from
a group of individuals to a community involved, and at the same time relied on,
the capacity of its members to acquire a different relational mindset and develop a
new emotional disposition. In one of his philosophical dialogues, Lipman tried to
clarify this point by stressing the qualitative difference between a community and an
association:
In a community – like for example in a friendship, or in a family, or in a classroom where
everyone cooperates and inquires together – the other person’s welfare means as much to
you as your own does. In an association, on the other hand, your own welfare generally
comes first. In an association, you cooperate with others because it’s to your advantage to
do so. In a community, the question of whose advantage it is never even comes up because
you always take other people’s points of view into account. In a community, you understand
and accept other people, and they understand and accept you. (Lipman, 1980, 33)
3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education 39

Sharp added the final touch to this reflection by recalling the centrality of “care”,
as the affective component revealing both the transition from an association to a
community of inquiry and the birth of a “we”, which had to be thought in open and
constructive terms in order to avert its communitarian closedness9 :
Such a community presupposes care: care for the procedures of inquiry, care for one another
as persons, care for the tradition one has inherited, care for the creations of one another. Thus
there is an affective component to the development of a classroom community of inquiry
that cannot be underestimated. The children must move from a stance of cooperativeness in
which they obey the rules of inquiry because they want to gain merit to a stance in which
they consider the inquiry a collaborative process. When they truly collaborate, it’s a matter
of we, not just personal success. It’s a matter of our ideas, our achievements and our progress.
[…]. They truly care for each other as persons, and this care enables them to converse in
ways they never have before. (Sharp, 1987–2018, 45)

3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education

In the effort to carry out their educational revolution, Lipman and Sharp had to chal-
lenge the widespread preconception that children were incapable of philosophising.
We previously illustrated that this effort resulted in Lipman and Sharp’s reframing
of both philosophy and education. In this section, I would like to complement the
former reflections on “self-defence” by detailing its educational importance.
First, it should be said that focusing on self-defence was the result of Lipman and
Sharp’s decision to understand children differently. While children were generally
viewed as not yet fully developed, entailing that their education provided them with
top-down stimuli capable of addressing “more accurately the child’s comprehension
capacity” (Lipman, 1988, 144), the founders of Philosophy for Children opted for
a bottom-up stance based on their core belief that children could be empowered
or that their intellectual capacity could be strengthened to deal with all kinds of
questions or problems they might encounter in their daily lives. This was the heart
of their educational approach, which, Lipman and Sharp believed, was capable of
being truly “generative”. This approach entailed the following:
[It] involves sensitizing children to instances of ambiguity and vagueness, while strength-
ening their questioning, reasoning, and discussion skills, so as to enable such children to
cope with the perplexing aspects of natural language that they are bound to encounter in
daily life. The generative approach contends that the choice is not between posing more
or less intellectually taxing questions but between neglecting or strengthening the child’s
capacity to inquire. It is not a matter of staking out the cognitive limitations of the child, but
of increasing the child’s cognitive powers. (Lipman, 1988, 144)

9It is worth noting the affinity of these reflections by Lipman and Sharp with the “ethics and politics
of care” perspective, developed by coeval philosophers, generally stemming from feminism, such
as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Murdoch, and Joan Tronto. This relationship
will be analysed in more detail in one of the next sections.
40 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

Sharp enhanced these reflections further. She exemplified “generative” education

through Philosophy for Children’s inquiry-based dialogic perspective and encapsu-
lated the outcome of this process in one sentence: the development of personhood or
“to become persons”, which “is the essence of what we mean by education” (Sharp,
1986–2018, 186; see also Lipman, 1988, 197–198; Sharp, 1986). In this regard, Sharp
stated that: “the rational method—the method of inquiry—is the only one that will
help human beings become fully persons, capable of autonomous action, creativity
and self-knowledge” (Sharp, 1987–2018, 45).
What did Sharp mean by the notion of personhood, and how was its relation-
ship to the development of the “self” to be understood? These were central topics
which Sharp tackled in a thoughtful and creative way. For instance, she stated that
persons were “individuals who are conscious of themselves in relation to others
in the world” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 193) and added that “imaginative, philosophical
dialogue” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 187) was capable of cultivating “intellectual autonomy
and ethical responsibility, both of which are essential to becoming persons” (Sharp,
1986–2018, 193). Moreover, she regarded personhood as a dynamic of humanisa-
tion relying on the “development of intellectual autonomy” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 189,
1993, 54). Here is where personhood interwove with self-formation and education,
since each individual did not develop his or her autonomy as a result of a natural
process, but due to a social context, and there were specific social contexts, namely
schools, deputed to this very task. As a result, the clarification of personhood also
entailed explaining and redefining education:
We do this [foster autonomy] by cultivating habits of reflection, by which I mean the ability
to look at the causes and consequences of what one is thinking about or about to do, the
ability to engage in an inner dialogue with oneself – to “become an object to oneself,” as
George Herbert Mead says […]. This capacity to exercise self-control through anticipation of
the consequences of one’s acts on oneself and on others, as well as the natural environment,
is the heart of personhood. Thus, the development of personhood mirrors the way we do
philosophy with children. (Sharp, 1986–2018, 189)10

The “community of philosophical inquiry” was the educational environment

where the self could develop through social interaction. It was Sharp’s belief that
in order to achieve “self-esteem, that is a real regard for their personhood” (Sharp,
1996–2018a, 49), children had to “be provided with an educational opportunity that
allows participation in a classroom community of philosophical inquiry” (Sharp,
1996–2018a, 49). As a result, the addressees of education would have the possi-
bility to “understand the self as a process in relationship to all of nature, a process of
endless transformation and self-correction” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 50). The reframing

10 As regards the influence of Sharp’s ideas on P4C scholarship, see Glaser (1992) and Nowell
(1992). Glaser focused on the self in the community of inquiry, while Nowell developed inter-
esting comparisons between Sharp and Freire. On the development of personhood, see also Sharp
(1986,1992). Finally, it is worth mentioning that Sharp’s thinking in this regard was influenced by
Nietzsche’s view of the “growth process” of freedom as the “cultivation of the power over oneself”
and as “the process of ACTIVELY REDIRECTING the basic energy of human life” (Sharp, 1975,
99–100).
3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education 41

of both individual identity and the self in terms of a “social construct” (Sharp, 1996–
2018a, 51) developing through self-control, self-esteem, self-transformation, self-
criticism, and self-correction was the strategy designed by Lipman and Sharp to
dismiss the traditional self-centred, autonomous, and solipsistic view of the human
being; a lesson they learnt from Dewey and Mead, among others. This relational
understanding of the individual led Lipman and Sharp to incorporate “care” among
the dimensions of thinking which we will analyse in the next section.
Before this, however, I would like to focus on another aspect of Lipman and
Sharp’s generative and personhood-oriented education, namely “imagination”, a
concept they borrowed from Dewey and then developed into a philosophical and
educational cornerstone (Lipman, 2008b, 150). Being more than just theoretical-
logico-rational, Lipman and Sharp’s view of philosophical reasoning was “inherently
imaginative” (Sharp, 1986–2018, 188), and this was for the following reason:
It enables students to ‘try on’ positions and test with their peers whether the positions have
any validity or not. Human actions become meaningful to the extent that they take some
present course as a pathway to an imagined future in the light of some recollected past
(Dewey, 1938b) […]. These ideas can also be expressed, explored, evaluated and modified
through creative writing, drawing, dancing, music making, or other imaginative activities.
(Sharp, 1986–2018, 188–189).

Sharp developed the educational implications of this idea in a way that foreshad-
owed present-day reflections on the notion of utopia as the capability to think and
act “otherwise” (Levitas, 2013). According to Sharp, imagination was intrinsically
relational and future-oriented, since it not only allowed us “to empathetically enter
into the lives of others”, but it also enabled “us to conceive of ways in which the world
could be a better place” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 234). Besides, the ability to imagine
ourselves and others in different situations also had ethical implications, due to its
“passionate” characterisation, which evidenced the human capability to go “beyond
instrumental intent” and act out of “genuine care” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 234). As
a result, imagination was a force which had “the potential to profoundly transform
self-understanding and the understanding of others” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 234). And
it was both Sharp and Lipman’s conviction that the community-based philosophical
dialogue was capable, through reflection, of developing imagination in a unique way.
Lipman and Sharp’s approach to education was also “generative” for other reasons.
First, it supported the empowerment of children by providing them with the proper
intellectual and relational tools “that they need to appropriate their own culture in
such a way that they can use this culture to reshape and remake their own world
in cooperation with their fellow co-inquirers” (Sharp, 1987–2018, 43). Second, at
the same time, it promoted dialogue; education was also capable of transforming
both the inquirers and the object of inquiry. As for the latter, the dialogic process
aimed at “producing a product—at some kind of settlement or judgment, however
partial and tentative this may be” (Lipman, 2003, 83), and it often happened that,
while striving jointly for meaning, clarification and “progress towards a solution”
(Sharp, 1995–2018a, 111), the direction of this process changed [“it moves where
the argument takes it”, Lipman used to recall (2003, 83)]. This was conducive to the
capability to understand the object of inquiry under a new light. In this sense, inquiry
42 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

also resulted in transforming the inquirers, since it could help them “to become more
objective” in their inquiry (Sharp, 1987–2018, 43), and Sharp added:
When I use the term ‘objectivity’, I mean an inter-subjective truth arrived at by human
beings through inquiry, experimentation, consideration of the evidence, and dialogue. This
inter-subjective truth is always subject to self-correction. (Sharp, 1987–2018, 41; see also
Lipman, 1996, 95)

By underlining this striving for objectivity, Lipman and Sharp endeavoured to

avoid relativistic interpretations of their generative dialogical approach.11
Philosophy for Children is […] pluralistic: it encourages a plurality of perspectives and
interests instead of the monopoly of one. But it does not encourage the view that one opinion
is as good as another. The challenge of communal inquiry is to embrace a wide range of
disparate and often conflicting views and forge out of them new perspectives and horizons.
(Sharp, 1995–2018a, 112)

The terminus ad quem of this inquiry process, namely its meaning and
clarification-oriented nature, will be detailed in Chap. 4.
What follows are a few reflections on the potentially transformative effect of
dialogue on the inquirers. Due to their participation in the “community of philo-
sophical inquiry”, they changed by developing new abilities. In other words, they
enacted the very meaning of “education”, which was understood by Sharp as “a
process of growth in the ability to reconstruct one’s own experience, so that one
can live a fuller, happier, qualitatively richer life” (Sharp, 1987–2018, 45). In this
sense, Lipman and Sharp’s “generative” education was deeply intertwined with the
development of ethical values and a due sensitivity to the “good”. The involvement
in communal inquiry (whose meaning overcame the traditional dichotomy between
theory and practice) offered participants an opportunity for self-transformation. As
a result, the inquirer was characterised by
an ever-developing moral-political awareness that tempers subjectivism and conservatism
on the one hand and a loose tolerance for anything at all on the other. Such a process of good
discernment involves a commitment to particulars. Iris Murdoch (1992) makes the point
that the journey toward the good is not only experienced in cognitive and verbal modes of
inquiry; it is also experienced in our most intimate relationships with the world, wherein
our perceptions of the smallest things […] are capable of becoming ever deeper and of
developing a caring attitude in us. (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 52)

Therefore, philosophical inquiry could contribute to the development of specific

personal and relational abilities due to the engagement in a joint striving for meaning,
resulting in progress towards a solution. “Children want to feel that they achieved
something”, Sharp said in this regard, although “Philosophical questions (except
those to do with logic) are usually not thought of as having one right answer” (Sharp,
1995–2018a, 111). However, that these two statements were not at odds was indeed

11As it happens, Philosophy for Children received this kind of criticism in the academic literature.
See for instance Brenifier (2007, 225–254). However, these views generally misunderstand P4C’s
very normative meaning, as well as the novelty of the related educational practice (Gregory, 2000,
2011).
3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education 43

the opinion of one of Lipman’s university professors and then colleagues, Justus
Buchler, according to whom, students “may have no right to demand final answers,
but they certainly have a right to expect some sense of intellectual motion or some
feeling of discernment” (Buchler, 1954, 14). Lipman intentionally built on Buchler’s
argument and concluded with the following remarks [inspired by Ryle (2009, 167)]
on the transformative power of philosophy, especially when practised by children:
Some feeling of discernment – right. Seldom have I seen children dissatisfied with the product
they took from a philosophical discussion, even if it is only some modest philosophical
distinction, for they recognize how before that acquisition they had even less. Children,
unlike adults, do not look insistently for answers or conclusions. They look rather for the
kind of transformation that philosophy provides – not giving a new answer to an old question,
but transforming all the questions. (Lipman, 2003, 86–87)

These reflections on the transformative role of philosophy were rooted in Lipman

and Sharp’s normative outlook on education and democracy.12 Moreover, it was
in the light of this foundation that the transformation and the development of the
self could be assessed and ultimately understood in terms of the above-mentioned
“journey toward the good” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 52). Worth mentioning is that
Lipman and Sharp used to refract the “good” into a set of multiple intertwined
notions, like “good citizenship”/“good citizen” (Lipman, 1988, 57–61, 113), “good
discernment”/“good judgement” (Lipman, 2003, 209–211, 226–227; Sharp, 1996–
2018a, 52), and “good thinking”/“better thinking”/“good reasoning” (Lipman, 1988,
41, 91, 2003, 36; Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 203–04; Sharp, s.d.a, 6). The underlying
assumption was indeed that the development of “skilful thinking” through “skilful
discussions” (Lipman, 1996, 104) could enhance children’s discernment and cultivate
their judgement, which would result in their capability to become “good citizens”.
How did Lipman and Sharp characterise “good thinking” and “better thinking”?
In this regard, we must recall their efforts to go beyond the sole paradigm of logic.13 It
was true that logic had traditionally established “criteria of good thinking” (Lipman
et al., 1977–1980, 203; see also Lipman, 1988, 91). It was also true that logical
thinking skills were relevant to any kind of discourse and therefore educationally
relevant as well. But Lipman and Sharp aimed at more than this, since a broad
reappraisal of the role played by thinking in education entailed a more nuanced
and careful study, as well as the acknowledgement of the irreducibility of personal
experience to logic. It was for this reason that Lipman and Sharp were convinced
that, in order to attain “better thinking”, “good thinking” had to be complemented
with “thinking for oneself”. In their words:
We can consider the criteria of good thinking (as established by logic), and apply these to
any form of discourse. But it is quite another matter to reflect upon and bring to utterance
our own personal perspective. In this sense, thinking for oneself involves a reflection upon
one’s own experience and upon one’s own situation in the world. It requires appraisal of
one’s own values and in effect of one’s own identity. It further involves a search for more
and more reliable criteria so that the judgments one makes in the course of one’s life can
rest upon a firm and solid foundation. (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 203)

12 See Sect. 3.2 of this chapter, focusing on “The challenge of democracy and citizenship”.
13 See the last section of Chap. 2 and the first of this chapter.
44 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

As a result, the encouragement of better thinking entailed not only the develop-
ment of logical competences (considering facts, reading situations, classifying and
making distinctions, generalising and making hypotheses) but also personal abilities
like the following: “a clear perception of oneself”, self-consciousness, “a sense of
personal identity”, a “sense of proportion”, an “awareness of those matters that are of
importance to oneself as distinguished from those that are not”, a “feeling for one’s
own powers and capacities so as to be able to distinguish what may lie within one’s
powers to perform and what may be beyond those powers”, and finally “a sense of
personal direction towards the goals that one foresees, however dimly, for oneself”
(Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 203).
At this point, we need to ask: which ideal guidelines did Lipman and Sharp
devise and enact for the joint development of “good thinking” and “better thinking”
skills? Both their educational reflection and practice revolved around the following
notions, which became regulative educational ideas, as well as the distinctive features
of “better thinking”: self-correction, sensitivity to context, reasonableness, and
fallibilism. The following will detail the mutual relationships between these ideas.
After acknowledging that Charles S. Peirce had already underlined the centrality
of “self-correction”, Sharp defined the latter as “the process of developing ever more
comprehensive ways of seeing”, and as an attitude arising out “of the desire to
self-correct” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 53).14 On his part, Lipman added the following
remark, which detailed the meaning of self-correction and underlined its association
with inquiry: “we can understand ‘self-correction’ as that aspect of inquiry that looks
for reasons, as well as for better reasons” (Lipman, 2003, 53). Moreover, Lipman
associated self-correction with “sensitivity to context”, both being cornerstones of
practical reasoning:
Self-correction as a search for better reasons represents, in a manner of speaking, a syntactical
approach to ethical judgement, while sensitivity to context represents a more semantical
approach, one grounded in the actual circumstances and their meanings. Sensitivity to context
calls for an act to be appropriate to the situation that evokes it. (Lipman, 2003, 53–54)

He also underlined the educational complementarity of these two approaches,

whose interaction could help students “understand their options when dealing with
the practical, particular, or unique aspects of actual life situations” (Lipman, 2003,
54).
The emphasis placed on self-correction and sensitivity to context involved an
equal stress on “reasonableness”, which Lipman defined as “rationality tempered by
judgement” (Lipman, 2003, 11). Due to this connection with the faculty of judge-
ment, reasonableness (rather than pure and abstract rationality) could bring the theo-
retical and practical aspects of reasoning together. In practical terms, for instance,
reasonableness entailed focusing “on the vindication of the act rather than on the
act itself” (Lipman, 2003, 53). Moreover, it had to do with “the character of the

14On the relevance of Peirce’s thinking to Philosophy for Children, see Sharp (1993), Gregory
(2022).
3.4 Becoming Persons Through Generative Education 45

individual citizen” (Lipman, 2003, 235),15 who could thus strengthen their capacity
of “exercising good judgment” (Lipman, 2008a, 107). How could people become
more reasonable? Mainly through an effort to clarify the reasons for one’s own
convictions, beliefs, and deeds. According to Lipman and Sharp, this was what was
dialogically and communally enacted in the “community of philosophical inquiry”,
which affected the way people thought and behaved. Therefore, “reasonableness”
ultimately turned into a “regulative idea of an inquiry-driven society”, in addition to
“fallibilism” and “democracy” (Lipman, 2003, 235, 2008a, 117), which will be anal-
ysed shortly. Finally, according to Lipman and Sharp, “reasonableness” highlighted
the individual’s capacity to enjoy attentive relationships with others, which also
resulted in transforming the self (Sharp, 1993, 52–53). In their words: “By reason-
ableness I understood not merely the capacity of using reason, but the capacity of
respecting and being open to other people’s use of reason as well” (Lipman, 2008a,
117). Sharp added that
To participate in a community of philosophical inquiry is to be involved in the construction
of a story that reveals our growing self-consciousness and our understanding not only of
others, but of other world views in relation to our own ever-expanding world view. (Sharp,
1996–2018a, 53)

As a matter of fact, these reflections by Lipman and Sharp not only underlined their
conviction that people could become more reasonable through dialogue but revealed
their own relational, dynamic, and practical view of the self. In other words, rather
than the result of “introspection” alone (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 55), self-knowledge
and personhood were understood as a flourishing process during which individuals
developed specific capabilities through practical interactions with others: “What we
call self-knowledge is composed of inferences (some more reflective than others)
from an outer world and the expressed judgement of our fellows” (Sharp, 1996–
2018a, 55).
Finally, there is the fourth regulative educational idea and feature of “better think-
ing”. Namely, “fallibilism”. In Lipman and Sharp’s view, fallibilism was more than
just an epistemological notion. They were once again inspired by the thinking of
Charles S. Peirce, who coined the term at the end of the nineteenth century to under-
line that, when it comes to scientific knowledge, “people cannot attain absolute
certainty concerning questions of fact” (Peirce, 1955b, 59). Not that this resulted
in Peirce becoming a sceptic; quite the contrary. What he was suggesting was that
the true scientific spirit was characterised by open-mindedness, as well as an exper-
imental, inquiry-oriented, and non-dogmatic attitude towards truth; as an endless
intellectual effort. Progress in knowledge was thus the result of “contrite fallibilism,
combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find
things out” (Peirce, 1955c, 4). Lipman and Sharp reframed the Peircean epistemo-
logical meaning of fallibilism and understood it in the more comprehensive terms of
a basic disposition and attitude of human life related to “an authentic willingness to
self-correct” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 55). In this sense, fallibilism turned out to be an

15
On reasonableness in Lipman and Sharp’s thinking, see Pritchard (1996), Costa Carvalho &
Mendonça (2017), Gasparatou (2017).
46 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

individual task of self-transformation as well as a principle and a goal of communal

dialogue. In Sharp’s words:
Thus, authentic dialogue involves an intellectual humility that assumes that (a) we are fallible,
(b) our views are limited (if not wrong), and (c) we are beings that must be open to diverse
ways of looking at experience. A commitment to fallibilism and open inquiry does not mean
that we immediately surrender our own ideas and perspectives. Self-correction assumes
a regulative ideal of truth to which the entire community is committed whether they are
conscious of it or not. It is for this reason that they can realize when they have made progress.
(Sharp, 1996–2018a, 55)

Similarly, Lipman stressed that fallibilism was able to nurture the inquirers’ will-
ingness to deal with problematic topics, notwithstanding the possible shortcomings
and “reasoning blunders” they made in this effort (Lipman, 2008a, 117). Moreover,
it was thanks to this very fallibilistic attitude of inquirers towards both co-inquirers
and the object of inquiry that they could eventually reconcile “to being mistaken
and having to investigate ways of correcting their errors” (Lipman, 2008a, 117;
Sharp, 1987–2018, 44). In this way, concluded Sharp, “Fallibilism is assumed and
self-correction becomes a way of life” (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 51).
Sharp also provided a vivid portrait of the dynamic of self-becoming and self-
correction that she and Lipman had in mind and which inspired their educational
efforts. It is worth noting that the source of inspiration for these reflections was once
again Charles S. Peirce, as Sharp openly admitted:
In summary then, for Peirce, the self is an evolving construction that is (a) oriented towards
the future, (b) a developmental teleology, a pursuit of purposes or plans in which genuinely
novel directions can and do emerge. And (c) during any moment of life, the self is first and
foremost understood in the process of self-correction in which some species of meaning
is evolving. It is this meaning that is open to reflection in the classroom community of
philosophical inquiry. (Sharp, 1996–2018a, 55)

The openness of meaning to reflection, the participants’ genuine willingness to

contribute to this inquiry and strive for the truth, the need to face unexpected issues or
deal with unpleasant situations (like mistakes, disagreement, and so on), the commit-
ment to the “social solidarity” that had to prevail in the classroom (Lipman, 2008a,
118) were the tangible signs of Lipman and Sharp’s generative and transformative
educational proposal. As stated earlier, this was their way of reviving and enacting the
lesson learnt from Dewey on the need to combine “reflective thinking” and “democ-
racy” (Dewey, 1933, 1916–2014; Lipman, 2003, 235, 2008a, 117). Moreover, it was
their way of underlining education’s essential relationship with ethics and politics,
which implied that educational efforts which were focused on self-transformation and
personhood were not value-neutral, but essentially imbued with normative features,
claims, and values. As noted earlier, Lipman and Sharp knew very well where they
stood with regard to these issues; that there was tangible proof that fallibilism and
relativism were not the same. Their belief in the possibility to strive for the “good” by
enacting the regulative ideas mentioned in this section explains why, among all ethical
values to be encouraged in children and in adults alike, they chose “responsibility”
as the “capacity to respond appropriately and intelligently when confronted with a
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 47

problematic situation” (Lipman, 1988, 113; Sharp, 1996–2018a).16 However, this

notion had to be rethought in its relationship to reflection and thinking. Furthermore,
this relationship had to be put into educational practice. In this regard, the challenge
was “not so much to get children whom we are educating for citizenship to know
this or that or to believe this or that” (Lipman, 1988, 113), but to help them develop
their “thinking skills—whether in making, in saying, or in doing” (Lipman, 1988,
113). According to Lipman and Sharp, reflection had both a behavioural dimension
[“people can act reflectively, create reflectively” (Lipman, 1988, 113)] and a social
one [“people engaged in dialogue are engaged in social reflection; indeed, it is the
internalization of that dialogue by each participant that comes to be individualized
reflection” (Lipman, 1988, 113)]. The aim of the next section is to detail the meaning
of reflection and thinking in Lipman and Sharp’s views.

3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical,

Creative, and Caring

The very definition of Homo sapiens sapiens underlines that, over and above knowl-
edge, the human being’s specificity relies on the capability to “know what s/he
knows”. In other words, it is reflection that distinguishes the human being from other
living beings.
In the thinking of John Dewey, this basic anthropological feature developed
into a comprehensive paradigm of both his societal and educational views. As a
result, Dewey developed the notion of “reflective thinking”, which he understood in
the following terms: “Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further
conclusions to which it tends constitutes reflective thought” (Dewey, 1933, 9). This
notion referred to an inquiry committed to the clarification of given meanings and
to the effort of pushing the quest endlessly forward. Moreover, reflective thinking
was characterised by the attitude of inquirers, which assumed responsibility for the
consequences of knowledge and the products of their inquiry in a willing and mindful
way. This idea clearly revealed Dewey’s pragmatist background, according to which,
thinking “begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked-road situation, a situ-
ation that is ambiguous, that presents a dilemma, that proposes alternatives” (Dewey,
1933, 14). He also added that the “function of reflective thought is, therefore, to trans-
form a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance
of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious” (Dewey,

16Worth noting is that Lipman and Sharp reframed the notion of responsibility proposed earlier by
Dewey (1908) in a less conservative and less consequentialist way. On the other hand, both Dewey
and Lipman/Sharp stressed the social relevance of responsibility, as well as its essential connection
with education. On responsibility and the community of philosophical inquiry, see Franzini Tibaldeo
(2014).
48 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

1933, 100–101).17 Therefore, reflection was prompted by a troublesome situation,

which had to be clarified, and it was reflective thinking that supported the successful
accomplishment of this task by converting “action that is merely appetitive, blind,
and impulsive into intelligent action” (Dewey, 1933, 17), attributing meanings and
values, and finally fostering the ability “to judge of evidence and to act accordingly”,
stated Dewey quoting John Stuart Mill’s words (Dewey, 1933, 21).
Lipman and Sharp developed these suggestions into a “reflective model of educa-
tional practice” (Lipman, 2003, 9–27) and arrived at the following definition of
“reflective thinking”:
Reflective thinking is thinking that is aware of its own assumptions and implications as well
as being conscious of the reasons and evidence that support this or that conclusion. Reflective
thinking takes into account its own methodology, its own procedures, its own perspective
and point of view. Reflective thinking is prepared to recognize the factors that make for bias,
prejudice, and self-deception. It involves thinking about its procedures at the same time as
it involves thinking about its subject matter […]. What is here called reflective thinking
includes recursive thinking, metacognitive thinking, self-corrective thinking, and all those
other forms of thinking that involve reflection on their own methodology at the same time
as they examine their subject matter. (Lipman, 2003, 26–27)

Lipman and Sharp also insisted on the social relevance of this kind of thinking
and recalled that the reflective paradigm involving thinking and action was to be
understood not only in individual terms but was thoroughly “social and communal”
(Lipman, 2003, 25), since it fully flourished in the dialogic encounter with the other.
Moreover, Lipman and Sharp intentionally developed another feature of reflective
thinking already pointed out by Dewey, namely its epistemological characteristics
and implications. Indeed, reflective thinking not only entailed a linear meditation
on the relationship between ideas, or between theory and practice, but a thorough
reconfiguration of thinking which became multidimensional, recursive, inclusive,
and transversal, i.e. capable of dealing with complexity and uncertainty, as well
as being open to unpredictability. Thus, the reflective nature of thought enriched it
with nuances that made it an interesting and promising paradigm of individual and
communal inquiry, as well as an effective educational model for both children and
teacher, or for adult education.18
Lipman and Sharp developed Dewey’s “reflective thinking” into their “multidi-
mensional thinking approach” (Lipman, 2003, 197) due to the close interaction with
the US educational context of the 1980s and the debate on “higher-order thinking”,
which was presented in the previous chapter (Sect. 2.3).
The turning point for this renovation occurred in the 1990s, when Lipman and
Sharp became increasingly aware of the implications of their educational project
for the development of human relationships and morality. Of capital importance in

17 Consequently, the author details the phases or aspects of reflective thinking: suggestions,
intellectualisation, hypothesis, reasoning, and testing the hypothesis by action (Dewey, 1933,
107–115).
18 In this sense, Lipman and Sharp’s itinerary developed in parallel to the so-called reflective turn

in education, which included Schön (1983, 1987) and Freire (2001), among others.
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 49

this sense was an article published in 1995 under the title “Moral Education Higher-
Order Thinking and Philosophy for Children”, where Lipman rephrased “higher-
order thinking” in the multidimensional terms of “critical, creative, and caring”
(Lipman, 1995a, 61).19 He began with underlining that, from its very outset, Western
philosophy had been characterised by a normative view of the thinking process: a
goal human beings had to achieve through the employment of a well-known trinity
of regulative ideals (the true, the beautiful, and the good). This ultimately gave birth
to the expression “higher-order thinking”20 : “Higher-order thinking is not a term
the Greeks used, but they were astute enough to recognize the criteria one might
apply to thinking to be able to call it good or better or higher-order” (Lipman,
1995a, 62). In his reappraisal of this tradition, Lipman wished to maintain both this
tripartite classification and its breadth, which was of fundamental importance for
the application of these reflections to educational contexts. As a result, he came
up with a revised trinity of “regulative ideals”, namely “truth, meaning, and value”
(Lipman, 1995b, 6), which was then complemented by a triad of “modes of think-
ing” (“critical”, “creative”, and “caring”), which respectively corresponded to the
gnoseological, the aesthetic, and the ethical axes of thinking (Lipman, 1995a, 62).
Moreover, he clarified that these “three modes of thinking” were characterised by
specific criteria, as well as constituting “criteria for higher-order thinking” (Lipman,
1995a, 63). Finally, he stated that in order to be achieved, higher-order thinking had
to meet all three specifications (Lipman, 1995a, 63, 2003, 229).
Looking more closely at these notions, it must first of all be said that the reflections
Lipman published in the above-mentioned article became fully developed in the
second edition of his book Thinking in Education (2003), and it is for this reason that
in the following, both publications will be referred to alternatively. However, before
dealing with the definitions of critical, creative, and caring thinking, it might be useful
to recall once again the background to Lipman and Sharp’s view of thinking. This
entails underlining two elements, both related to pragmatism, which were discussed
earlier, namely thinking’s inquiry-based feature and practical relevance. In Lipman’s
words:
Inquiry, Peirce tells us, is the struggle to believe once the beliefs we had previously relied
upon have been corroded and dissolved by doubt. It is doubt that signals to us that we are
in a problematic situation, and it is inquiry that we engage in to get some orientation within
the gloom. (Lipman, 2003, 254)

Thinking is the specifically human means by which we respond to the challenges

of ordinary life. This effort of thinking is called “inquiry” since it is an effort to
cope with and overcome a problematic situation. As a result, thinking does not

19 As will be seen later, the other equally important article published in 1995 by Lipman under the
title “Caring as Thinking” (1995b) focused on this very issue, among others.
20 Lipman also recognised that the “threefold distinction has more recently trickled down into

curriculum theory, as in Bloom’s taxonomy. Bloom and his associates have identified three aspects
of higher-order thinking: the analytical, the synthetic and the evaluative” (Lipman, 1995b, 5–6;
Bloom et al., 1956). For an earlier allusion to the classical tripartition, albeit with no reference to
higher-order thinking, see Lipman (1988, 173).
50 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

simply equal abstract or formal reasoning, but evidences a judgement-oriented and

context-specific nature (Lipman, 2003, 212, 219–220).
This said, we can now turn to critical thinking, which was defined by Lipman in
the following clear-cut terms:
This is a mode of thinking that is largely rule-governed, and is devoted to problem-finding
quite as much as to problem-solving. It is, therefore, highly inquisitive thinking, if we consider
merely its exploratory aspect. But it is also extremely deliberative, continually examining and
weighing alternatives in the light of explicit standards and criteria, as might be expected from
a mode of thinking that is most closely associated with the practice of criticism. In addition
to being investigative, critical thinking is often justificatory, devising reasons and arguments
for particular opinions or conclusions. The employment of reasons (both evaluative and
classificatory) is one of the grounds for counting critical thinking as a reasonable form of
communication, just as the employment of criteria and standards is one of the grounds for
categorizing it as critical. Among the other characteristic features of critical thinking are
that it is conducive to judgment, self-corrective and sensitive to context. It is conducive to
judgment in the sense that it is generally not content to remain at the level of theory but seeks
rather to apply itself to practice […]. It is self-corrective in that it invites and welcomes the
identification of its own blunders and fallacies […]. And it is sensitive to context in that it
recognizes the individuality of specific situations and seeks to respond appropriately to that
individuality. (Lipman, 1995a, 64)

Similarly, in Thinking in Education, Lipman argued that critical thinking

was “applied thinking”, which involved “more than attaining understanding”:
“It involves using knowledge to bring about reasonable change. Minimally,
the product is a judgment; maximally, it is putting that judgment into prac-
tice” (Lipman, 2003, 211). The practical relevance of critical thinking was a
feature both Lipman and Sharp intentionally revived from Aristotle (Lipman,
2003, 208; Sharp, 1995–2018a, 116), whose name not surprisingly reverber-
ates in the title of Lipman’s first educational novel. It is worth remembering,
however, that this “functional” view of critical thinking was developed earlier
by Lipman in the first edition of Thinking in Education (1991, 114 ff.),
and in this book, it played a role of primary importance, which he revised in the
following years.
Regarding creative thinking, Lipman used a different approach, since it was
precisely the comparison with critical thinking that would help understand it:
We have to do, in this case, with a mode of thinking and judgment that seems far removed from
critical thinking. First, […] critical thinking is persistently rule-guided. Creative thinking
[…] could even be rule-defiant. Then […] [c]ritical thinking tends to interest itself mainly in
linguistic utterance. Language, for creative thinking, is only one of the media through which
it can choose to express itself. One can think creatively in any artistic medium – stone, wood,
paint, tones, words, etc. […]. Critical thinking tends to employ criteria on an individual basis.
Thus, it may inquire about the evidence that supports a given statement, about this instance of
ambiguity or that instance of bias. By taking up these individual aspects of the problem one
at a time, critical thinking is able to reduce the conflict that occurs when different criteria are
appealed to simultaneously. Creative thinking, on the other hand, tends to employ contrasting
criteria all at once, because this intensifies the dramatic impact that the creative thinker hopes
to bring about […]. There is a difference, too, in the way critical thinking insists on its own
fallibility, with the consequence that it must engage incessantly in self-correction […], while
creative thinking, with more concern for the creation of meaning than for the discovery of
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 51

truth, is to be found constantly comparing itself with what it was. Creative thinking in this
sense always seems to involve a thrust towards self-transcendant originality, towards going
beyond, in some fashion, what it has been, so as not to repeat itself. (Lipman, 1995a, 65)

These reflections were coherent with what Lipman had developed earlier in the
first edition of Thinking in Education (1991).21 Here, creative thinking was under-
stood as a way of coping with problematic situations through the capacity to “forge”
new meanings (Lipman, 1991, 193), which was different from critical thinking’s less
inventive nature. On the other hand, it must be said that in the years culminating in the
release of the second edition of Thinking in Education, Lipman seemed to deempha-
sise the comparative approach between critical and creative thinking, with the result
that a more comprehensive notion of the second was developed. Lipman was thus
able to detail the following list of the characteristics of creative thinking: originality,
productivity, imagination, independence, experimentation, holism, expression, self-
transcendence, surprise, generativity, maieuticity, and inventiveness (Lipman, 2003,
245–247). However, this did not entail the reduction of creative thinking to the
simple “psychological disposition to creativity per se” (Lipman, 2003, 249). On the
contrary, he underlined that what distinguished creative thinking from creativity was
its reliance on criteria, and this is where creative and critical thinking converged,
since they both relied on criteria and used them in order to clarify situations and
make judgements. On the other hand, they made a different use of these criteria,
being creative thinking capable of dealing “with more subjective factors” (Lipman,
2003, 244). As a result, a person employing creative thinking could deal with criteria
in the following terms: “she may employ novel criteria that she has extemporane-
ously invented, or traditional creativity criteria applied in a new way, and this would
be a matter of thinking creatively about creative thinking” (Lipman, 2003, 245).
Notwithstanding their true differences, critical and creative thinking also revealed
structural similarities: they both revealed a practical orientation towards judgement
and a strong attentiveness to contextual nuances. In fact, Lipman distinguished
between the critical and the creative purely for the sake of explanation, since they
were actually just facets of the single phenomenon of thinking, which each person
enacted in a unique way and resulted in a plurality of individual expressions and ways
of thinking, as Lipman suggested in the last chapter of the novel Harry Stottlemeier’s
Discovery (1974, 91–96).
It is now time to examine “caring thinking”, a notion which was analysed by
Lipman in the two previously quoted articles published in 1995 (Lipman, 1995a,
1995b).22 However, as correctly pointed out by Richard E. Morehouse, Lipman and
Sharp both acknowledged that the notion of “caring thinking” “originated in the rich,
synergistic, and at times fraught professional and philosophical relationship between

21 Also interesting in this regard were Lipman’s earlier allusions to “philosophical creativity” and
creativity as “ampliative reasoning” (Lipman, 1988, 180–181, 185).
22 These articles probably developed from a paper Lipman presented to the Sixth International

Conference on Thinking, which took place in 1994 at the MIT in Boston (Sharp, 2007, 256).
52 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

the two of them” (Morehouse, 2018, 197).23 As we will see, Lipman and Sharp’s
slightly different views of the role played by caring thinking in the overall thinking
process probably reveal one of the most remarkable examples of the productive
tension characterising their cooperation. However, before this, the following question
needs to be addressed: why did Lipman and Sharp supplement critical and creative
thinking with the additional “caring” dimension?
While reflecting on the above-mentioned trinity of regulative ideals (truth,
meaning, and value), Lipman posed the following questions:
But then, what aspects of higher-order thinking could be said to approach these ideals? One
might nominate critical thinking as the truth-seeking aspect and creative thinking as the
meaning-seeking aspect. But what aspect of higher-order thinking is especially concerned
with the dimension of values? (Lipman, 1995b, 6)

Lipman and Sharp’s hypothesis in this regard was that the practical orientation
and attention to the context of thinking was ultimately devoid of meaning had it not
been complemented by a reference to values. This was indeed relevant to “thinking
well”. As a result, Lipman supplemented the third dimension of “caring thinking”
and came up with the following description of the abilities required for the three
dimensions of thinking:
When we are thinking critically, we are applying to our thinking the rules, criteria, standards,
reasons and orders that are reasonable and appropriate to it. When we are thinking creatively,
we are inventing ways of expressing ourselves and/or the world around us; we are trying
to go beyond the ways we have thought in the past; we are imagining details of possible
worlds and proposing unprecedented innovations. When we are thinking caringly, we attend
to what we take to be important, to what we care about, to what demands, requires or needs
us to think about it. Higher-order thinking, in other words, is not value-free. (Lipman, 1995b,
6–7)24

This plurality of modes of thinking was indeed relevant to how philosophical

dialogue had to be operationalised in educational contexts, since the development of
thinking skills required a focus not only on argumentative and “critical” thinking,
but also on the “creative” and “caring” dimensions of thinking, and on the contribu-
tion of emotions to thinking (Lipman, 2003, 127–138). Indeed, the very notion of
“caring thinking” explicitly challenged the traditional opinions concerning cognitive-
affective relationships. In this regard, Lipman and Sharp opted for a radical approach.

23 As a result, added Morehouse, from “the late 1990s through the remainder of their lives, the two
[Lipman and Sharp] promoted the tripartite of critical, creative, and caring thinking as an analytical
and educational heuristic, and contended with one another about the meaning of the latter term”
(Morehouse, 2018, 198).
24 In a passage of Philosophy goes to School (Lipman et al., 1977–1980) can be found one of the

earliest references to “caring” in the works of Lipman and Sharp. Here, although not yet defined
in terms of “caring thinking”, caring already reveals the double meaning it will maintain in the
following years (e.g. Lipman, 2003, 262). First, it evidences the attitude of children as co-inquirers,
who care about what they discuss, since it is “something meaningful and important” (Lipman et al.,
1977–1980, 199). Second, care also evidences the attention given by children to “the procedures of
philosophical inquiry itself and the rigor that these procedures involve” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980,
199–200).
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 53

Instead of supporting the overly cognitivist view that emotions could be in the service
of cognition, they advocated for a more ambitious and less dualistic reframing of the
relationship between cognition and emotions.25 Their practice-oriented and context-
situated view of thinking provided a suitable background for cognition and emotions
to meet: on the one hand, by regarding “emotions as judgments” about existential situ-
ations (Lipman, 1995b, 3), Lipman underlined that it was not true that emotions were
“unthinking processes that work to confuse and disrupt the mind’s efforts at rational-
ity” (Lipman, 1995b, 5); on the other hand, counter to Western philosophy’s strong
tradition of egologic self-sufficiency, he stated that rationality and thinking were not
to be considered in such a static and emotion-devoid way. Lipman made explicit
reference to the philosophical works by Israel Scheffler, Harry Frankfurt, Robert
Solomon, Kathleen Wallace, and Martha Nussbaum. However, he did not develop
these topics further, since his interest was limited to the understanding of “caring
thinking” and of the related cognitive operations. Instead, as we will see shortly,
Sharp thought that the inquiry into “caring thinking” should have been developed
further, to verify its relevance to “caring practice”, on the one hand, and the develop-
ment of personhood and interpersonal relationships on the other (Sharp, 2004–2018,
209–210).
Lipman defined “caring thinking” in the following terms:
To care is to focus on that which we respect, to appreciate its worth, to value its value. Caring
thinking involves a double meaning, for on the one hand it means to think solicitously about
that which is the subject matter of our thought, and on the other hand it is to be concerned
about one’s manner of thinking. (Lipman, 2003, 262)

This peculiar dimension of rationality highlighted our intense desire for reality
and our need for an abundance of diversities, which endowed reality with worth and
value. Moreover, “caring thinking” appeared to be unavoidably entangled in a subtle
paradox connected to appraising differences:
caring is a kind of thinking when it performs such cognitive operations as scanning for alter-
natives, discovering or inventing relationships, instituting connections among connections,
and gauging differences. And yet, it is of the very nature of caring to obliterate distinctions
and rankings when they threaten to become invidious and, thereby, outlive their usefulness.
Thus, caring parents, recognizing that “being human” is not a matter of degree, just as “being
natural” is not a matter of hierarchy, do not attempt to assign rankings to their children; yet
at the same time they recognize that there are significant differences of perspective so that
things have different proportions in one perspective than they have in another. Those who
care, therefore, struggle continually to strike a balance between that ontological parity that
sees all beings as standing on the same footing and those perspectival differences of propor-
tion and nuances of perception that flow from our emotional discriminations. (Lipman,
1995b, 8; see also Lipman, 2003, 264)

Moreover, Lipman described “caring thinking” as endowed with particular charac-

teristics. First, it was “appreciative” or “valuational”, since it provided the capability
to enjoy relationships, pay attention to what matters, and experience something in

25As for the Deweyan inspiration for this non-dualistic approach by Lipman and Sharp, see Bleazby
(2013, 92–112).
54 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

a relational and valuational way. Second, it was “affective”, due to its capacity to
provide cognitive criterions of contextual appropriateness and foster an affectionate
feeling for something or someone. Third, it was “active”, being capable of fostering
our capacity to “care for”, in the sense of “taking care of” or “looking after”, and for
this reason, it could be both protective, conservationist (“taking pains to maintain
what is already in place”), and interventionist (“making pains to change what is in
place”). Fourth, it was “normative”, since it provided a blueprint for what ought to be,
which in turn could become “part and parcel of the attention one pays to what is actu-
ally going on”, and finally, it was “empathic”, because it supported the displacement
of the individual towards the horizon of another, and this resulted in enabling us to
“understand much better how that other person views his or her situation” (Lipman,
1995a, 66–68, 1995b, 8–12, 2003, 264–271). The result of this vivid portrait was
that the reframing of the cognitive-affective relationship made even more prominent
and educationally relevant26 the intrinsically practical feature of thinking, as well as
its indistinguishability from emotion. Lipman concluded his pioneering essay with
the following words:
I suspect we feel emotions when we have choices and decisions to make, and these choices
and decisions are the leading edges of judgment. Indeed, so important is the role of the
emotion in the thinking that leads up to the judgment and in the thinking that leads down
from and away from it that we would be hard put to tell the one from the other. In fact, they
may very well be indistinguishable, they may very well be identical, in which case it would
make perfect sense to say that the emotion is the choice, it is the decision, it is the judgment.
And it is this kind of thinking that we may well call caring thinking when it has to do with
matters of importance. (Lipman, 1995b, 12; see also Lipman, 2003, 270–271)

Focusing on Ann Sharp’s contribution to “caring thinking”, the following will

highlight that the peculiarity of her philosophical and educational background, as
well as her research interests, made her emphasise aspects of “caring thinking” in a
slightly different way from Lipman.
As mentioned earlier, Lipman and Sharp developed the Philosophy for Children
curriculum together and would discuss every aspect of their educational philosophy,
including of course the idea of multidimensional thinking. Therefore, it was not
a surprise that the progress of their dialogues and communal inquiry resonated in
their publications. This was particularly evident with “caring thinking”. The first
allusions to this notion in Sharp’s publications were to be found in three articles
published between 1994 and 1995 (Sharp, 1994a, 2, 1994b, 28, 1995–2018a, 111),
the same years as Lipman’s own. However, a careful analysis of Sharp’s previous
works reveals the development of an interesting in nuce idea of “care”, which she
ultimately developed into “caring thinking”.
For instance, in an article published in the IAPC journal Thinking in 1991 under
the title “The Community of Inquiry: Education for Democracy”, Sharp stated the
following:

26 The educational relevance of multidimensional thinking was detailed in connection with ethical
or normative inquiry (Lipman, 1995a, 68–70; Sharp, 1995–2018a, 1995–2018b) and the education
of emotions (Sharp, 2007).
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 55

A certain care is manifest in the group, not only care for the logical procedures but for the
growth of each member of the community. This care presupposes the disposition to be open,
to be capable of changing one’s views and priorities in order to care for the other. In a real
sense to care presupposes a willingness to be transformed by the other – to be affected by
the other. This care is essential for dialogue […]. Care, then, makes possible a conception
of the world as a play in which one can shape outcomes and create beauty where none has
existed before. (Sharp, 1991–2018, 242)

According to Sharp, “care” was the relational pivot enabling communal thinking,
philosophical inquiry, and the transformation of the self. Moreover, it revealed itself
through the social and proactive behaviours of co-inquirers, who enjoyed mutually
generative and trustworthy relationships. In an interesting footnote to the text, Sharp
acknowledged that she had become aware of both the philosophical and psycholog-
ical meanings of care since 1989 and in this regard mentioned the works of Martin
Heidegger and Erik Erikson. In 1993, she complemented these reflections with a reap-
praisal of Peirce’s cosmologic notion of “agapism” or “evolutionary love” (Sharp,
1993, 57). Sharp was in search of “a more comprehensive understanding of human
experience” (Sharp, 1993, 56) and was convinced that the philosophy of Peirce could
provide such an insight.27 As a result, the dynamic, evolutive, cherishing, creative,
and agapistic nature of the “higher development of human reason” according to Peirce
(Sharp, 1993, 57) led her to a trinity of forms of inquiry enacted in the practice of
philosophy, which was very similar to Lipman’s: “Philosophy for Children focuses
on the doing of ethical, aesthetic and logical inquiry” (Sharp, 1993, 59). It is worth
noting that for Sharp and Lipman alike, care was characterised as being intrinsically
value related.
However, an interesting document preserved in the archive of the IAPC at Mont-
clair State University casts light on the uniqueness of Sharp’s approach to care. It
is an unpublished poem titled “To My Mirror”, composed by Sharp on 4 December
1980.28 This poem, dealing with the difficulties of dialogue, was important because
it revolved around the polysemic noun “reflection”. In its literal sense, “reflection”
referred to the mirror’s capacity to throw back light or an image. At the same time,
“reflection” was also a synonym for thinking. Accordingly, the poem hinted at two
possible ways of reflecting or thinking: uncaringly or caringly. The mirror embodied
uncaring reflection (“You don’t care about me […] You’re not interested in my ideas,
my ideals”, denounced Sharp), which was characterised by alleged objectivity and

27 See the reflections in the previous section on self-correction, sensitivity to context, reasonableness,
and fallibilism.
28 Here is the full text: “Mirror, you’re a mime, /A mimic! /Every day you mock me. //You never

affirm me /when I’m happy /As if you’re always saying /‘Who do you think you’re /kidding?’ //You
don’t care /about me. /You never reflect my thoughts /my dreams /You’re not interested in /my ideas,
my ideals. //But you do reflect my body. /And, I am my body, too. /You mirror the tension, the lines,
/the awful struggle of the /sense-making. /You glare me straight when /I hurt. /You stare me down
when /I pain. /The ugliness, the awful ugliness. /The neck, the jaw, the mouth, /the breasts. //Have
you ever reflected my beauty? /Was there once a time? /In my eyes? /Or could you? //But, if I were
to die /You could no longer /mock me. You could no /longer mimic and /reflect the ugliness. /And
I would have my vengeance! Ann Margaret Sharp, Dec 4, 1980”.
56 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

the depiction of exteriority. However, this perspective resulted in a detached, unin-

volved sense, deprived of beauty; an ultimately untrue knowledge about somebody
or something. One could be tempted to see in this portrait of knowledge the effects of
pure (ego)logic and abstract reasoning, whereas Sharp suggested that thinking could
also take a different and more caring path, which endowed thinking with sensitivity
to context and differences, an appreciation of ethical and aesthetic values, and the
possibility for interpersonal engagement.
The thread of care running through Sharp’s meditations gained further clarification
due to her dialogue over the years with feminism, which represented the explicit
reference point of the above-mentioned works (Sharp, 1993, 1994a, 1994b). For the
sake of the present analysis, it is important to highlight some basic aspects of Sharp’s
view of feminism, in addition to those already pointed out at the beginning of Chap. 2.
She was well aware of the plurality of positions among feminist thinkers, some
of whom were more inclined towards essentialism by underlining the irreducible
differences between men and women, while others focused more on the criticism
of patriarchal culture and argued in favour of the transformation of both men and
women (Sharp, 1994b, 24–25). As for Sharp, she was closer to this second approach,
which emphasised that a gender perspective and a broader vision could foster cultural
change through constructive criticism of the existing structures of power.29 However,
even more relevant to the current educational analysis was the fact that Sharp’s
truthful feminist sensitivity enabled her to add innovative nuances to Lipman’s view
of caring thinking and appraise it in a slightly different way. As a result, Sharp’s view
of the role played by caring thinking in higher-order thinking was also different from
Lipman’s.
Sharp produced a lively depiction of caring thinking, for which, over time, she
mobilised not only the resources of feminism, but also her interest in Continental
philosophy, theology, and psychology. For instance, in the essay published in 2004 on
“The Other Dimension of Caring Thinking”, Sharp evidenced three characteristics of
care: the “ontic” feature, involving the whole person; “intentionality”, involving our
relationships with other persons; and “communality”, as the relational environment
where people can commit themselves to practice (Sharp, 2004–2018). Although there
were no feminist thinkers among the sources of this article,30 it was clear that the
three basic characteristics of care evidenced by Sharp relied on her earlier works,
where the employment of a feminist approach had helped her bring to the fore-
ground the bodily, perception-related, and relational dimension of care. This was
not at odds with the aspects of caring thinking underlined by Lipman, since both
thinkers agreed that care contributed in a unique way to the affective embodiment of

29 Among the women intellectuals quoted by Sharp (1994b) were the following: Virginia Woolf,
Simone Weil, Kathryn A. Rabuzzi, Sarah Ruddick, Lorraine Code, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carol
Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Catherine Keller, Iris Murdoch, Rosemary Ruether, and Martha Nuss-
baum. On Sharp and feminism, see Garza (2018). On gender perspective’s capacity to broaden the
individual’s glance, see Loretoni (2014).
30 In this essay, Sharp mentioned and analysed the works by the following thinkers, theologians,

and psychologists: S. Augustine, M. Buber, E. Erikson, M. Heidegger, E. Husserl, S. Kierkegaard,

R. May, M. Nussbaum, R. Solomon, P. Tillich, A. N. Whitehead.
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 57

thinking and to its “intensity and commitment to act” (Sharp, 2007, 251). However,
it was also true that Sharp’s view of caring thinking differed from Lipman’s: while
for Lipman aspects of higher-order thinking like sensitivity to context, orientation
towards practical judgement, and relational consciousness possessed equal impor-
tance and evidenced symmetric interrelations, for Sharp the latter aspect, which
was specifically related to caring thinking, was endowed with an anthropological
pre-eminence and a more encompassing nature if compared to critical and creative
thinking. It was in the light of interpersonal relationships that human existence and
thinking acquired meaning and were thus capable of orienting judgement, choices,
and behaviours. Sharp developed this relational primacy of both care and caring
thinking from her dialogue with feminism, and especially with the so-called ethics
of care (e.g. Sharp, 1994b, 1995–2018a, 118). As a result, her understanding of
Philosophy for Children was relation-centred in the following sense: “Committed to
the narrative as a form for becoming aware of the philosophical dimension of expe-
rience, it [Philosophy for Children] stresses relationships not only among ideas and
disciplines, but among people” (Sharp, 1994b, 27). This was true, according to Sharp,
due to the fact that critical and creative thinking seemed to be enveloped in caring
thinking. Consequently, the difference between Lipman and Sharp’s approaches to
caring thinking can be summarised in the following diagrams31 :

M. Lipman Ann M. Sharp

(Lipman, 2003, 200) (Morehouse, 2018, 203)

Before moving to the next section, the implications of this dissimilarity between
the founders of Philosophy for Children need to be explained. As stated earlier,
rather than preventing their cooperation, the differences between Lipman and Sharp’s
views enriched their educational project. This was specifically the case with caring

31It is worth noting that Lipman himself conceived of his own diagram (Lipman, 2003, 200), while
Sharp’s was presented and discussed independently by Davey (2005, 38–39) and Morehouse (2018,
203). On Sharp’s view of caring thinking, see also Davey Chesters (2012, 128–153).
58 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

thinking, a notion that Lipman systematically analysed and Sharp endeavoured to

clarify from a relational point of view. What did this imply? Firstly, a different, albeit
complementary, focus on emotions. On the one hand, Lipman inquired into the rele-
vance of emotions to thinking, as well as into the integrity of emotion, cognition,
and judgement, and concluded that emotions were forms of cognition capable of
orienting judgements, choices, and decisions. On the other hand, Sharp focused on
the relationship between perception and emotions, with the aim to put higher-order
thinking into educational practice. Probably inspired by Simone Weil’s studies on
“attention”,32 Sharp remarked that “emotions direct the attention of the students”
(Sharp, 2007, 253) and were thus involved in how they feel or see a situation and
“the impending decisions” (Sharp, 2007, 252). This was both a relational and an
educational issue, since to decide appropriately required the harmonious develop-
ment of a truly relational consciousness related to care33 and the above-mentioned
“agapistic” nature of thinking. The fostering of such consciousness was one of the
benefits of communal inquiry, which manifested “this love in a variety of ways: love
for the tools of inquiry, love of other’s ideas, love of truth, love of each other as
persons, love of the ultimate ideal, love of the world” (Sharp, 1993, 58). How could
education contribute to the development of this consciousness? Sharp’s answer to this
question was the twofold education of perception and emotions; a topic that Lipman
had dealt with only partially and marginally (Lipman, 2003, 127–132), although this
debate is livelier nowadays.34
It is worth underlining that the focus of Sharp’s education of perception and
emotions was not the atomistically independent individual, but the relational human
being, whose dynamic identity relied on his or her interpersonal relationships with
other beings.35 When Sharp endeavoured to detail what the education of emotions
entailed in a classroom community of inquiry, she identified the following tasks to
be accomplished by children with the help of the teacher: the identification of one’s
emotions; the clarification of the underlying belief of the emotion; the identifica-
tion of a procedure for justifying one’s emotions; and learning to let go of emotions
that children could not justify to themselves (Sharp, 2007, 254–255). The aim of
these educational tasks was to encourage “the formation of community feelings,
which develop the pro-social, virtuous dispositions (such as sincerity, courage, care,

32 For Sharp’s appraisal of the thinking of Simone Weil, see Sharp (1978, 1984a, s.d.b), Sharp &
Gregory (2009–2018).
33 In one of her earlier essays on the thinking of S. Weil, Sharp remarkably stated in this regard:

“This attention manifests itself in care, a striving for excellence, objectivity, beauty, and quality”
(Sharp, 1984a, 494).
34 As regards the education of perception, see for instance Masschelein (2010) and Biesta (2020).

As regards the centrality of emotions in education, co-inquiry, and cognitive transformation, see
Candiotto (2022). Moreover, the education of emotions seems to fit in with the recent “affective
turn” in social sciences and education.
35 In an interesting unpublished poem inspired by S. Weil’s Beyond Personalism (1952), Sharp

seems to understand the human being as an expressive meaning-seeker and sense-creator, who
ultimately reveals a relational essence: “All there are now are relations” (Sharp, s.d.b).
3.5 The Multidimensionality of Thinking: Critical, Creative, and Caring 59

honesty, considerateness compassion, sensitivity, integrity, etc.) and character struc-

tures of the children in the class” (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 114).36 The reflective compe-
tence to be developed in this regard was children’s “reasonableness”, as the capability
to “feel emotions about emotions” (Costa Carvalho & Mendonça, 2017, 129–131).
However, probably the most central and encompassing competence related to the
education of emotions was “compassion” or “intelligent sympathy”, to which Sharp
devoted an important paper published in 1995.37 According to Sharp, compassion or
intelligent sympathy was the emotional attitude of those who did not consider them-
selves independent from, or superior to the world. Rather than being a contemplative
disposition, compassion was essentially practical and committed “to a certain kind
of action that arises out of seeing the nature of suffering in the world” (Sharp, 1995–
2018b, 233). Finally, “the word for compassion means experiencing a trembling
or quivering of the heart in response to another’s pain” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 233).
This relational consciousness or capability to feel “connected to the other” (Sharp,
2007, 251) and perceive the nature of suffering in the world was what Sharp called
“global ethical consciousness” (Sharp, 1995–2018b). This was where emotions and
perception revealed their proximity and mutual interdependence: on the one hand,
compassion was a “prerequisite for global ethical consciousness and action” (Sharp,
1995–2018b, 231); on the other hand, the education of perception in a relational
and attentive sense could foster compassion. In what sense was this to be under-
stood? According to Sharp, this was possible due to the “ecological dimension of
communal inquiry” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 237) focused on the education of imagina-
tion, which enabled participants to “conceive of ways in which the world could be
a better place” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 234),38 envision new possibilities, and imagine
themselves in different situations. This resulted in creatively decentring the partici-
pants’ view, in the sense that it shifted their “preoccupation with themselves towards
an understanding of the innumerable relationships that exist between them and others
in the world” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 237), an allusion once again to Lorraine Code’s
feminist perspective (1991).39 In another essay, focused on the thinking of Lévinas,

36 In this regard, Sharp was once again in line with the feminist revision of philosophical discussion
and critical thinking in a way that was no longer at odds with care and the education of emotions.
See for instance Thayer-Bacon’s “constructive” perspective (1993, 2000).
37 See Sharp, (1995–2018b). However, the paper was probably originally conceived as a chapter of

the book Educating for Global Consciousness: A Philosophical Approach (Sharp & Guin, 1995),
which was never published. Sharp derived the notion of “intelligent sympathy” from Dewey’s ethical
theory (Sharp, 1955–2018a, 115, 1995–2018b). On the centrality of affection and relationship in
Dewey’s ethics, see Pappas (1993). Of equal importance for the development of Sharp’s idea of
compassion was the relational thinking of Lévinas (Sharp, 2006, 45). Finally, on compassion in
Lipman and Sharp’s P4C, see Cassidy (2022).
38 It is also worth mentioning that according to Nussbaum (2010, 95–120), the cultivation of

imagination is a keystone of a vigorous individual and citizen.

39 In this essay, Sharp also quotes the work of the moral philosopher Johnson (1993). The

centrality of compassion, as the basic social emotion, also recalls the works of Nussbaum
(1996). On the relationship between the decentring of the ego and the recognition of others,
see also Sharp (s.d.a, 13).
60 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

Sharp concluded: “If we don’t learn how to perceive the face of the other, we lose
more than the other does. We lose ourselves” (Sharp, 2006, 47).
This unique capability of caring thinking to foster relational awareness, intelli-
gent sympathy, compassionate creativity, and global consciousness explained why
in the following decades it became progressively important in Lipman and Sharp’s
educational project. Moreover, it also inspired an interesting, albeit not yet fully
implemented, line of research pivoting on the environmental-educational relevance
of Philosophy for Children (Saner & Manzo, 2022; Sharp, 1995–2018a, 1995–2018b,
2007; Young Silva, 1991).

3.6 Moral Education and Appreciation of Diversities

Lipman and Sharp’s approach to education was essentially normative. The previous
sections clarified in what sense this was to be understood: the need to tackle
the inequality of the educational system, the challenge of democracy in times
of consumerism, the need to develop children’s intellectual autonomy through
communal dialogue and the practice of philosophy, generative education as the
most effective way to meet these challenges, and finally, the practically engaged,
context-sensitive, fallible, value-oriented, and caring or passionate idea of communal
thinking. Indeed, these characteristics of Lipman and Sharp’s educational philosophy
also converged in their idea of moral education.
In the light of what has been said, it should be clear that facing the challenges of
morality through ethical inquiry entailed more than just being capable of “mechani-
cally applying fixed procedures” or abstract rules (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 235; see also
Lipman, 1985, 21). Indeed, especially according to Sharp, ethics was “defined by
the constant and unconditional exercise of receptivity, rather than by an autonomous
and algorithmic exercise of moral reasoning” (Sharp & Laverty, 2018, 122). It was
caring thinking that proved once again to be central in this regard:
Discourse ethics, without what Lipman calls caring thinking, runs the risk of reducing moral
education to argumentation by those who have the analytic skills and loud voices to argue
well, depriving others who have yet to discover their skills or voice any chance to effectively
participate in the communal enterprise of dialogue and inquiry. (Sharp, 2006, 47)40

As a result, the core of Lipman and Sharp’s normative approach to education was
the relationships between the members of a community, who could benefit from the
tools of inquiry provided by philosophy to achieve relational awareness and mutual

40 In discourse ethics, and especially in the Habermasian project of “intersubjective universal

reason”, there was “a real risk that reason might be reduced to the domain of argument by those who
have the power and the power to speak, depriving ‘others’ of any chance to participate effectively
in discourse” (Ortega Ruiz, 2004, 284). On the other hand, stated Megan Laverty, by building on
Sharp’s intuitions, the “community of inquiry goes beyond a discourse ethic rooted in a Habermasian
conception of reason by giving students a lived experience of being ethically situated” (Sharp &
Laverty, 2018, 125).
3.6 Moral Education and Appreciation of Diversities 61

recognition, be engaged in a joint quest for meaning, and ultimately be transformed

and capable of transforming society. This entailed a dynamic and evolving view
of morality, based on the persons’ capability to jointly conduct an attentive and
meaningful inquiry:
Philosophy for Children views ethics itself as an on-going, developmental communal inquiry
rather than a rule-guided or principle-guided endeavour. Implicit in this view is the recog-
nition that in an evolving universe there are no such things as static moral truths. The truth
of moral principles is ultimately a function of their ability to give rise to a better universe. It
follows that moral integrity is not so much an issue of permanent convictions but rests on our
commitment to care effectively for other persons and species in nature as well as continual
inquiry itself. (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 116, s.d.a, 11)

The caring engagement of participants in philosophy enabled their moral growth,

as well as the development of habits and skills of inquiry (Lipman, 1995a, 68–69;
Lipman & Sharp, 1978; Sharp, 1984b). Accordingly, ethics was reframed in a more
practical, inquiry-oriented, and context-sensitive way. This had three main educa-
tional implications. First, moral education was neither primarily content-centred nor
merely applicative, since it involved more than just being able to understand how
abstract or universal values should be correctly applied to specific cases. Second,
moral education should not be confused with indoctrination, and third, moral educa-
tion was not value-free or value-neutral, being instead oriented towards “violence
reduction and peace development” (Lipman, 2003, 105). So, how did these three
ideas apply to Lipman and Sharp’s educational proposal?
Along with their attempt to go beyond the traditional educational dichotomies
of theory/practice, content/experience, reason/emotion, and individual/community,
Lipman and Sharp also endeavoured to revolutionise moral education, and it was
once again philosophy that provided the proper means to attain this goal. Rather
than focusing on the content-related transmission of ethical values [a surreptitiously
violent and indoctrinating practice, since it relied on the “implanting (of) the teacher’s
values in the vulnerable minds of the children in the classroom” (Lipman et al.,
1977–1980, 85)], they opted for a more active and student-centred proposal geared
towards
the liberation of students from unquestioning, uncritical mental habits, in order that they
may better develop the ability to think for themselves, to discover their own orientation to
the world, and, when ready to do so, to devise their own set of beliefs about it. (Lipman et al.,
1977–1980, 85)

This entailed focusing on the development of children’s “intellectual and creative

powers”, as well as their “own way of looking at things”, as a prerequisite for their
“better understanding of what they think and why they think and feel and act the way
they do, and of how it might be to reason effectively” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 85).
Developing children’s capacity to think for themselves was, for Lipman and Sharp,
also the most effective way to empower them from a moral point of view. This effort
entailed both reflection and practice. As a result, children were encouraged to become
autonomous and responsible persons, rather than blind worshippers of authority:
62 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

we have to help children both understand and practice what is involved in violence reduction
and peace development. They have to learn to think for themselves about these matters, not
just provide knee-jerk responses when we present the proper stimuli. (Lipman, 2003, 105)

To be effective, these last words were addressed to teachers, who were, in addi-
tion to students, the other key elements in education. Lipman and Sharp knew that
the teachers’ good intentions of fostering ethical behaviour in their students often
collapsed because of a lack of pedagogical and reflective awareness on their part.
Therefore, as we will see in Chap. 4, throughout their cooperation Lipman and
Sharp relentlessly and continuously devoted themselves to teacher training, since
the success of the P4C curriculum greatly relied on the teachers’ ability to prac-
tice it properly with their students. This entailed, among other things, being able
to foster a lively and joyful environment (Lipman, 1995a, 70), where ideas could
be discussed freely and from a variety of perspectives (Lipman et al., 1977–1980,
90), where both “meanings” and “procedures” could be taken into consideration
and analysed (Lipman, 2003, 105), and where the reasons behind certain beliefs or
behaviours could be contextualised, clarified, and/or understood, no matter how diffi-
cult and unsettling this could be or how much disagreement would come to the surface
(Lipman, 2003, 105–106). These results could be acquired through the “conversion
of ordinary classrooms into communities of inquiry” (Lipman, 2003, 105), whose
pillars were the social solidarity among participants, mutual respect, and a caring
attitude to relationships with co-inquirers. The practical and empowering implica-
tions of this “conversion” were clear to Lipman and Sharp, who could not be satisfied
with children becoming “a group of little prigs […] thinking altruistically instead
of in terms of their own self-interest” (Lipman, 2008a, 117), but instead aimed at a
more effective result, namely, the “children’s acquisition of the moral qualities they
are expected to model to one another” (Lipman, 2008a, 117).
This communally liberating ethical inquiry enacted two additional features of
philosophy: its logical structure and its capacity to unveil and examine “what is
normally taken for granted in moral discourse” (Lipman, 2003, 113). However, as
regards the logical structure of philosophical discourse, its relationship with rules,
procedures, and standards of inquiry, Lipman and Sharp also added that it had not to
be assumed in a dogmatic way, but rather in a manner which was conducive to inquiry,
since there “is nothing final about logical criteria” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 87).
This meant that logic was not the purpose of inquiry, but an aid to inquiry, and like all
tools, it had to be applied appropriately with respect to the context and the purpose of
inquiry. As we will see in the next chapter, the professional in charge of this delicate
mediation was to be the teacher: “What the teacher must seek to convey is that in
certain contexts and for certain purposes, it is beneficial to be able to […] think
logically” (Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 87). This also implied the recognition of those
contexts and purposes which, on the contrary, required inquiry to emphasise and
leave room for different and more informal ways of expressing one’s thoughts and
feelings. The first effect of this plurality of ways of uttering and expressing oneself
was inclusion, mutual recognition, and the possibility to give a voice to everybody,
even to those persons whose voice was usually unheard or marginalised because of
3.6 Moral Education and Appreciation of Diversities 63

an alleged diversity or deviation from what was stereotypically considered normal

(Lipman, 2003, 106–107; Sharp, 1994b, 27–28).41 An additional effect related to the
awareness of the plurality of perspectives and voices was that the product of inquiry
was richer, more profound, and more effective than the “one-dimensional moral
thinking” produced by uncritical educational methodologies such as “sermons and
lectures” (Lipman, 2003, 106–107). Lipman and Sharp’s views also resulted in the
fostering of students’ capability to recognise and critically assess the violence hidden
in mass media communication (Lipman, 2003, 107–108) through the strengthening
of students’ moral character and disposition to inquiry (Lipman, 2003, 114–116), as
well as their desire to regain control of their own life (Lipman, 2003, 108).
All of this was possible due to the fruitful educational employment of philosophy,
whose specificity was to provide “ideas for people to chew on—ideas that don’t get
used up because they are persistently contestable” (Lipman, 2003, 106). These ideas
were worked out collaboratively in the “safe environment” (Sharp, 1994b, 28) of the
community of inquiry, whose procedures enabled the practical enactment of
moral procedures such as tolerance, trust, compassion, benevolence, seeing things from
various perspectives, understanding the different world views of those in the group, listening
to one another attentively, taking the ideas of each other seriously and being disposed to
self-correct in a public fashion when one realizes that one is wrong. (Sharp, 1994b, 27)

Lipman and Sharp also detailed the tools of ethical inquiry to be practically used in
“communal moral deliberation”: “empathy, consistency, comprehensiveness, giving
of reasons, universalizing, projecting an ideal image of the self or society, taking
consequences into account, taking the context into account” (Sharp, 1994b, 28).
In sum, their belief was that due to communal philosophical inquiry, children
developed not only their cognitive and affective qualities, but also their relational and
moral capabilities. Their additional conviction was that, rather than being focused
on universalisable principles, moral education entailed developing an attentiveness
to specific contexts and interpersonal experiences, as well as to related normative
demands. It was precisely in this sense that morality and moral education required
not only inquiry, but “communal” inquiry, relying essentially on the participants’
relationships with others. This was because relationships provided the motivation
for moral inquiry and, at the same time, revealed its normative or ideal feature. Nel
Noddings famously expressed these ideas in the vocabulary of “care”; ones that
Lipman and especially Sharp would have probably subscribed:
We want to be moral in order to remain in the caring relation and to enhance the ideal of
ourselves as one-caring. It is this ethical ideal, this realistic picture of ourselves as one-caring,
that guides us as we strive to meet the other morally […]. Our efforts must, then, be directed
to the maintenance of conditions that will permit caring to flourish. (Noddings, 1984, 5)

41 Lipman and Sharp evidenced a peculiar sensitivity to diversities like blindness, dyslexia, and
communication disorders in children (Lipman, 2008a, 90, 95–96; Sharp, 1996–2018b). Over time,
other diversities like deafness, as well as alternative audiences like gifted or talented students,
incarcerated juveniles, and terminally ill children with cancer, were included in the activities of
P4C practitioners (Cinquino, 1981; Dalin, 1979; Geisser, 1993; Lee, 1986).
64 3 Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophical-Educational Vision

Lipman and Sharp’s basic conviction was that their educational philosophy
could foster significant changes, not only in individuals but in society, ultimately
contributing to a reduction in violence and discrimination (Sharp, 1995–2018a, 118).
That their conviction was not misplaced or unrealistic (as Hannah Arendt incorrectly
suggested in her reply to Lipman’s reactions to the essay “Reflections on Little Rock”
published in 1959)42 and that they were perfectly aware of the challenges related to
the operationalisation of their educational project will be the specific focus of the next
chapter. However, as regards the effects of Lipman and Sharp’s educational philos-
ophy on the reduction of violence, it might be worth mentioning the many projects
and practical experiences focusing on this aspect, which flourished successfully over
the decades. Among these, one in which both Lipman and Sharp engaged directly
became paradigmatic, namely the Canadian experience at La Traversée mentioned
at the end of Chap. 1.

References

Arendt, H. (1959). Letter to M. Lipman dated 30 March 1959. IAPC archive.

Arendt, H. (1959–2003). Reflections on Little Rock (1959). Republished in Arendt, H. (2003).
Responsibility and Judgment, pp. 193–213. Schocken.
Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. University of California Press.
Asch, S. (1958). The metaphor: A psychological inquiry. In R. Tagiuri & L. Petrullo (Eds.), Person
perception and interpersonal behavior (pp. 86–94). Stanford University Press.
Biesta, G. (2017). Touching the soul? Exploring an alternative outlook for philosophical work with
children and young people. Childhood & Philosophy, 13(28), 415–452.

42 In Chap. 1, I alluded to the so-called “Little Rock Crisis” (1957–1958) and to Arendt’s criticism

of the political decision to exploit education in order to overthrow racial segregation. Her position
relied on the distinction between the social and the political domains. Racial segregation was a
political issue which had to be tackled at the proper political-legislative level. On the contrary,
social discrimination was a social matter, in the sense that it referred to the “innumerable variety”
of social “groups and associations”, each of which possessed a unique identity (Arendt, 1959–
2003, 205). Education was a social matter of this kind. According to Arendt, any attempt to legally
enforce social discrimination was obviously to be banned and fought politically. However, it was
equally problematic not to respect the right of groups to their social specificity and force them to
integrate with other groups. And, reminded Arendt, “the government has no right to interfere with
the prejudices and discriminatory practices of society” (Arendt, 1959–2003, 208), as happened in
the “Little Rock Crisis”. As already mentioned in Chap. 1, Lipman replied to Arendt’s arguments,
but his considerations were never published. He sent his reflections to Arendt privately, and she
replied with a letter dated 30 March 1959. Arendt concludes her letter with the following words,
which are consistent with her previous reflections: “I am afraid your whole syllogism resides on
your not distinguishing between (social) discrimination and (political) persecution” (Arendt, 1959,
3). Indeed, neither Lipman nor Sharp could ever agree with this distinction, which was at odds with
their personal experiences and their convictions about the role played by education in fostering both
social and political change. Also, they probably did not agree with Arendt’s reductive criticism of
utopia (Arendt, 1959–2003, 197); an idea that Lipman and Sharp endeavoured to revive for the sake
of democracy.
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Chapter 4
Philosophy for Children’s Educational
Curriculum

4.1 The First Novel: “Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery”

(1969)

The first act of the drama, which eventually culminated in the Philosophy for Children
educational proposal, started in 1967 with Matthew Lipman’s conception of the pilot
novel, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery, while still teaching at Columbia University.
The author recalled writing the story in his spare time on a portable typewriter,
mostly by night, in the basement of his house (Lipman, 2008, 111–112). It was as
if he were secretly starting a conspiracy to subvert traditional education. As seen in
Chap. 1, a pilot version of the book was published in 1969 with financial support
from the National Endowment of the Humanities (Lipman, 1969), and this eventually
led Lipman to his new position at Montclair State College, where he could further
develop his inquiry into children’s philosophical thinking.
Another aspect was that in those years, Lipman was concerned with freeing chil-
dren from the manipulation of adults and society, and that this result was to be
achieved through the empowerment of the children’s capacity to think for them-
selves. It was for this reason that he began conceiving of a didactic text which could
support children in their effort towards autonomy. It would be one that was non-
manipulative, non-authoritative, and capable of engaging in philosophical inquiry,
simultaneously and openly with both children and teachers (Lipman, 1996a, 88,
2008, 108–109). After some thought, Lipman chose a text written in the form of a
novel, rather than a traditional expository book. The remains of this section will be
devoted to clarifying the reasons for this choice.
In Lipman’s view, the narrative form was the most suitable to carry out his project
of renovating education through philosophy, but for this purpose, philosophy also
had to be radically changed, in the sense that it had to be intentionally dismantled
into its basic elements and then rebuilt with a different kind of educational project in
mind. The text was, at the same time, the starting point and the key element of this

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 71

R. Franzini Tibaldeo, Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp,
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_4
72 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

renovation. Recalling the time when he finished writing the first chapter of Harry,
Lipman said the following:
I still have considerable admiration for that first chapter, because for anyone, including
myself, to understand it would require a thorough-going ‘deconstruction’, as people call it
nowadays, a complete taking apart and reassembling, which would involve all the themes
and mechanisms that I needed to identify and champion. (Lipman, 2008, 112)

These themes and mechanisms sprang from the Western philosophical tradition.
All he had to do was identify the most fundamental of these themes, which would
then be “translated into ordinary language” (Lipman, 1988, 183) and reorganised in a
way that would make sense and be effective in an educational setting. The challenge
was at the same time communicative, expressive, philosophical, and educational.
Lipman’s solution was to portray a class of ordinary schoolkids engaged in everyday
conversations and dialogic situations, whose structure and content were a rewrite of
traditional philosophical themes, arguments, and systems to reveal the questions that
originally sparked them. As David Kennedy wrote:
In Lipman’s novels, the tradition is disassembled as onto-theological discourse and redis-
tributed into the narrative world of human everyday experience – not as arguments, positions,
or systems, but as the fundamental questions which led to the articulation of those systems
in the first place. (Kennedy, 1999, 348–349)

Among the advantages achieved by Lipman in his reconstruction of the philo-

sophical tradition, which to some extent was inspired by Plato’s dialogues (Lipman,
1996a, 80), Kennedy underlined the lively “dynamisation” where philosophy took the
shape of a communal thinking effort, rather than a monological one. “Philosophical
stories”, stated Lipman, “exemplify not only philosophy but thinking—the thinking
of philosophy” (Lipman, 2002, 13), and this resulted in refreshing the students and in
greatly liberating their intellectual energy (Lipman, 1991, 220–221). The “dramatiza-
tion” enacted through the “distributive play of dialogue […] re-presents the tradition,
as in a play, or a game, or an agon” (Kennedy, 1999, 349). It was these very charac-
teristics of Harry, their importance and educational potential, that Ann Sharp imme-
diately understood as she read the novel for the first time after Lipman’s conference
at Montclair in 1973.
However, before addressing the topic of Harry’s educational potential, it might be
useful to add a few words on the novel from a comparative perspective. As Lipman
reflected over the years on what led him to writing Harry (as well as the following
novels of the P4C curriculum), a question he never relinquished was: To what extent
was Harry different from other philosophical novels? Lipman had in mind books like
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Plato’s
dialogues, Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, Le rêve de d’Alembert, and Supplément
au voyage de Bougainville, and romans à clef like those by Aldous Huxley, John
Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy or Lancelot), and David H. Lawrence
(Lipman, 1996a, 80–81). As a result, Harry was characterised by the following
features. First, Harry did not contain “much philosophising”, nor had it been designed
to convey “a particular philosophical perspective” or “enchant us into acquiescing to
that perspective” (Lipman, 1996a, 80; see also Lipman, 1991, 218). On the contrary,
4.1 The First Novel: “Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery” (1969) 73

it had been created for us “to do philosophy ourselves” (Lipman, 1996a, 80). Second,
it had “little character and less plot” than traditional philosophical novels and for this
reason it could maybe be considered “a different genre altogether” (Lipman, 1996a,
80; see also Lipman, 1991, 216). Third, Harry moved philosophical concepts and
ideas directly to the foreground, enacted them in a dialogic and inquiry-oriented
way, and made them relevant to everyday informal conversational contexts (Lipman,
1996a, 81).
However, in the years following the publication of Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery,
the innovative aspect of the novel was often overlooked and misunderstood. Teachers
used to say their students found the book boring and added that it was badly written.
Lipman was aware of this and admitted that Harry was “quite badly written” (Lipman,
1996a, 88). However, this did not bother him, since the reason he had conceived of
Harry was not to “get children to appreciate the best literature there is”, but to
help them “read critically” (Lipman, 1996a, 89). What Lipman had in mind was a
different didactic use of the text, related to its innovative educational potential. This
was indeed something teachers failed to understand in the beginning and one of the
reasons for the foundation of the IAPC in the following years.
Addressing Harry’s educational potential, Lipman’s idea was that the novel had
to act as “stimulus text” for classroom discussion (Kennedy, 1999, 349), because
not all discussions or conversations were dialogical (Lipman, 2003, 83–84), and in
order to attain a regular, truly dialogic classroom discussion, it was not enough for
pupils and teachers to rely on those rare “improvised discussions” (Lipman, 1976,
26), which were also very difficult to manage. So, a stimulus text was required. But
the true protagonists of communal philosophy were the students reading the text
and then discussing it. The text alone was not the protagonist, nor was it to act as
an authority since it cancelled out the cognitive privilege of the author and insisted
“upon equality of cognitive opportunity” among those who read and discussed it
(Lipman, 1991, 218). However, by providing a stimulus, the text also provided, in
multiple senses, a model for classroom discussion.
First, the dialogue between the fictional characters served as a model for the kind
of dialogic interaction which could help thinking develop: children need “a model
of discovery-in-practice” (Lipman, 1976, 26), namely “models of how to think”
(Lipman, 1996a, 89), and of how to think in everyday informal contexts. The kind of
thinking fostered through dialogue and turned into inquiry could help them to “figure
things out” (Lipman, 2008, 119) and understand them better. For this purpose, it was
“not enough just to sharpen” children’s “reasoning skills” (Lipman, 1996a, 89). In
this sense, Harry was not to be confused with a traditional textbook providing notions
to be studied and then applied or simply put into practice, but offered a propulsive
stimulus for the immediate enactment of a dialogic experience and an embodied
model of how this experience could become a philosophical inquiry culminating
in the achievement of a capability: thinking and especially higher-order thinking
(Lipman, 1991, 216, 1996a, 11, 104). Thus, the exemplary discussion provided by
the novel would result in modelling the real classroom discussion and inspiring
its transformation “from the monological to the dialogical […] from the literary
to the philosophical […] from the text to the context and from the context to the
74 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

community of inquiry” (Lipman, 1996a, 114). This result was achieved due to the
narrative text’s unique capacity to combine discussion and plot for the reconstruction
of philosophical tradition and everyday life situations to maximise its impact upon
the learner thanks to its “cognitive-affective equilibrium” (Lipman, 1991, 218).
The second sense in which the narrative text was a model for classroom discussion
relied on its capacity to portray exemplary personal and interpersonal attitudes and
behaviours that were conducive to inquiry. The fictional characters in the text were
students engaged in philosophical discussions and higher-order thinking, who made
explicit not only the “logical and conceptual moves” (Lipman, 1991, 219) related to
this effort, but also inquiry-oriented postures of open-mindedness, critique, and ques-
tioning, as well as behaviours characterised by mutual respect, friendship, solidarity,
and empathy. According to Lipman, this was likely to cause an educational domino
effect, since “the live students in the classroom take the behavior of these fictional
characters as models of how to behave” and then, due to the mutual influence among
real students, “children will use other children’s behavior as models for their own”
(Lipman, 1991, 219). The result was that these “behaviors gradually become normal
practice within the community” (Lipman, 1991, 219). An interesting addendum has
to be made in this regard. Among the novel’s exemplary behaviours and postures
were also those of the (few) fictional adults; mainly teachers. They listen, super-
vise the procedures of classroom discussion, help students clarify their thoughts,
and evidence the possible flaws in their arguments by providing wise suggestions.
According to Lipman and Sharp, this kind of adult or teacher provided both a “model
of self-mastery” (Sharp, 1975, 106) and a “model of someone who transcends rather
than rejects right-wrong answers in the sense of caring more for the process of inquiry
itself than for the answer that might be right or wrong at a given time” (Lipman, 1991,
219). It was this behaviour that was “especially cherished and relished by students,
for it has an integrity they are quick to appreciate” (Lipman, 1991, 219); another
model for students. However, as will become clear in one of the next sections, the
text was also capable of being taken as a model by teachers in their effort to facilitate
philosophical inquiry among their students.
The text also served as a model in a third sense, related to the fact that the main
characters exemplified different “ways of knowing, call them styles of experience”
(Lipman, 1996a, 50), and types or “models of thinking” (Margolis, 1996, 124).
Indeed, it was the intrinsic complexity of the thinking process itself that called for a
pluralistic, organic, and dynamic textual approach (Lipman, 1991, 219–222; see also
De Marzio, 2011, 40–43) capable of rendering the variety of tasks and operations
required by thinking in different situations and contexts. It was this complexity
of thinking that Lipman endeavoured to express through the plurality of fictional
characters involved in lively discussions, each of whom embodied a specific type
or kind of thinking. For instance, Harry embodied the critical and experimental
4.1 The First Novel: “Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery” (1969) 75

thinker, Tony the analytical, Lisa the intuitive and synthetic, and Mark the creative
and divergent (Lipman, 1974, 25–26, 91–95, 2008, 116, 119).1
Lipman’s narrative text was a model for classroom discussion because it meant that
it could perform the same modelling effect on the classroom community of inquiry as
the one performed by an instructor. In the words of Lipman: it “shows—not merely
tells—how the desired performance is to be carried out” (Lipman, 1991, 223; see
also Lipman, 1976, 29). This triggered the “gradual internalization of the thinking
behaviors of the fictional characters” (Lipman, 1996a, 11)2 and was something a
traditional, purely expository conceptual text was incapable of (Sharp, 2017, 18–19).
Before moving to the next section, here are some final remarks on Lipman’s Harry
Stottlemeier’s Discovery. In his autobiography, Lipman stated that when he first
conceived of the novel, what he had in mind was “fundamentally an undergraduate
course pre-shrunk to fit the minds of middle school students” (Lipman, 2008, 115).
Even though during the following years the author realised that he had accomplished
more than just this, in what sense was his statement true? And what were students
expected to learn? It can be said that the fictional pupils discovered the relevance
of Aristotelian logic (statements, validity, syllogisms, and the rules of thinking) to
everyday life. Harry’s “discovery” was indeed something Aristotelian: he became
aware that not all sentences could be reversed, and this triggered his inquiry into
the logical rules of utterance and thinking. Besides, Harry conducted this inquiry
with the help of his classmates and teachers and occasionally other adults as well.
Towards the end of the novel, the fictional students acknowledged that to carry out a
“careful investigation” (Lipman, 1974, 90), namely a validity-oriented and truthful
inquiry, they needed this kind of logic. However, they also recognised that for this
purpose something more than just formal logic was required, and this was because
of the diversity in understanding, learning, and perceiving (Lipman, 1974, 92–95). It
was always important to consider the complexity of certain situations and “see things
from other people’s point of view” (Lipman, 1974, 94). An additional reason was
that formal logic could be successfully applied to circumscribed contexts of human
experience (like abstract mathematic reasoning) but was incapable of dealing with
the nuances and contextual meanings of everyday life and language (Lipman, 1974,
95, 1976, 20). Thus, thinking demanded not only sticking to logic and following its
rules, but also keeping an open mind and being creative. This was what Lisa, one of
the characters of the story, meant by quoting the last line of Richard Wilbur’s poem,
Mind: “A graceful error may correct the cave” (Wilbur, 1959, 72). One should always
be reminded of the possibility that “all of our knowledge is changed” (Lipman, 1974,
95), and this was what from time to time happened due to revolutions in knowledge.

1 It is worth noting that the following novels, also written by Lipman and Sharp, maintained this
plurality of perspectives as the narrative expression of their multidimensional approach to thinking:
critical, creative, and caring (Oyler, 2017, 1874).
2 According to psychologists like Mead, Vygotsky, and Piaget, “internalization” was “the conver-

sion of the external behavioural process into an internal thinking process” (Lipman, 1996a, 101).
Arkady Margolis acknowledged that in the case of the P4C programme, this process moved from
the interpsychical to the intrapsychical: “The development of individual thinking is a product of
internalization of group thinking as demonstrated in collective discourse” (Margolis, 1996, 123).
76 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

As a result, Lisa pleaded with her classmates to “keep an open mind, and don’t think
you know it all because you’ve figured out a few rules of thinking” (Lipman, 1974,
95).
There are other themes explicitly discussed by Harry and his classmates in addition
to those focused on the rules of thinking: the aims of education and schooling, the
role played by teachers, the meaning of human relationships, accidents of ordinary
life, religion and political power, the nature of thoughts and their relationship with
language, the human difference, the freedom of thought, the importance of giving
reasons, conformism, the origin of the universe and God, the appreciation and fruition
of art, death and pain, social and economic inequalities, smoking, wars, and the
explanation of natural phenomena. However, the narrative texture also revealed other
interesting topics, which are hinted at subtextually. These range from socio-economic
and political themes (e.g. the typical US melting pot3 and cultural-religious diversity,
gender and racial issues, poverty, radicalism, civil rights, and solidarity) to relational
ones (e.g. children/grown-up relations,4 family ties, friendship, and love).

4.2 The Demand for Empirical Evaluation

The writing of the novel was not all Lipman had in mind, since he intuited that
putting his ideas into practice entailed using Harry in an unconventional way. It
was not enough to employ it as an ordinary school text because Harry had not been
conceived of as a textbook, but as an instructional manual and a stimulus text for
classroom discussion. His aim was to operationalise Harry and do philosophy with
real children. He also wanted to be sure this could be done effectively. Last but not
least, he had to show to both his future employers in Montclair and possible funding
institutions that his idea worked.
For this reason, in the fall of 1970, soon after the first pilot version of the novel had
been published in 1969 and before effectively transferring from Columbia University
to Montclair State College in 1972, he “conducted an experiment to examine the
effects of the nascent Philosophy for Children curriculum on a group of fifth-grade
students from the Rand School (a public school in Montclair)” (Lipman, 2008, 121).
What follows is Lipman’s account of the experiment:
The study, which looked at two groups of fifth-grade students who were selected at random,
took ten weeks to complete. We began by administering each group of students a reasoning
test similar to the one that would be administered at the end of the experiment, and we
found that the two groups were virtually identical in terms of test results. Next, the treatment

3 Lipman (1992, 4) intentionally gave this clue through some of the characters’ surnames: Tony
Melillo, Jill Portos, Milly Warshaw, Suki Tong, Micky Minkowski, Laura O’Mara, Mark and Maria
Jahorski, and Sandy Mendoza (Lipman, 1974, 35–37).
4 The novel occasionally presented dialogic situations in which adults, who normally used “adult-

splaining”, became gradually aware of the limits of their posture and began to interact in a more
constructive way with children and youngsters. See, for instance, the dialogue between Mr. Portos,
his daughter Jill, and her friends in Lipman (1974, 30–34).
4.2 The Demand for Empirical Evaluation 77

group was given two 40-minute Philosophy for Children sessions per week for nine weeks.
Each session consisted of the children reading aloud, page by page, a chapter of Harry
Stottlemeier’s Discovery, a segment that lasted about 20 minutes, and then discussing what
they had read. I assumed the role of the teacher. Some members of my class were slow
readers, but we stuck to our format until the very end of the book. The other group received
a fifth-grade course based on Sociology. When the results of the experiment were computed,
we discovered that the control (comparison) group showed no significant advance over their
initial test scores. On the other hand, the experimental group showed an improvement in
logical reasoning of 27 months in mental age. I was ecstatic! (Lipman, 2008, 121–122; see
also Lipman, 1976, 29–33)5

The designer of the experiment had been Milton Bierman, Director of the Pupil
Services of the Montclair school system (Lipman, 1976, 29). However, it was
Bierman himself who recommended caution. It still had to be proved that the results
of the experiment were endowed with educational, rather than just statistical value.
In other words, said Bierman to Lipman, “You’ve got to show that the results are not
just for reasoning but that they transfer to other aspects of the children’s educational
experience. Furthermore, you’ve got to show that the results are not just temporary.
They have to be lasting” (Lipman, 2008, 122). Thus, instead of subsequently retesting
the same students with the previous test, the idea Lipman and Bierman came up with
was to use the results of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills which all students of that
school district had given in May 1973 when the students involved in the previous
experiment were seventh graders. In particular, Bierman and Lipman analysed the
results of the subtest covering reading. The conclusion was that “the experiment
conducted positively affected the reading scores of the students two and a half years
later” (Bierman, 1976, 37). According to Lipman, this outcome relied heavily on
the fact that, instead of being simply introduced to abstract and “general aspects
of reasoning” or philosophical concepts that children considered “almost devoid of
significance” (Lipman, 1976, 25; see also Haas, 1976, 71), they had been involved
in discussions on ideas that they considered important and were meaningful to them.
Moreover, this had been accomplished through the creation of the proper educational
“climate and environment” which encouraged them to discuss fruitfully and freely
(Lipman, 1976, 26), and to a novel which served as a “springboard” for intellectual
discussion (Lipman, 1976, 27).
In the last section of his report, where Bierman discussed the educational meaning
and implications of the experiment, he supplemented the analytic perspective with
the following remarks, which at the same time endorsed Lipman’s statements and
foresaw the advent and development of the Philosophy for Children curriculum:
I am now convinced that philosophy can and should be a part of the entire length of a child’s
education. In a sense this is a kind of tautology, because it is abundantly clear that children
hunger for meaning, and get turned off by education when it ceases to be meaningful to
them. And philosophical discussions are precisely the proper medium for putting things
in perspective, getting a sense of proportion, and achieving some kind of insight into the
direction of one’s life […]. As Kant says, who wills the end, wills the means: if we really
want children to find their educations meaningful, we’ll devise a suitable philosophical

5 For a critical-comparative analysis of this experiment, see Trickey & Topping (2004, 371).
78 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

component. And if we don’t devise such a component, it’s because we really don’t want
them to wonder what it’s all about. (Bierman, 1976, 39)

However, further work was needed to accomplish the empirical validation of

doing philosophy with children. For instance, Bierman remarked that results had
to be replicated in other settings as well, and “the philosophy teacher should be a
regular classroom teacher trained for this particular use of philosophy, it shouldn’t
be […] the developer of the program” (Lipman, 2008, 123). As we know from
Chap. 1, these challenges led to the foundation of the Institute for the Advancement
of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) and to further empirical research.6 Among the
most significant results of the experimental research carried out in the following years
(1975, 1976–1978, 1980–1981) were that the P4C “program had a very favorable
effect upon student motivation and interpersonal attitudes” and “was shown to be
very effective for children identified as slow readers” (Educational Testing Service
[NEH], Princeton, 1977–1978, quoted in Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 223). Besides,
the results suggested that “logical reasoning and intellectual creativity are not mutu-
ally inhibitive, and that both can be sharply stimulated by the same program” (NEH
1977–1978, quoted in Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 223).7 Therefore, concluded the
same report, students “appeared to teachers to be significantly more curious, better
oriented toward their tasks, more considerate of one another, and better able to reason”
(NEH 1977–1978, quoted in Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 224). Virginia Shipman, who
had supervised the 1980–1981 experiment in New Jersey, significantly concluded
that:
It is our belief that the gains evidenced in the present study should enable students not
only to deal more effectively with school tasks but with the many problems that face the
preadolescent in our complex society. Given the difficulties facing our society today, and
education in particular, it is imperative that the necessary resources are made available
to further the development of innovative educational programs such as the present one.
(Shipman, 1983, 47)

These were indeed promising results for an incipient educational programme.

6 Over the years, many more experiments took place. See for instance (Colom et al., 2014; Gazzard,
1988; Karras, 1979; Strohecker, 1985; Trickey & Topping, 2004, 2013; Topping & Trickey, 2014;
Ventista, 2021), including studies comparing P4C with other educational approaches (Soter et al.,
2008). In addition to this quantitative research, Sharp in particular became progressively aware of
the need to carry out also a more refined qualitative evaluation of P4C (Sharp, s.d.; see also Franzini
Tibaldeo & Lingua, 2018; Santi, 1993; Santi & Oliverio, 2012). More will be said in this regard
in the following section. On the IAPC website (https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/research-in-philos
ophy-for-children/), Esther Cebas and Félix García Moriyón compiled a detailed list of empirical
and evaluative research in P4C covering the areas of cognitive skills, affective and social skills,
reasoning and affective skills, and methodological aspects.
7 In this regard, see also Lipman (1991, 216), De Marzio (2011, 35–39).
4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical Inquiry” … 79

4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical

Inquiry” Practice and Educational Curriculum

Lipman was aware that writing Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery was only the tip of
the iceberg and that the accomplishment of his educational ideas would require a
great deal of additional work. Acknowledging that the future of the project relied on
successful empirical validation, he had to carry out urgent tasks like the following:
first, a revision of those portions of the Harry novel which had not worked well during
the experiment conducted in 1970 (Lipman, 1976, 31); second, a development of the
basic exercises he had prepared on that occasion (Lipman, 1976, 31) into a systematic
teacher manual; third, an engagement with teacher training and also prospectively,
in the training of teacher educators; fourth, the development of a complete P4C
curriculum (inclusive of novels and teacher manuals) covering the so-called K–12
(for pupils from 5–6 to 17–18 years old); and finally, the undertaking of new empirical
research to validate the programme. All of the above-mentioned tasks required funds,
and it was Lipman, as Director of the newly established IAPC, who was incharge
of obtaining them. To make matters worse, Lipman had to comply with the ordinary
teaching duties of a university professor.
The enormity of this workload was about to overwhelm Lipman, when something
unexpected occurred: the arrival on the scene of Ann Margaret Sharp; an event that
Lipman defined as “a blessing for both myself and the Institute” (Lipman, 2008,
124).
Together, they started revising the Harry novel, which was republished in 1974,
although “it subsequently went through four sets of changes before we were satisfied”
(Lipman, 2012, 29). Lipman and Sharp then revised the pilot teacher’s manual related
to Harry, which Lipman had written a couple of years earlier (Lipman, 1976, 17).
What follows is Lipman’s account of how he developed the manual with Sharp and
laid the foundations for the P4C curriculum:
The manner in which the instructional manual for Harry was organized set the standard for
the other instructional manuals in P4C. First I would write the novel. Then Ann would read
it and together we would identify the leading ideas in each chapter. We would then approach
the ideas in sequential order, writing about a paragraph for each concept, and trying to make
it readable for teachers. I would dictate to Ann and she would type, but if she disagreed with a
formulation, she would stop me so that the matter could be discussed. As each idea or concept
was completed, I would study them and write one or several exercises or discussion plans
for it. Some discussion plans were intended to introduce teachers to questions derived from
the philosophical tradition; others were offered as models for classroom dialogue. Exercises
were intended to sharpen skills that the children had come across in reading the novel. When
the leading idea and its exercises and discussion plans had been completed, I would proof
them and turn them over to the typesetter. These proofs again had to be read and corrected
before publication. (Lipman, 2012, 28–29)

Before detailing the instructional manual’s aims and features, including the discus-
sion plans and exercises, some attention needs to be drawn to an important issue
Lipman and Sharp had to cope with in order to develop a complete educational
curriculum based on dialogic inquiry-oriented philosophy. In short, they had to deal
80 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

with Piaget and his evolutionary idea of formal thinking. Indeed, both Lipman and
Sharp acknowledged that Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery had been written under
the influence of Piaget’s stages of child development (Lipman, 1996a, 41; Sharp,
1995–2018, 113). Thus, Harry’s audience were pupils of eleven or twelve years of
age; the time when, according to Piaget, children started to develop their formal
logic skills. Lipman and Sharp’s difficulties when dealing with both the Piagetian
orthodoxy and the widespread idea that philosophy entailed an abstract and formal
endeavour, resulted in the novels written after Harry being addressed to elder students
(Lisa, Suki, and Mark). It was only in the following years, when they directly chal-
lenged Piaget’s perspective, that Lipman and Sharp ventured to address younger
audiences. For instance, in the book Natasha, Lipman described in more detail how
they succeeded overthrowing Piaget due to the combination of Mead and Vygotsky
(Lipman, 1996a, 98 ff.), who had a different idea of abstract or formal thinking.
While, according to Piaget, abstract thinking derived from concrete thinking, Mead
and Vygotsky argued the opposite. Lipman described this “revolution” in thinking by
underlining the “ascent [of thinking] from the abstract to the concrete” and “from the
interpsychical to the intrapsychical” (Lipman, 1996a, 91, 99). In other words, Lipman
and Sharp revised the very relationship between abstract and concrete thinking, as
well as the role played by interpersonal relationships. This change of paradigm was
expressed by Lipman in the following terms:
It seems to me that whether we read either author [Mead and Vygotsky], we begin with a
series of dichotomies: the abstract versus the concrete, the universal versus the particular,
the rational versus the nonrational. And the resolution of these dichotomies all point in the
same direction – in the direction of the reasonable. (Lipman, 1996a, 103)

This became one of the cornerstones of P4C. Moreover, this revolutionary perspec-
tive applied to the relationship between theory and practice, as well as between
speech and thinking, and motivated Lipman and Sharp’s direct criticism of those all
too narrow educational perspectives based solely on critical thinking or reasoning
skills, or which were “episodically and arbitrarily developmental” (Lipman, 1991,
222). Lipman and Sharp opted for a more dialogue-centred way, which relied on a
holistic and sequential view of the thinking process:
if – Lipman contended – utterance is the matrix of thinking and if thinking is what we want
to flourish, then we must find ways of stimulating critical and inventive discourse. Skillful
thinking will naturally emanate from skillful discussions […]. Skillful interpersonal dialogue
gives rise to skillful intrapersonal reflection. You don’t need to study the skills separately or
practice them separately […]. To read literature or to engage in dialogue is to call into play
vast numbers of mental acts. The mind springs to life. (Lipman, 1996a, 104–105)

While developing the curriculum with Ann Sharp in the first years of their coop-
eration, Lipman realised that, in order to develop their thinking, children “would
need help from parents and teachers” (Lipman, 1996a, 31). In other words, Lipman
and Sharp’s educational proposal entailed that they engaged in an additional revolu-
tionary task, namely teacher education, with the aim of providing teachers with the
proper abilities to facilitate classroom discussions. As we will see in the next section,
4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical Inquiry” … 81

it was for this reason that they developed the aforementioned instructional manuals
equipped with leading ideas, discussion plans, and exercises.
However, before dealing with this topic, a focus on the heart of communal discus-
sion is required, namely the P4C session as it was conceived of by Lipman and
Sharp. Lipman’s initial idea was to make use of the text as a stimulus for classroom
discussion, each session of which was to have a duration of approximately forty
minutes and occur on a weekly basis. Whereas the duration and frequency of the
P4C sessions became one of the pillars of the P4C educational projects as devel-
oped in the following decades worldwide, the simple structure of the session initially
devised by Lipman was given a more refined shape, composed of five distinct phases,
each of which corresponded to both a stage of inquiry and a specific task related to
the formation of a philosophical community of inquiry. Here is the list of phases
(Lipman, 1996a, 11–12, 2003, 101–103; Oyler, 2017, 1875–1876):
(1) The offering of the text.
(2) The construction of the agenda.
(3) Solidifying the community.
(4) Using exercises and discussion plans.
(5) Encouraging further responses.
The precondition for the session to take place was of course the setting, which
was interactive: “The children in a class, plus their teacher, are seated in a circle
so that they can speak face-to-face with one another” (Lipman, 2017, 8). In the
first phase, the narrative text was read aloud by participants, who took turns in
reading. This reading exercise was of fundamental importance for many reasons.
First, classroom discussion and “the quest for meaning” had to be provoked by
“something controversial perhaps, or something already rich in meanings that must
be sought out and uncovered, and held up for consideration” (Lipman, 2003, 97–
98); and the fictional dialogue between the characters of the novels, in the sense
analysed previously, provided a model for how this result could be achieved. Second,
reading the text aloud assisted children “in appropriating the meanings of the text
to themselves” and developing their capacity for “deep reading” (Lipman, 2003,
98). Third, it helped children to “correct their tendency to read monotonously and
inexpressively, a practice responsible for a considerable loss of meaning” (Lipman,
2003, 98). Finally, it played a role of primary importance in the community building
process, since it lent support to “the practice of careful, attentive listening” (Lipman,
2003, 98), as a prerequisite for both the development of mutual respect and accuracy
and precision in thinking (Lipman, 1996a, 11, 35).
After reading the text, the participants were invited by the teacher/facilitator to
move to the second phase: questioning. Were participants expected to pose certain
kinds of questions? Did the questions have to focus on the text? What if a participant
wished to propose a reflection instead of questioning? In my experience, these are the
typical questions about questioning posed by adults (e.g. teachers) who engage for
the first time with P4C. The same probably happened decades ago during the teacher-
training sessions facilitated by Lipman and Sharp. For adults, questioning was, and
still is, an extremely difficult and almost unnatural effort, and this is due to adults’
82 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

peculiar relationship with the text, which is mostly regarded as an auctoritas to be

interpreted rather than questioned, and sometimes even reduced to a handbook of
problem-solving strategies. Lipman and Sharp conceived of a different relationship
with the text, which relied on an innovative idea of philosophy as inquiry and an
effort to clarify a perplexity or problem. They apparently made their point during
P4C sessions when children evidenced a natural inclination to question the text in an
unauthoritative and creative way, whereas in adults this capability had to be somehow
re-educated and restored.
The text was expected to stimulate the participants’ intellectual curiosity and
their capacity for “question-raising” (Lipman, 1976, 20–21). On his part, the
teacher/facilitator assisted the community of inquirers in this process in the following
way:
With the completion of the reading the teacher invites those students who are puzzled or
perplexed to formulate their puzzlement in the form of a question. These questions are then
written on the chalkboard, each followed by the name of its contributor of something of
assistance to the work of the community. It is a moment of which they are deservedly proud,
one in which they can take responsibility for their ideas. Completed, the list of questions on
the board represents the various interests and perspectives of the members of the community
in the topic to be discussed. It also represents a possible agenda for that discussion. (Lipman,
2003, 98)

As with reading, questioning also played a twofold role in the P4C session.
Through questioning, participants contributed to the epistemic progress of communal
inquiry, while at the same time consolidating interpersonal relationships and ethical
behaviours. According to Lipman and Sharp, questioning was indeed “the leading
edge of inquiry: It opens the door to dialogue, to self-criticism, and to self-correction”
(Lipman, 2003, 99).8 This resulted in laying the basis for further discussion and the
“solidification of the community” (phase 3).
The problem had to be addressed of how the transition from the second to the
third phase of the session had to be accomplished, namely from the “agenda” (which
somehow represented a “wish list” of questions to be answered) to the discussion,
whose aim was to focus on the very topics addressed by the questions. In an interesting
passage of Thinking in Education, Lipman suggested the following answer, which
provided a general guideline for teachers who aspired to become facilitators:
This is a pivotal moment. If the teacher selects the questions to be discussed, the students are
likely to interpret that act as a vestige of the old authoritarianism. Fortunately, a number of
alternatives compatible with democracy are available. The order of questions to be discussed
can be determined by lot or by asking someone who did not submit a question to make the
necessary choice. (Lipman, 2003, 98–99)

Another strategy was for teachers and students alike, to pose “follow-up questions”
(Lipman, 2003, 99; Sharp, 1992–2018, 89), in order to deepen, delimit, or rephrase
a topic of discussion. Often, the discussion began

8 In this sense, questioning was an educational resource that went “far beyond a mere methodological
step of asking questions within a P4C session”; rather, questions were “a central part of thinking
and inquiry” (Mendonça & Costa Carvalho, 2019, 3–4).
4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical Inquiry” … 83

by turning to the person who posed the question that the community decided should be
discussed first. This student may be asked to say a few words about the sources of the
question, the reasons for raising it, and why it seems important. With the student’s reply,
others join in so as to articulate their agreement or disagreement with what is being said.
(Lipman, 2003, 99–100)

No matter how the discussion took off, it was likely to involve more than just
one line of reasoning, and it was the teacher’s ability to “juggle or orchestrate these
different lines of inquiry, which usually seem to be more vexing to adults than to chil-
dren, who are evidently capable of participating in several inquiries simultaneously”
(Lipman, 2003, 100). This called for innovative teacher education, whose aim was
to develop teachers’ ability to deal effectively with the plurality and complexity of
communal dialogue: “An effective teacher does not put his trust in any one technique,
but relies upon his tact and sensitivity to determine which of his armory of methods
he should select and employ on any given occasion” (Lipman, 1976, 28).
Teachers could then suggest that participants deepened or further enhanced their
inquiry by using the discussion plans and exercises (phase 4) Lipman and Sharp had
specifically conceived of (see the next section). This was a way of providing students
with a wider perspective on reality by helping them to focus “on specific problems
so as to compel the making of practical judgments”, supporting their appropria-
tion of the philosophical tradition and methodology, and urge inquiry “to examine
overarching regulative ideas such as truth, community, personhood, beauty, justice,
and goodness” (Lipman, 1996a, 12; Sharp, 1992–2018, 89). Trying to make sense
of these philosophical concepts was the specific aim of a classroom community of
inquiry. According to Sharp, these concepts shared certain characteristics, capable
of stimulating classroom dialogue:
(1) They are related to our daily experience and usually taken for granted.
(2) They have been talked about and written about by philosophers for over
2500 years. As a result, there are alternative views on the issue.
(3) They are controversial, that is, they are open for inquiry within the classroom
community. (Sharp, s.d., 9)
In the final phase, inquirers were encouraged to produce further responses and
translate the inquiry “into some mode other than dialogue like doing an art or action
project that in some way implements the new judgments and also continues the
inquiry” (Oyler, 2017, 1876). Moreover, this was a way through which philosoph-
ical inquiry could be reconnected to the everyday lives of participants and make a
difference (Sharp, s.d., 22).
However, over time, and due to continuous educational and teacher-training prac-
tice, the above-mentioned five-phase structure was enriched, integrated, and even-
tually modified through “meta-level” or “metacognitive” reflection (Gregory, 2008,
47; Sharp, s.d., 4), which Sharp clarified in the following terms:
If philosophy is, as is thought by many, liberating, then it follows that those doing philosophy
ought to be put in the position of evaluating their own behaviour in the same way that they
think about their own thinking. To so equip children would, at the same time, be helping
84 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

them to do better philosophy with each other for it would give them the tools that they need
to think on a meta-level about their own practice. (Sharp, s.d., 3–4)

Years before, Lipman had also underlined the centrality of metacognition and
metacognitive acts to both philosophical inquiry and thinking (Lipman, 1988, 25–
27, 81–84). Moreover, it was his conviction that the “metacognitive act is what
makes self-correction possible” (Lipman, 1988, 26), and in Chap. 3, the meaning
and implications of this notion were discussed.
However, while developing their educational curriculum and reflecting on their
practice, Lipman and Sharp became aware of an additional aspect of metacognition
related to evaluation. Sharp explicitly addressed this topic in the unpublished essay,
“Can we Evaluate a Philosophy for Children Session?” (Sharp, s.d.). What did the
verb “evaluate” mean in the context of the community of philosophical inquiry? First,
it expressed the co-inquirers need to know if they were doing philosophy well (i.e.
a need for self-evaluation). Second, this need for evaluation could not be fulfilled
by an external authority, since “in a classroom community of inquiry, the locus
of evaluation moves from external authority figures to the communal reasoning of
the children themselves” (Sharp, s.d., 1). Third, the evaluation criteria traditionally
employed by quantitative and experimental approaches (including those which had
been successfully assessed within the P4C programme years before) were incapable
of responding to the above-mentioned demand of the inquirers. “What was needed”,
concluded Sharp, “was a far more qualitative rather than quantitative approach to
evaluation: one that would be able to capture the dynamics of the classroom commu-
nity of philosophical inquiry in all of its nuances” (Sharp, s.d., 2). As a result, this
kind of evaluation as “self-assessment” became “part of the practice itself” (Gregory,
2008, 68), in the sense that self-assessment lent itself “to philosophical inquiry among
the children at some point in their practice” (Sharp, s.d., 4), and this would further
enhance the quality of communal discussion. As already mentioned, the nuances to be
evaluated included both interpersonal and epistemic, or psychosocial and cognitive
features (Sharp, 1992–2018, 90).9
It was for these reasons that alongside the development of the curriculum, the
practice of classroom philosophical inquiry, and the thorough engagement in teacher-
training activities, allowed Lipman and Sharp to establish evaluative criteria for doing
philosophy well, as well as design effective ways of operationalising them.10 What
did these criteria look like? The most complete and detailed answer was provided
by Sharp in the above-mentioned “Can we Evaluate a Philosophy for Children
Session?”.11

9 In the IAPC’s Philosophy for Children Practitioner Handbook, these features were defined as
related to “community” and “inquiry”, respectively. “Community” focused on “connections” and
“inclusion” (namely, the relationships among participants), while “inquiry” considered the aspects
of “reasoning” and “structure” (Gregory, 2008, 43, 78).
10 As regards operationalisation, the Philosophy for Children Practitioner Handbooks released

by the IAPC provided assessment calendars and instruments, such as observation guides, self-
assessment questions, and surveys for both children and teachers (Gregory, 2008, 69–81).
11 See also Sharp’s earlier essay “A Letter to a Novice Teacher” (Sharp, 1992–2018, 90–91).
4.3 The Development of the “Community of Philosophical Inquiry” … 85

She initially recognised two possible sets of criteria. The first was the one
proposed by Thomas Jackson, who had conducted P4C activities in Hawaii since
1984 (Jackson, 2004), and whose evaluation criteria were the following:
(1) Did we really listen to one another?
(2) Did we build on each other’s ideas?
(3) Did we give good reasons for our views (or criteria for our judgements)?
(4) Did we “dig down deep”? (Sharp, s.d., 4)
The second possibility was to derive the evaluation criteria of classroom discus-
sions from the characteristics of critical and creative thinking presented by Lipman
in Thinking in Education (2003, 209–223, 243–249) and summarised by Sharp as
follows. Critical thinking was “(1) conscious of criteria, (2) sensitive to context,
(3) self-correcting and (4) productive of better critical judgements”, while creative
thinking was “(1) guided by the context, (2) sensitive to criteria, (3) self-transcending
(that is productive of personal growth) and (4) responsible for better creative
judgements” (Sharp, s.d., 5).
Nevertheless, Sharp’s idea was to go beyond these provisional proposals. What
she had in mind was another set of (self)evaluation criteria which, although in many
ways overlapping the previous two, was “more inclusive and more characteristic
of a philosophical as distinct from an empirical discussion” (Sharp, s.d., 5–6). She
arrived at the following criteria, which among other things revived the topic of “good
thinking”, discussed earlier in Chap. 3:
(1) How much good reasoning was going on in the discussion?
(2) How much good inquiry was going on in the discussion?
(3) How much concept formation was going on in the discussion?
(4) How much translation was going on in the discussion? (Sharp, s.d., 6)
Yet, in a way, it was the latter that turned out to be the most relevant criteria, and
this was because of the centrality of “translation” in the philosophical inquiry:
Translation is a crucial practice in the classroom community of inquiry. Without it, no
philosophical conversation takes place. Without it, no community of inquiry is formed. Thus
as the children perfect their translation skills, they move toward a working community of
philosophical inquiry. Translation is what drives the dialogue, pushing it in directions of
deeper understanding among all the participants. (Sharp, s.d., 10)

As a result, the (self)evaluation of the all-encompassing “translation skills” or

“capabilities” acquired through classroom discussion provided children and teachers
alike with important feedback on the “epistemic” progress of communal inquiry (how
participants were able to reason well, form concepts, and clarify ideas), as well as on
the quality of interpersonal interactions between co-inquirers, i.e. how they succeeded
in caring for the ideas, feelings, and concerns of others and if they developed “an
ethical disposition to see the world from the perspective of others and the imaginative
ability to envision a more reasonable world” (Sharp, s.d., 10). Sharp’s aim was to
equip children with criteria for self-evaluation, capable of transforming them into
“good translators” (Sharp, s.d., 12–13, 17). This led her to break these reflections
86 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

down into more manageable units of evaluation, which were rephrased in terms of
abilities and questions to be considered during the self-evaluative process12 :
1) The first is an imaginative ability: Did the children demonstrate an ability to represent
alternative subjective points of view, not merely of a perceptual character, but also of an
ideological character? 2) The second is an ability to reason hypothetically about the likely
response of others to a given view or course of events, given their various subjective perspec-
tives. Did the children use the “if… then…” construction in their conversation? 3) The third
is an abstractive ability, namely the ability to recognize social norms and values as socially
constructed rather than as a priori truths. This ability is necessary for transforming existing
social arrangements. Did the children look at values or norms or mores in this fashion?
Were they able to criticize them constructively? 4) The fourth is the creative imaginative
ability to conjure up or dream an alternative world, more reasonable and less oppressive
for all of nature. Did the children postulate what the world be like if it were based upon
alternative social norms and relationships? 5) The fifth is an inductive ability to hypothesize
about the sources of unhappiness, oppressions, and well-being both in personal and interper-
sonal affairs. Did the children engage in such hypothesis-formation during the conversation?
(Sharp, s.d., 20–21)

Although these were the basic evaluation criteria, Sharp concluded her reflections
with a word of warning that these were “not the only criteria of good philosoph-
ical conversation” (Sharp, s.d., 22). Indeed, these had to be supplemented with an
additional criterion, namely the participant’s perception of having been involved in
a meaningful endeavour:
when a child leaves a session, she must feel that she has made some progress […]. Children
must feel that they have made a move from the known to the unknown. In those rare moments
when this has occurred, when out of their collective shared experience, one creates a new
hypothesis to make sense of human experience and the group begins to analyse critically
whether this hypothesis may have any value, at that point the children are truly tasting the
process of good inquiry – the bringing into being of new ideas that can make a difference in
how we live our lives. (Sharp, s.d., 22; emphasis added)

4.4 Training Supervisors and Teachers

As mentioned earlier, the extensive success of Lipman and Sharp’s educational

proposal relied on their ability to involve teachers as primary agents of education.
This was why, over the decades, Lipman and Sharp relentlessly and continuously
engaged in the training of both supervisors and teachers. After the teacher-training
experiments they carried out in the 1970s, Lipman and Sharp realised that the IAPC
needed a larger team, whose task was to train “teacher educators” (Lipman, 2008,
134), who in turn could provide preparation to schoolteachers in doing philosophy
with children (see Chap. 1).
This section will address the main issues related to teacher education that Lipman
and Sharp dealt with while developing the Philosophy for Children curriculum.

12 Sharp acknowledged that she had been inspired in this regard by Jane Braaten’s reflections on the
intellectual competences, virtues, and abilities required to build communities in which well-being
was possible (Braaten, 1990, 6).
4.4 Training Supervisors and Teachers 87

In Chap. 3, it was seen that breaking the frame of traditional education entailed
rethinking the very relationship between educational contents (what should be taught)
and other key aspects of education, like its theoretical underpinning and methodology
(why and how something should be taught). This renovation could not be achieved
without the supportive cooperation and active involvement of teachers, whom Lipman
and Sharp appointed with this change in educational responsibility. In order to enable
teachers to take on this new professional responsibility, they had to be trained from
both a pedagogical and philosophical point of view to comply with the educational
vision developed at the IAPC, according to which teachers had to be “pedagogically
strong but philosophically self-effacing” (Sharp, 1992–2018, 90; see also Lipman,
1996a, 18).
First, however, the role of primary importance played by the teacher in the class-
room community of inquiry needs to be clarified. Indeed, teachers served as models
for classroom inquiry, in the sense that they should “value the process of inquiry
above any particular dialogic exchange” (Lipman, 1991, 219), and by doing so, help
children develop their autonomous thinking. This kind of teaching involved more
than just focusing on educational content and required the capacity to adopt different
approaches, such as cooperative learning, reciprocal thinking, and especially “cogni-
tive apprenticeship” (Lipman, 1991, 223). In particular, the latter involved a series of
actions the teacher had to carry out knowingly and attentively, for example “Bringing
tacit skills to consciousness”, “Comparison of expert and novice performances”,
“Modeling”, “Coaching”, “Scaffolding”, “Articulation, reflection, and exploration”
(Lipman, 1991, 223–224, which quotes Collins et al., 1987).13 To master this plurality
of approaches and the related educational moves, teachers had to engage in a process
of apprenticeship, which was very similar to the one they would encourage after-
wards in their pupils (Lipman, 1988, 155–157).14 To support teachers in this process,
Lipman and Sharp conceived of instructional manuals (which will be analysed later
in this section) related to the novels of the P4C curriculum. These manuals were
to provide teachers with “one of the most valuable forms of scaffolding” (Lipman,
1991, 224) and help them become “facilitators” of classroom discussion (Lipman
et al., 1977–1980, 102).
This transformation entailed equipping teachers with the capacity to have a
dialogue with their pupils in a rigorous, but creative and caring way. To acquire
“expertise in facilitating dialogue”—stated the IAPC Practitioner Handbook—was
“not a matter of following a checklist or rehearsing a script” (Gregory, 2008, 23),
but involved transforming the teacher’s profession into a more lively, interesting,
and liberating practice. The “good educator” stated Sharp, building on Nietzsche’s
educational thinking, “is an artist who is involved in the most delicate art that there
is, the art of teaching” (Sharp, 1975, 102; see also Lipman, 1976, 28; Lipman et al.,

13 Guin (1991), who served as a resident teacher educator at the IAPC from 1978 to 1998, also
underlined the importance of scaffolding and coaching to teacher training. Moreover, he significantly
compared the approach to teacher training developed at the IAPC with Donald Schön’s influential
model based on the “reflective practitioner” (Schön, 1983, 1987, 1991).
14 Indeed, Lipman and Sharp were aware that the traditional approach to teacher education had to

be utterly revised in this regard. See for instance Lipman (1988, 151–159).
88 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

1977–1980, 124–126). According to Lipman and Sharp, the role of the facilitator was
twofold: “(1) to model and to call for good dialogue moves (cognitive and social),
and (2) to help the participants keep track of how the dialogue progresses through
the stages of the framework” (Gregory, 2008, 23–24). Instead of lecturing students,
the teacher/facilitator was expected to achieve a different philosophical-pedagogical
posture, which implied intervening “with moves such as identifying assumptions
overlooked by the group, identifying important alternative views not raised by the
group, and nudging the group from one stage to the next” (Gregory, 2008, 24).15
Moreover, given the dynamic and processual nature of classroom inquiry, the facil-
itating posture was likely to change and evolve accordingly. This was because the
multifaceted nature of facilitation entailed carrying out a diversity of tasks, which
in the case of mature communities of inquiry resulted in turning the facilitator in a
co-inquirer16 :
In the beginning, […] one needs a philosophically sensitive teacher who is able to take the
discussion to a more general level. By means of her questioning, posing of counter-examples
and offering alternative positions to consider, she is not only offering a model of what the
children should be doing themselves with each other in the conversation, but is making sure
that the children begin to sense some progress. She models speculation for them. She offers
new hypotheses for them to consider. Children learn in a very short time that hypotheses
must always be tested not only against what is the case but what ought to be the case. Thus,
it is quite appropriate for children to ask whether a hypothesis would be congruent with the
kind of world we want to live in or the kind of persons we would like to be. At this point,
the children begin to experience what inquiry is all about – moving from the known to the
unknown. Although it is true that they need a philosophically sensitive teacher to model this
inquiry in the beginning of the process, it is not long when they could do this for themselves.
At that point, the teacher becomes a co-inquirer. (Sharp, s.d., 7–8, 1992–2018, 89)

What Sharp meant by “philosophically sensitive” was that the teacher had to be
prepared “to hear the philosophical dimension” of what students were saying and
detect what they were lacking (Sharp, 1992–2018, 89). However, at the same time
the teacher had to be pedagogically aware of the proper way to foster inquiry in his
or her pupils. It was for this reason that the IAPC developed the above-mentioned
saying, which Sharp explains in the following terms:
Teachers are expected to be pedagogically strong, so as to safeguard the relevance of the
discussion and the civility of the participants, while at the same time to be philosophically
self-effacing, so as not to overwhelm or indoctrinate students. (Sharp, 1995–2018, 112–113)

15 For a more extensive account of what it means to facilitate (i.e. both “guide” and “orchestrate”
a classroom discussion appropriately), see Lipman et al. (1977–1980, 102–128). See also Kennedy
(2013), Gardner (2015), Michaud & Välitalo (2017). Of great interest to the understanding of
the current challenges related to facilitation is also the dossier on “Ethical implications of prac-
ticing philosophy with children and adults”, published in the “Childhood & Philosophy” journal
(Kennedy & Kohan, 2021).
16 In other words, as the process of communal inquiry developed, the community acquired auto-

facilitation capabilities and this went hand in hand with the transfer and subsequent distribution of
the facilitating functions used by the teacher with the members of the group (Kennedy, 2004, 753);
see also Castleberry & Clark (2020).
4.4 Training Supervisors and Teachers 89

As already mentioned, this posture had to harmonise with the gradual development
of classroom inquiry.
Lipman and Sharp were aware that teachers, and especially those who did not
possess a philosophical background, had not only to be initially trained to acquire
the appropriate facilitating skills,17 but had to be subsequently supported in their daily
routine. The instructional manuals accompanying the novels of the P4C curriculum
were designed to provide this kind of support. It was indeed Lipman and Sharp’s
conviction that “Would-be classroom teachers of philosophy need models of doing
philosophy that are clear, practical and specific” (Lipman, 1996b, 64). And the
way Lipman and Sharp fulfilled this practical need was to equip the novels with
specific discussion plans and exercises focused on a number of concepts they had
identified in each chapter of the story. Discussion plans and exercises were an attempt
to concretise these concepts “by considering various possible manifestations of it”
(Lipman, 1996a, 85).
A philosophical discussion plan consists of a group of questions that generally deal with a
single concept, relationship (such as a distinction or connection) or problem. The questions
may form a series, in which each builds upon its predecessors, or they may form a circle
around the topic so that each question focuses upon the topic from a different angle. We can
speak of these two families of discussion plans as cumulative and non-cumulative. (Lipman,
1996b, 65)

As for the purpose of the exercises, according to Lipman, philosophical exercises

were necessary to acquire the ability to practice philosophy “in much the same way
that athletes need to perform exercises as part of their professional preparation”
(Lipman, 1996b, 71). And he added:
exercises aim at exemplification, instantiation. But they also aim at the improved performance
of standard procedures. After all, those who do philosophy, whether students or instructors,
are all practitioners, engaged in philosophical inquiry. They need to perfect their technique
no less than their insights and intuitions. (Lipman, 1996b, 71)

Teachers could use these materials interchangeably, both when arranging and
during a P4C session. However utilised, teachers always had to bear in mind that
discussion plans and exercises aimed at the same result: putting “the spotlight on
the student’s performance”, in the sense that they were “devices for extracting
creativity from students, for getting them to think for themselves, to be independent
and resourceful in their thinking” (Lipman, 1996b, 77). So, during their training,
teachers could regard these materials as powerful resources “to concentrate on the
moves to the point of removing them from the context of a conversation and practicing
them directly” (Kennedy, 2013, 117). In this sense, discussion plans and exercises
were certainly of great value. However, the ultimate goal of teacher training was
to develop the facilitator’s ability to become aware of the moves and to practice
“them in the live, grounded context of a group discussion about some philosophical

17 The teacher education workshops and summer seminars promoted by both the IAPC and fellow
organisations spread all over the world (see Chaps. 1 and 5) and, finally, the graduate and post-
graduate courses in Philosophy for Children created at the IAPC (see Chap. 1) served the purpose
of providing teachers with these skills.
90 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

issue that is important to those participating” (Kennedy, 2013, 117). The mastery of
this “delicate, complicated, and intuitive practice” was, indeed, “a life-long project”
(Kennedy, 2013, 118), which entailed developing an attentive sensitivity to what
was appropriate to unique dialogic circumstances: “The facilitator cannot be said to
choose these moves as a result of any conscious strategic calculus but feels them, as
a painter feels a color to be appropriate in a certain place, or a musician a rhythmic
or harmonic or melodic shift” (Kennedy, 2004, 756).
To attain this result, the teacher had to consider the criteria of good thinking
analysed in Chap. 3, including those of democratisation,18 as well as the gradual
attainment of the “skills essential to doing inquiry in a school setting” (Lipman,
1996a, 23),19 using these indicators to monitor the results of classroom discussion.
However, above all, the teacher had to acquire a special sensitivity to the uniqueness
of dialogic situations and the capacity to foster interpersonal growth:
Effective facilitation requires a form of sensitivity to otherness, to difference, and an ability
to nurture a potential in others that may already be present in himself or herself. The nurturing
ability entails a capacity for strategic self-effacement that the greatest philosophical mind
is, it would appear, capable of lacking completely. (Kennedy, 2004, 762)

Lipman and Sharp were aware of the complexity of teacher training and never
relied on instructional manuals as magic wands to solve this puzzle. Rather, as
already mentioned in Chap. 1, they conceived of an innovative teacher-training
process, which was carefully designed in four stages. The first was the prepara-
tion of teacher educators, who had to possess a “strong philosophical background”
(Lipman, 1988, 154). Prospective teacher educators had to attend a communal ten-
day workshop in which they were introduced to the curriculum, conducted individual
sessions, and discussed relevant philosophical and educational issues. They then
served as “philosopher in residence” in a classroom for four to six weeks, with the
aim of gaining experience of working with children (Lipman, 1988, 155). Whenever
possible, especially in this experiential context, novice teacher educators worked
“for a time in tandem with a more experienced trainer”, to increase their “reflective”
competencies (Lipman, 1988, 155; see also Kennedy, 2013, 118). The following three
phases (entailing “curriculum exploration”, “modelling”, and “observation”, respec-
tively), were devoted to teacher preparation and were organised in the following
way. A group of fifteen to twenty teachers, along with a teacher educator, took part
in a three to fourteen day curriculum-examination seminar, in which teachers were
“expected to experience this stage in much the same way that their future students
are to experience it” (Lipman, 1988, 155). In other words, teachers experienced

18 A document preserved in the IAPC archive detailed these as follows: tolerance for dissenting opin-
ions, respect for majority opinion, the reaffirmation of one’s own position despite majority, open-
mindedness, seeking consensus, mutual respect, absence of intimidation, formation of a community
of inquiry, acceptance of cultural differences, responsible citizenship, and personal integrity (IAPC,
1987).
19 Lipman identified the following: (a) skills “involved in investigating or examining a problem-

atic subject-matter”; (b) “reasoning skills”; (c) “concept-formation skills”; (d) “translation skills”
(Lipman, 1996a, 23).
4.4 Training Supervisors and Teachers 91

themselves as members of a community of philosophical inquiry, and this change

of perspective was of core importance for the attainment of P4C’s educational goal,
namely the empowerment of children due to the development through dialogue of
their capacity to “think for themselves”:
It is not uncommon to confound thinking by oneself with thinking for oneself and to be
under the mistaken impression that solitary thinking is equivalent to independent thinking.
Nevertheless, we are never so moved to think for ourselves as when we find ourselves
engaged in shared inquiry with others. The way to protect children from uncritical thinking
in the presence of others is not to compel them to think silently and alone but to invite them
to think openly and critically about contestable issues. For this to happen in the classroom,
it must first happen in the teacher-training seminar. It is only when teachers have had actual
experience of a community of inquiry that they can foster the development of one with their
own students. (Lipman, 1988, 156)20

During the curriculum exploration seminar, teachers participated in a number

of sessions of philosophical inquiry facilitated by the teacher educator and became
familiar with the structure of the session, the possibilities of communal inquiry, and
the moves of other participants. At the same time, teachers could also observe the
moves accomplished by the facilitator.
The next stage of the training process took place in the teachers’ classrooms. To
help teachers manage this delicate transition, teacher educators entered the individual
classrooms and took over the lesson for the day by facilitating a P4C session with
the teacher’s own students. The aim of these “modelling” sessions was to show
the novice teacher “how the trainer would like the material taught” and “provide
that modicum of hand-crafted, personal attention” (Lipman, 1988, 158) he or she
needed to recognise “the difference between a philosophical and a non-philosophical
discussion” (Lipman, 1988, 159), and thus contribute to the transformation of the
classroom into a community of philosophical inquiry.
The final phase normally occurred six weeks later, when trainers returned to the
classroom to observe and evaluate “the progress of the teacher’s implementation of
the program” (Lipman, 1988, 158; Schaffalitzky, 2021). As a result of this training
process, teachers were prepared “not only to integrate philosophy into the present
school curriculum, but to encourage children to think philosophically” (Lipman et al.,
1977–1980, 210). This did not mean that the teacher had become a philosopher, but
that he or she had acquired a “competence in guiding a philosophical discussion, in
faithfully observing the cardinal rule not to block the path of inquiry but rather to
follow the inquiry where it leads” (Lipman, 1988, 159).

20 As regards the effects of P4C on the professional development of teachers, see Baumfield (2017),
Davey Chesters & Hinton (2017). According to others, rather than just being a facilitator of class-
room discussion, the true emancipatory teacher should become a “difficultator of what the school
as institution asks her to teach and the student to learn” (Haynes & Kohan, 2018, 219).
92 4 Philosophy for Children’s Educational Curriculum

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Lipman, M. (2008). A life teaching thinking. IAPC, Montclair State University.
Lipman, M. (2012). Matthew Lipman: An intellectual biography, edited by F. García Moriyón.
Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 20(1–2), 22–32.
Lipman, M. (2017). The institute for the advancement of philosophy for children (IAPC) program.
In S. Naji & R. Hashim (Eds.), History, theory and practice of philosophy for children (pp. 3–11).
Routledge.
Lipman, M., Sharp, A., & Oscanyan, F. (1977–1980). Philosophy in the classroom. IAPC, Montclair
State College, 1977; second edition, Temple University Press, 1980.
Margolis, A. (1996). Afterword. A comparison between the philosophy for children approach and
the cultural-historical and activity approaches: Psychological and educational foundations. In M.
Lipman, Natasha: Vygotskian dialogues (pp. 117–129). Teachers College Press.
Mendonça, D., & Costa-Carvalho, M. (2019). The richness of questions in philosophy for children.
Childhood & Philosophy, 15, 1–21.
Michaud, O., & Välitalo, R. (2017). Authority, democracy and philosophy: The nature and role of
authority in a community of philosophical inquiry. In M. Gregory, J. Haynes & K. Murris (Eds.),
The Routledge international handbook of philosophy for children (pp. 27–33). Routledge.
Oyler, J. (2017). Philosophy with children: The Lipman-Sharp approach to philosophy for children.
In M. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1871–1877). Springer.
Santi, M. (1993). Philosophizing and learning to think: Some proposals for a qualitative evaluation.
Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 10(3), 16–22.
Santi, M., & Oliverio, S. (Eds.). (2012). Educating for complex thinking through philosophical
inquiry. Models, advances, and proposals for the new millennium. Liguori.
Schaffalitzky, C. (2021). Learning to facilitate dialogue: On challenges and teachers’ assessments
of their own performance. Educational Studies. Accessed April 25, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/
03055698.2021.2007854
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner. How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Schön, D. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and
learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass.
Schön, D. (Ed.). (1991). The reflective turn: Case studies in and on educational practice. Teachers
College Press.
Sharp, A. (1975). Nietzsche’s view of sublimation in the educational process. The Journal of
Educational Thought, 9(2), 98–106.
Sharp, A. (1992–2018). A letter to a novice teacher: Teaching ‘Harry Stottlemeier’s discovery’
(1992). Reprinted in M. Gregory & M. Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret
Sharp: Childhood, philosophy and education (pp. 88–95). Routledge.
Sharp, A. (1995–2018). Philosophy for children and the development of ethical values (1995).
Reprinted in M. Gregory & M. Laverty (Eds.), In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret
Sharp: Childhood, philosophy and education (pp. 109–119). Routledge.
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Sharp, A. (2017). Philosophical Novel. In S. Naji & R. Hashim (Eds.), History, theory and practice
of philosophy for children (pp. 18–29). Routledge.
Sharp, A. (s.d.) Can we evaluate a philosophy for children session? Unpublished typescript probably
composed by Sharp in her later years (approx. 2004) and preserved in the IAPC archive. The
second part of the typescript on “The Ethics of Translation” (pp. 15–22) had been previously
published in Critical and creative thinking: The Australasian journal of philosophy for children,
1(1), 1991, 10–17.
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International Journal of Educational Research, 47, 372–391.
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Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 6(2), 41–44.
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in Education, 19(3), 365–380.
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In S. Goering, N. Shudak & T. Wartenberg (Eds.), Philosophy in schools: An introduction for
philosophers and teachers (pp. 288–298). Routledge.
Ventista, O. (2021). How to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based intervention: Evaluating
the impact of the philosophy for children programme on students’ skills. Bingley.
Wilbur, R. (1959). The poems of Richard Wilbur. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Chapter 5
An Open-Ended Educational Proposal

5.1 Philosophy for Children’s Global Dissemination

As a result of Lipman and Sharp’s efforts, Philosophy for Children flourished world-
wide. Over the decades, the IAPC relentlessly monitored the global dissemination
of their educational-philosophical proposal and offered support to develop the prac-
tice, train educators and teachers, sensitise educational and political institutions,
and foster academic research. As already mentioned in Chap. 1, a key role in this
regard was played by the journal issued by the IAPC: “Thinking: The Journal of
Philosophy for Children”, which from 1979 to 2014 regularly published articles,
reports, and issues devoted to the global dissemination of P4C as well as current
trends in academic research related to doing philosophy with children. Over the
following years, the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children
(ICPIC) became another reference point, thanks to the biennial international meetings
organised since 1985, along with its journal, “Childhood & Philosophy”.1
In his autobiography, Lipman gave an account of some experiences of Philos-
ophy for Children’s international dissemination, something in which he had directly
participated. Among the sites where the local adoption of the programme took place
were Nigeria and the province of Quebec (Lipman, 2008, 142–147). He also empha-
sised the relevance of the P4C centres which had been established in Mexico and
Brazil2 ; and while acknowledging with a certain satisfaction the global growth of
the P4C movement, he also admitted the failure of his own country to recognise the

1 The full list of ICPIC conferences is available at the following address: https://www.icpic.org/our-
projects/#our-conference. See also Gregory et al. (2017). As for recent accounts of other experiences
around the world, see the following: Gregory (2017), Lam (2020), Naji & Hashim (2017, 141–204).
2 The “Centro Latinoamericano de Filosofía para Niños” had been founded by Eugenio Echeverria

in the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in 1993 (http://www.celafin.org; Echeverria &
Hannam, 2017), while the “Centro Brasileiro de Filosofia para Crianças” had been established by
Catherine Young Silva in São Paulo in 1985.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 95

R. Franzini Tibaldeo, Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp,
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_5
96 5 An Open-Ended Educational Proposal

innovative aspect of the educational-philosophical proposal he had developed with

Ann Sharp:
The eagerness evinced by many Latin American educators upon discovering Philosophy for
Children is very different from their cool appreciation of, say, critical thinking. And in the
United States, the appreciation by educators of critical thinking is very different from their
lack of enthusiasm for educational philosophy. To the Latin American or European educator,
Philosophy for Children is a dream come true, while for many educators in the United States,
for whom philosophy was never at the core of their culture, its sudden availability hardly
meant that it would now be greeted with warmth in the colleges of teacher preparation.
(Lipman, 2008, 169)

Was Lipman somehow suggesting that in the US they had not been able to success-
fully accomplish the educational renovation he and Sharp had cherished and had
striven for? This is an interesting question, whose tentative answer requires further
research and goes beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, it would require carrying
out a critical investigation into the deep modifications of education, society, and
economy which occurred over the globe in the last decades.3
However, in these last pages I would like to address a more specific topic, one
concerning the main reasons for the worldwide success of Lipman and Sharp’s Philos-
ophy for Children, whose specificity—as we saw—was the “merger of education and
philosophy” (Lipman, 2008, 110).

5.2 The Reasons for P4C’s Worldwide Success

As mentioned earlier in Chap. 2, Lipman and Sharp’s development of their

educational-philosophical project was characterised by a revised view of the child
as someone capable of doing philosophy—indeed, this was a new sensitivity which
was spreading across the world and gaining universal recognition.4 This implied
an equally revised view of the interpersonal and educational relationship between
children and adults. Lipman and Sharp were immersed in this new cultural temper
and, at the same time, significantly contributed to its development, along with other
thinkers and pedagogists such as Ekkehard Martens and Eva Marsal in Germany,
Michel Tozzi and Oscar Brenifier in France and other francophone countries, and

3 For instance, in these last years some scholars have cast doubt on P4C’s capacity to deal effectively
with the destructive forces of capitalism (Kohan, 2018), foster the actual transformation of society
(Burgh & Thornton, 2022), go beyond the paradigm of egological empowerment (Biesta, 2017),
or promote constructive dialogues regarding race and racial oppression, as well as coloniality
and decolonisation (Fitzpatrick & Reed-Sandoval, 2018; Reed-Sandoval, 2019; Reed-Sandoval &
Sykes, 2017).
4 On this new respect for childhood, see among other works (Haynes & Murris, 2021; Kennedy &

Kohan, 2017, 2021; Kinard & Cannella, 2021; Kohan, 2011).

5.2 The Reasons for P4C’s Worldwide Success 97

Gareth Matthews in the US. As correctly pointed out, these investigations and prac-
tices did not form “a unified field”, but rather evidenced “numerous and divergent
approaches” (Gregory et al., 2017, xxvi).5
Thus, the success of Lipman and Sharp’s Philosophy for Children relied initially
on a favourable Zeitgeist which made the contemporary historical context receptive to
their educational-philosophical proposal. However, when compared to other philo-
sophical practices with children, one has the impression that Lipman and Sharp’s
proposal succeeded in a unique way, consequently allowing it to achieve global
recognition and dissemination. I am convinced that the main reason for this was,
and still is, the peculiar combination of methodological mindfulness, effectiveness,
and adaptability of the P4C programme. As evidenced throughout this book, what
Lipman and Sharp had accomplished was more than just a series of philosophical
novels for children, or conceiving of a simplified translation of Western philosophy
for discussing philosophical issues with them. What they had in mind was an overall
educational reform, which was supported by a specific educational philosophy they
clarified over the years, thanks to both their academic research and their practice
with teachers and children. At the same time, they developed their P4C curriculum
composed of novels and instructional manuals, putting it into practice through the
training of supervisors and teachers, as well as by the arrangement of classroom
activities, congresses, and seminars all over the world. With the continuous help of
collaborators, they managed to involve in the activities of the IAPC, they succeeded in
giving life to a lively and strongly motivated “community of philosophical inquiry”.
The methodological awareness with which they promoted this communal experi-
ence resulted in assuring its efficacy and attractiveness.6 Those who came in contact
with P4C immediately perceived that, despite the contemporary individualistic main-
stream, a different way of conceiving and building interpersonal relationships was
not only theoretically possible, but practically realisable thanks to the “community
of philosophical inquiry” proposed by Lipman and Sharp.
At the same time, however, Lipman and Sharp succeeded in keeping this commu-
nity accessible to everyone, permeable to diversities, and open to further develop-
ments. For instance, they continually supported those individuals or institutions who
desired to install the P4C programme in their country; especially in the developing
ones, where P4C could indeed “make a remarkable difference” (Lipman, 2017, 9).
In this regard, the IAPC played an important role in providing useful recommenda-
tions for the international development of P4C (Lipman, 2017, 9–10). Moreover,
Lipman and Sharp cherished virtually any attempt to adapt their programme to
specific contexts and cultures, like the African, the Latin-American, the Middle
Eastern, and the Eastern (Lipman, 2008, 141–152; Sharp, 1995–2018a, 110, 2017,
33). They were aware that among the global challenges to education, there was the

5 See also Johansson (2018), Kennedy (2022, 204–205), McCall (2009, 93–112), Vansieleghem &
Kennedy (2011).
6 For an interesting reflection on Philosophy for Children’s “method”, see Kohan & Costa Carvalho

(2019).
98 5 An Open-Ended Educational Proposal

issue of cultural and religious diversity. This challenge also concerned Philosophy
for Children:
At first there was only one curriculum, a single garment for global needs. But the garment
couldn’t stretch over all the languages, all the cultures, all the dialects. For example, every
Latin-American or Siberian culture wants its own curriculum, its own translation. Other
countries insist they do not want translations: they want texts by their own authors. (Lipman,
2002, 12)

In a passage from his autobiography, Lipman complemented the previous state-

ments with the following reflection detailing P4C’s truly hospitable and democratic
nature:
The success of this global outreach does not mean that the English version of the approach
developed by the IAPC is simply translated into the languages of the other countries,
although this frequently does occur. The stories that in Philosophy for Children serve as
texts are supplanted by other stories containing their own philosophical concepts and their
own interpretation of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and so forth. (Lipman, 2008, 168)

As a result, Lipman and Sharp not only envisioned the need to update, expand, and
adapt the IAPC curriculum to take into account different philosophical traditions and
cultures (Lipman in UNESCO, 1999, 77; Sharp, 2017, 33), but also looked forward
“to a time when major writers would consider it a challenge to write textbooks for
children. But first—they added—we may have to create the market that will motivate
them to do so” (Lipman, 1991, 217). Indeed, recent works and projects promoted by
P4C scholars and practitioners followed in this direction (Haynes & Murris, 2021;
Miraglia, 2021).7
Lipman and Sharp succeeded in putting into practice their sensitivity to cultural
diversity, and this resulted in Philosophy for Children’s cross-cultural dissemina-
tion. It was their conviction that “with the making of better judgments and the role of
imagination, empathy and story-telling” children could be enabled to achieve “inter-
cultural understanding” (Sharp, 2012, 42) and “transcultural consciousness” (Sharp,
1995–2018b, 236), which Sharp clarified thanks to Hannah Arendt’s metaphor of
“going visiting” (Arendt, 1992, 43; Glaser, 2018, 221):
Children go visiting when they share their world-views and try to make their peers understand
the reasons for why they say the things that they do. This sharing takes the form of story-
telling, on-going narrative and comparing and contrasting the various world views in the
group. When I begin to understand others who see things from very different perspectives,
I deepen my understanding of myself and my own world view and begin to realise how
contextual our world views are in themselves. It is the fostering of such understanding that
gives hope that the next generation will be able to deal with the multitude of global problems
in a non-violent and just manner. (Sharp, 2012, 42)

As evidenced throughout the book, P4C’s “intercultural potential” relied on a

renewed and liberating view of interpersonal relationships, whose quality could be
improved thanks to dialogue and communal philosophical reflection. This in turn

7In this regard, see also the “Thinking in Stories” column (https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/thi
nking-in-stories/) edited by Gareth Matthews from 1979 to 2006 and then continued by Peter Shea.
5.2 The Reasons for P4C’s Worldwide Success 99

was conducive to the empathic understanding of other people’s situations, the ability
to recognise and nurture multiple viewpoints, the capacity to “build on each other’s
ideas, although not necessarily with identical architecture” (Lipman, 2003, 97), the
evaluation of what was relevant and meaningful, and finally, the inclusion of diversi-
ties. Needless to say, these topics constituted the strongest research interests of current
P4C scholarship, including intersectional subtopics like cultural change, pluralism
and democratic citizenship, racial and gender issues, religious pluralism, decoloni-
sation and indigenous thinking, and interculturality and cosmopolitanism (Bleazby
et al., 2022; Burgh & Thornton, 2022; Chetty & Suissa, 2017; Echeverria & Hannam,
2017; Mohr Lone, 2022; Moodley, 2021; Reed-Sandoval & Sykes, 2017).
Another aspect of P4C which contributed greatly to its worldwide dissemina-
tion was its timely proposal to deal with environmental issues. In Sharp’s previous
quote, the “going visiting” capacity was related to both intercultural recognition
and the development of a “global ethical consciousness” (Sharp, 1995–2018b).
It is worth mentioning that this expression, developed by Sharp, evoked Hannah
Arendt’s “love for the world” (Arendt, 1961, 196; Glaser, 2018, 224), a notion
that recently regained educational recognition thanks to increasing environmental
challenges (Biesta, 2021a, 2022). Lipman and Sharp dealt with these challenges
from the very outset of their cooperation and precociously developed the connection
between “relational consciousness” (Sharp, 2007, 251), “global awareness” (Sharp,
1995–2018b, 236), ecological thinking, and the “ecological dimension of communal
inquiry” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 237). Two significant documents confirm this perspec-
tive. The first was one of the novels in the P4C curriculum, namely Kio and Gus,
which focused entirely on “reasoning about nature”. The second was the report of
the UNESCO meeting of experts in Philosophy for Children, held in Paris in 1998,
where Lipman and Sharp underlined the efficacy of P4C in developing “an approach
aimed at environmental protection” and in fostering children’s “commitment to envi-
ronmental ethics” (UNESCO, 1999, 28). Therefore, as evidenced in Chap. 3, the idea
of ethical responsibility fostered by Philosophy for Children culminated in the notion
of “global responsibility”, which Lipman recalled in the last page of his autobiog-
raphy (Lipman, 2008, 170) and currently constitutes a promising line of research for
P4C scholars (Birch, 2020; Bleazby et al., 2022; García Moriyón 2021; Gómez &
De Puig, 2003).8
This section on P4C’s worldwide success must conclude with a tribute to Ann
Sharp. Indeed, all of the above-mentioned reasons for Philosophy for Children’s
global success rely on Sharp’s contribution to her joint effort with Lipman. Her
insightful and acute “sensitivity to injustice” (Garza, 2018, 134) drove her educa-
tional and philosophical engagement, and her gender perspective (which we analysed
in Chap. 3) provided the basis for her methodological and ethical awareness, which
was “non-imperialistic, relational, contextual, and focused on the concrete details

8 See also the following online resources: https://p4c.unt.edu/our-work (Philosophy

With Children, University of North Texas) and https://www.plato-philosophy.org/philosophy-
toolkit/ (environmental ethics toolkits provided by the “PLATO—Philosophy Learning and
Teaching Organization”).
100 5 An Open-Ended Educational Proposal

of daily life” (Sharp, 1994, 25). Such a non-imperialistic approach was naturally
conducive to interpersonal recognition, intercultural dialogue, and the empower-
ment of both individuals and communities (Brel Cloutier, 2021; Franzini Tibaldeo &
Lingua, 2018), and as we know from the previous chapters, this ultimately led to
human liberation and flourishing (Glaser, 2018; Haynes, 2021; Kizel, 2021).

5.3 Towards the Future

Did Lipman and Sharp’s educational-philosophical proposal succeed? Answering

this question entails additional research which goes beyond the scope of this book.
However, when looking back at the history of Lipman and Sharp’s efforts, one has
the impression that over the decades the dual top-down and bottom-up approach—
one entailing at the same time a structural political, institutional, and educational
reform, as well as one capable of changing the daily routine and relationships between
teachers and pupils—has somehow come to a dead end, and this is mainly because
of the problematic changes in education which have occurred in the contemporary
neoliberal and techno-globalised world, as well as in the related “impulse society”
(Roberts, 2014; see also Biesta, 2021b; Woodhouse, 2023). As a result, despite the
growth of P4C around the world, this proposal remains on the periphery in both
present-day school systems and academic research (Mohr Lone, 2022).
Nevertheless, we should never forget the prophetic warning given decades ago by
Lipman:
Societies that do not aspire to be communities of inquiry may have to resign themselves to
the fact that neither freedom nor justice nor wealth nor power can assure the scintillating
productivity that we so much admire in the cases of Athens and Florence. (Lipman, 1996,
xii–xiii)

And in another passage of the same book, after admitting he was an outsider in
the field of education, Lipman optimistically concluded that he was “resigned to the
present” but nonetheless “prepared to wait”, since.
I know that fads come and go in education. One day it’s all microteaching and new math; the
next day they’ve disappeared between the cracks. But philosophy in the elementary school
is not a fad. It will haunt the system and give it bad dreams. Some day, when people are
more ready for it, it will be incorporated without being rejected and without being made a
travesty. Meanwhile, I accept my nonacceptance. (Lipman, 1996, 71)

So, even if the top-down reform Lipman and Sharp had dreamt of seems currently
unavailable, the bottom-up dissemination of Philosophy for Children still makes
sense. Moreover, it will eventually succeed in modifying both the educational system
and society at large, provided that this bottom-up engagement does not relinquish
the “prophetic dimension of the community of inquiry”, whose aim is to work out
“a philosophy of global democracy, conceived of as an ideal of a community life”
(Sharp, 1995–2018b, 235) and capable of revising and extending “our understanding
to include new perspectives” (Sharp, 1995–2018b, 236).
References 101

Lipman and Sharp never ceased from regarding the future and future generations
as the imaginative source of their inspiration. In this sense, the development of their
educational-philosophical project can be interpreted as their creative and dialogic
engagement with the texts and the teachers of the future (Lipman, 1988, 27, 1991,
221). Lipman and Sharp’s genuinely open-ended and communal effort, which was
certainly ahead of its time, is surely their most generous heritage.

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