Theory for Beginners

Children’s Literature as Critical Thought

Kenneth B. Kidd

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823289608
  9780823289592
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823289615
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Literature

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children's literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children's classics, especially Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children's literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children's literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children's picture books, from Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.

1

Philosophy for Children

In 1970, with the help of an NEH grant, philosophy professor Matthew Lipman wrote his philosophical novel for children Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery and then taught it as a field experiment in fifth- and sixth-grade public school classrooms in Montclair, New Jersey. Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery runs about the length of a standard middle-grade novel, at ninety-six pages with seventeen chapters. Published in stapled-cover format, the novel was reprinted several times, although it was never picked up by an established publishing house. Lipman believed strongly in the Socratic dialogue as a pedagogical model, and Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery is a series of dialogues, ostensibly realistic and designed to inspire dialogue among real-world students. Harry and his friends are fifth graders pursuing philosophical questions in their daily lives, involving logic, epistemology, and ethics. Discussion often gravitates to the workings of thought and of language and to their relation. Harry, for instance, muses on the reality of thoughts, concluding that in some ways “‘they’re even more real than things. Because when things aren’t around, we can’t be sure they’re still there, but our thoughts we always carry with us’” (15). Assigned to write a theme paper on “The Most Interesting Thing in the World,” Harry and his classmates muse over the multiplicity of “thing,” their teacher Mrs. Halsey prompting “‘Yes, a thing can be an object, like a tennis racket, something you can see and touch and measure, or it can be something rather vague and hard to define, like an activity.’” “‘Like doing your thing?’ asked Fran, with a grin” (16). Harry decides that The Most Interesting Thing in the World is thinking: this is his great discovery.

In the original experiment and in its replications, pupils saw measurable gains in both reasoning and reading ability.¹ Success with the book and Lipman’s pilot P4C program helped lead to the 1974 establishment of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC), headquartered at Montclair State College, where Lipman was then appointed. Articles about Lipman’s novel and project appeared in Time, Newsweek, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe (Pritchard 4). Under Lipman’s supervision, the IAPC produced pedagogical materials used widely in school settings, beginning with six additional novels plus accompanying teacher’s manuals.² Lipman wrote the novels solo but collaborated on the manuals with IAPC colleagues. Lipman also wrote books about philosophy and/as education, designed graduate-level programs in P4C, and founded Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, which ran from 1979 to 2011. By 1976, P4C programs were in place in elementary schools in Newark, New Jersey; Baltimore; East Lansing, Michigan; Denton, Texas; and Hastings-on-Hudson, New York (Bynum 1). These were typically under the supervision of university faculty. A number of colleges and universities developed P4C programs or modules, among them Montclair State, Washburn University of Topeka, University of Nebraska, University of Cincinnati, University of Delaware, University of Massachusetts, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Lehigh. The Subcommittee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association was then working on an APA statement of standards, and professional journals on the topic were beginning to materialize. A national organization of philosophers, teachers, and parents was formed, the National Forum for Philosophical Reasoning in the Schools.³

Lipman is acknowledged as P4C’s founder, but another pivotal figure was Gareth B. Matthews, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Philosophy and the Young Child (1980), Dialogues with Children (1984), and The Philosophy of Childhood (1994). After producing scholarship on more conventional philosophical topics, Matthews turned his attention to childhood. His interest in P4C, he explains, was sparked by dialogues with his young daughter, whose questions recalled those not only of his college students but of the great philosophers being studied.⁴ Unlike Lipman, who wrote his own material for children, Matthews embraced existing children’s literature, especially canonical works of fantasy and imaginative realism, from Alice and Winnie-the-Pooh to Frog and Toad Together, Charlotte’s Web, and Tuck Everlasting. “There is an important strand of children’s literature that is genuinely philosophical,” he remarks in The Philosophy of Childhood. “I am fond of telling anyone who will listen that, for example, Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Together, which is so simple in its vocabulary as to count as an ‘I can read book,’ is also a philosophical classic” (4). While Lipman prioritizes logical thinking, and creates his own children’s books to model such, Matthews searches existing children’s literature for examples of what he calls “philosophical whimsy,” a writing style that “consists in raising, wryly, a host of basic epistemological and metaphysical questions familiar to students of philosophy . . . not at all unusual in children’s literature” (“Philosophy” 9). Friends and occasional collaborators, Lipman and Matthews went about P4C differently, and over time, Matthews’s brand of P4C became more dominant, even though Lipman’s materials are still in circulation. The two men agreed, however, that the purpose of P4C is not to teach philosophy as a subject but to encourage philosophical thinking. Both felt that kids are natural-born philosophers needing guidance and hoped P4C would foster a thoughtful, ethically engaged citizenry.⁵

P4C helped to accelerate philosophy’s attention to childhood and especially to children’s literature.⁶ Peter Costello credits psychoanalysis for the initial push, writing that it was “not until philosophers begin to take up the insights of psychoanalysis that philosophy texts undertook rigorous study of childhood on its own terms, i.e., as a mode of existence worthy of its own description” (xiv). Costello points to the work of Merleau-Ponty and to Simone de Beauvoir in particular, and of course psychoanalysis has long attended to fairy tales, picturebooks, and other genres categorized as being for children. Another factor was the gradual easing of tension between philosophy and literature more generally. Philosophers came to understand that literature is not necessarily sophistry and thus a corruption of philosophy, and more gradually even accepted that philosophy has its own literary tendencies and figurative language, or what Le Doeuff identifies as the “philosophical imaginary.”⁷ But as this chapter emphasizes, we also have P4C to thank for philosophy’s growing attention to children’s literature and especially for the idea that children’s literature can function as a philosophical project.

Whatever its successes as an educational enterprise, P4C put the spotlight on children’s literature not simply as a tool or curriculum but as an arena of philosophical engagement and opportunity. P4C proposes that philosophers write for children while recognizing that children’s authors philosophize. Beginning with Matthews especially, P4C understands children’s literature as a parallel enterprise, carried out by writers hoping to encourage the imaginative and intellectual lives of children. That approach to children’s literature dovetails with and perhaps helps to legitimate the rise of children’s literature criticism within literary studies. The Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) was formed in 1972, two years after Lipman’s Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery appeared, and Matthews engaged directly with literary scholarship from the 1970s forward, even presenting a paper (“Philosophy as Child’s Play”) at the 1990 ChLA conference. In recent years, P4C has come to emphasize the particular usefulness of picturebooks, with Karin Murris leading the way.

If P4C has not exercised much influence on academic philosophy, meaning philosophy as practiced in university settings, it has played an important role in educational philosophy and popular or outreach philosophy, dedicated to the notion that philosophy applies to and should be accessible to everyone. The 1920s saw the rise of middlebrow institutions like the Book-of-the-Month Club and the publication of various “outlines” such as Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926). Ever since there has been a waxing and waning market for popular philosophy primers, and they are now again on the upswing. I am thinking of books like Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . (2008), If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers (2010), Breakfast with Socrates (2011), and Philosophy on Tap (2011). Since the year 2000, Open Court Publishing Company has published a series of applied philosophy casebooks on popular culture, including children’s and young adult literature, with 123 titles and counting. These volumes are playful and even styled after their source texts. Harry Potter and Philosophy, for instance, mimics the experience of being at Hogwarts, opening with everyone gathered in the great hall for sorting into theoretical houses (Baggett and Klein). The introduction to Dr. Seuss and Philosophy takes the form of a Seussian poem. While these primers exploit the popularity of children’s culture, they acknowledge children’s authors as philosophers and appeal to both child and adult readers. Obviously this boom in pop philosophy has a lot to do with convergence culture, but P4C is in the mix too.

P4C and the Wonder Kids

That philosophy should be addressed and taught to children, and in the form of a children’s book, is not a new idea, even if P4C gave it new life. Anglo-European children’s literature is rooted in the philosophical ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau about education and child-rearing, even if it has not continually embraced the radical politics of the early philosophical novel.⁸ It is not just that Western philosophy helped inspire children’s literature; children’s literature is in part a narrative engagement with philosophical as much as educational principles. As Samuel Pickering reminds us, Locke was a popularizer, writing Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) in deliberately accessible prose, with no Greek or Latin references. His emphasis on the malleability of childhood and the power of education inspired authors such as Maria Edgeworth and Sarah Trimmer to write fiction based on Lockean precepts. Much of this early literature encouraged critical thinking on the part of the child, both independently and in dialogue with adults. That emphasis continued in Victorian authors such as Carroll, Stevenson, and Nesbit, as Marah Gubar (in Artful Dodgers) and Victoria Ford Smith especially have shown. P4C maintains the general link between philosophy and children’s literature while moving toward the idea that children’s literature is not only a form of applied philosophy (as with Lipman) but also a philosophical form in its own right (as for Matthews).

A more troubling but persistent philosophical-literary tradition leading up to P4C is the Robinsonade. Adopted early into the canon of children’s literature, the Robinsonade offers a happier version of the thought experiment of social isolation than the story of the feral child, typically a kind of test case about the human condition (or rather about human conditioning).⁹ The Robinsonade is a kind of literary version of sovereign boy-child philosophy as discussed by Faulkner. Aware of the philosophical possibilities of children’s literature, and working just as P4C was getting underway, the influential French novelist Michel Tournier rewrote Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe twice, first for adults as Friday (1967) and subsequently for children as Friday and Robinson (1972).¹⁰ “Although he rewrote his first Friday in order to make it less explicitly philosophical and abstract,” observes Sandra Beckett, “he insists that the shorter version [for children] retains an important, but implicit, philosophical element. If he had become a philosopher, Tournier says that he would like to have taught philosophy to children” (174). Such was his ambition with his books; he calls them “philosophical books for ten-year-old children.”¹¹ Tournier was a friend of Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze even wrote an essay about Friday, which was included as an afterword in later editions (Beckett 175). It was no accident that Tournier turned to the Robinsonade, long of critical interest and long linked with Rousseauian dreams of self-sufficiency and sovereignty.¹² It is interesting to think about the appeal of the genre to children’s writers especially.¹³

In any case, P4C shares some territory with the Robinsonade and related philosophical-literary genres but also revises them and makes use of other materials. P4C plays up the idea of child sovereignty and intellectual independence. But it also leans heavily in favor of the social contract by encouraging and fictionalizing Socratic-style child-adult dialogue and a peer-based “community of inquiry.” P4C’s roots in the social movements of the 1960s, as well as the broader tradition of progressive education, helped to ensure that the child thinker was not isolated literally or metaphorically. No child is an island, and P4C is uninterested in the thought experiments of the Robinsonade. Instead, P4C emphasizes the power of dialogue and community. To its credit, P4C has turned to a rich variety of children’s texts over time, capitalizing on and further developing a diverse set of scripts for subjectivity and exchange.

P4C merges analytic with continental philosophy, combining a focus on language and logic with an appreciation for curiosity and speculative thought. Some P4C contexts and programs are more analytic than others. But as I mentioned in the introduction to this book, a key concept for P4C across the board is “wonder,” aligned with the terms play and enchantment. In Theaetetus, Plato puts these words in the mouth of Socrates: “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” (155 c–d). In Metaphysics, Aristotle remarks that wonder first led men to philosophize (982b12). The idea that philosophy begins in wonder, or thaumazein, has become a core element of the Platonic legacy, taken up by thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Whitehead. It is a serious academic idea, as well as an idea asserted by the broader public, sometimes against academic philosophy.¹⁴ Wonder has a double construction with respect to philosophy. It is both the source for philosophy and a corrective to or caution against its excesses or abuses; wonder ostensibly keeps philosophy true or pure. Wonder is not reducible to reason or thought. Plato calls wonder a feeling, while Aristotle speaks of astonishment. Modern definitions underscore both wonder’s proximity to thinking and its ostensibly healthy distance from such. As a noun, wonder suggests “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable”; “the quality of a person or a thing that causes wonder”; “a strange or remarkable person, thing, or event.” As a verb, it suggests the desire to know but not absolutely or without doubt; it is a more speculative, less invested sort of desire.¹⁵ Wonder, it seems, leads to philosophy but also exceeds, survives, even redeems it. Wonder seems nearly to affirm something like the unconscious of philosophy. Wonder makes space within philosophy for resistance to knowledge as much as its pursuit. To think philosophically means not only to seek insight but to welcome doubt.

In some formulations, wonder gestures toward the spiritual or metaphysical, “signifies that the world is profounder, more all-embracing and mysterious than the logic of everyday reason had taught us to believe”—even leads us to “a deepened sense of mystery . . . [to] the knowledge that being, qua being, is mysterious and inconceivable” (Pieper 115).¹⁶ In such formulations, wonder evidences and also becomes that mysteriousness we can never quite grasp. Increasingly, wonder has been associated with childhood. If philosophy begins in wonder, the thinking runs, wonder begins in childhood. Consider, for instance, psychiatrist Neel Burton’s 2014 P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Children’s Literature Otherwise
• 1. Philosophy for Children
• 2. Theory for Beginners
• 3. Literature for Minors
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series List