Children are small philosophers in grass: they discover the world and ask questions, and they ask them to those who take care of them. Respect and take seriously the thoughts of children allows adults to recover the size of the reality that, growing up, have put aside
Children are curious by nature: from an early age they explore the environment that surrounds them and ask parents continuous questions. Accompanying them to discover the world is an important educational taskand illustrated books are a precious tool: they stimulate imagination, and allow you to “dig” without offering easy and definitive answers.
THE’Hamelin Associationwho for twenty years has been dealing with promoting reading for childhood, has dedicated the last issue of his magazine to the “philosophical potential” of the registers, Hamelin. Pedagogy figures stories. Here an extract from an article published in Hamelin n. 50, I was thinking: register and philosophy.
“Difficult” questions
“Mom, what do you think how long does it last forever?”: This is the “big question” (taking up the title of the Wolf Erlfruch register) which, for some time now, my daughter Eva, 2 and a half years not yet completed, turns me at least once a day.
A question that surprised me and that, with the adult mind, I immediately demented to a “has no idea what he is saying … this, then, who knows where he will have heard it!“. To which, in the initial embarrassment, I tried to sketch some response, hoping that it will be satisfied, at least there and there. It is clear that The question, in its complexity, did not leave me indifferent: not only as a mother, but above all as a scholar.
Because it surprises me that such a little girl can do me A question that I would not hesitate to define philosophical? Why is my clumsy attempt not to give it a random answers embarrassed but to look for something that makes sense? And why don’t you scare me not to have an answer, a “two plus two does four”, to be offered to them with bold wisdom, from the top of my wise and sarrial age?
Here, I think they are also questions like these to have to guide the reflection of a pedagogy and a culture that deal with childhood and that have at heart The right of boys and girls to exercise thought.
I don’t care (or I care up to a certain point) if this thought is logical, both abstract and rational before or after 7 years (nor would I dream of going into a field that does not compete). What I am sure, however, is that from a pedagogical point of view (but also as an Eva mother), I have a great responsibility: I can’t ignore it, this question.
Where is the embarrassment for certain questions?
A small biographical story, therefore, intertwined with my profession, keeps me anchored to the field of education at thought.
Like Maestro Lorenzoni (but, before him, many others) reminded us that “children think great”, giving us school narratives that echo al Wrong country of the great Mario Lodi, the fact that an education to thought represents a child’s right to be protected and pursuednot so much (or not only) as an exceptional sporadic experience, but fully Alongside the disciplinary didactics and the enhancement of more than recognized skills.
Here, however, I don’t dwell so much about the practices, but I try to keep me a step back, at the level of the premises. What, in fact, I believe is a priority, before any choice linked to a method, a path, a project of philosophical practice, is the fact that it is appropriate to return to that sense of embarrassment Which often leads the adult to ignore a child’s questions.
In fact, recognized that children, even very small, exercise (and express) thought (in whatever form it is), It should be wondered if they always exist a space, once, a arrangement that are able to welcome it.
We remind us very little of our early childhood and this makes us “foreigners” (although not completely foreign) to the boys and girls of today: their questioning eyes, their questions “out of any logic” (logic of whom?), Their solutions that exceed the binarisms we are used to, instead of surprising us (in the full sense of wonder) and instead of blocking us – in respectful silence – on the threshold of a “other” world, they worry us, they make us feel “uncomfortable”lead us to haste, to the dry response or non -response at all.
Make room for children’s thoughts
“Have dear questions“, Therefore, is a first step in the direction of a recognition of the (real) participation of children in their childhood and in the world we share with them; questions that, of course, are freer from superstructures and conditioning than those of adults and they can represent an opportunity, for themselves, to regain the pleasure of the discovery and commitment of research.
It is very difficult, in fact, for adult society, although worthy of having recognized the minors of the differences for which specific rights are sanctioned (UN Convention, 1989), to move from “paper” to reality and also recognizing them active participation.
The subject-child, in the imagination and in reality, remains relegated to a condition of “lack” and “minority” (in-fanswithout a word), a incompleteness to be filled to become, as soon as possible, “the adult of tomorrow”.
One thing is to guarantee a single child his own subjectivity within his family, school, social everyday life in general; Another thing, however, much more complicated, is to imagine, first, and then realize A world, a country, a city that are actually “infantile participation measure”.
It is, to resume the words of Montessori, to give the right of thought, word and action to that “forgotten citizen” who lives, in fact, the time of childhood.
What “childhood” are we talking about?
Whether the child is a philosopher or that childhood can do philosophy (or, better, “philosophizing”) is not the priority demand for education. Pedagogy must ask (and, in fact, some illustrious scholars in Italy have been doing it for some time in the context of Philosophy for Children) If within the educational contexts there are the premises and attitudes for:
- recognize right of citizenship to thought (and to the questions) of the children;
- recognize a educational value to the ability to ask questions and to seek, together with a community of peer, of the responses (the “philosophize”);
- recognize a “gift” and a potential of enrichment That childhood makes, bringing to light his questions, to an adult world now deaf to divergent and blind melodies with non -discounted horizons.
But even before these questions, in the writer’s opinion, it is advisable to reflect on What is our idea of childhood: Which boys and girls have in mind when we design, assume, do we draw educational proposals?
Moving in the riverbed of rights, in fact, a passage of perspective is needed from an idea of education For childhood to an idea of education with childhood.
Children and girls no longer recipients of adult reflections and practices, but co-construction of learning experiences and, of course, of exercise of thought. A thought that, precisely starting from the definition that the authors of the Philosophy for Childrenis not valued only in its most “recognized” dimension – logic, criticism, argumentative -, but also in those that refer to creativity, to taking care of the other and the world, to the exercise of a global and solidarity citizenship.
Philosophical practice, as imagined and created in the context of Philosophy for/with Childrenrefers to an idea of complex thinkingconsisting of several levels, absolutely not hierarchical, but in continuous connection between them.
And so the idea of childhood that derives from it is complex: not flattened on rigid learning stages and related skillsbut “fluid”, worthy of careful observation and listening, capable of “getting out of the frames” of which we are part and showing us alternative ways to the routes that we are addicted and dumb.
What may appear as “illogical” and, for this, less than a rigorous and systematic thought is actually Another face of thoughtwhat is closest, at first glance, to what we easily catalog like the contradictions and nonsense of childhood.
But this is the fantasy (that we adults are missing), a place where “it rains inside”, Calvino would say, A powerful and generative placeable to take into consideration any hypothesis, a place of opening, of counterintuitive jumps and important lighting.
Of course, it is a place for which there are fewer prompt answers, more tiring to live in, disorienting, unsettling, with fewer holds at hand or close ports in which to dock. But isn’t this the place of childhood? Or, better, that’s not how we perceive it, we adults, completely disoriented in front of a 2 and a half year old girl who asks us how long it lasts forever?
Childhood teaches us that not all problems can be addressed with logic: When the phenomena are unpublished (and so it is for a subject who has just arrived in the world), the variables are numerous and often elusive. It is in this encounter with the novelty, the wonder, the amazement that the ground resides for questions, for all questions (it is in what the “birth” of philosophy resides).
The power of literature for childhood
Despite all the difficulties of concretely recognizing a thought to childhood and, above all, his right of citizenship, despite the effort of the “adult” mind of dialogue with forgotten dimensions of thought, which often lead to ignore their great wealth, There are places where the voice of the “Child World” speaks.
A precious place, for example, is represented by Literature for children. To put it with Giorgia Grilli, that of literature is the place where childhood seems to find her space “par excellence”, where girls and boys are shown in their parts of diversity and divergence, never fully grasped by the adult gaze. In the pages of the great illustrated books, childhood sees things “that adults do not see, enters dimensions that for adults do not exist”.
As in Ask me what I like by Bernard Waber with Suzy Lee’s illustrationsin which the thoughts of a child dialogue “with equal arms” in a swing of questions and answers with the father: a book that speaks the plural languages of childhood and who, at the same time, does not crave to fill the spaces, to fill the voids but, rather, accompanies the reader to wear a hospitable look towards the universe-child.
Or as in Wait by Antoinette Portis in which it is the perseverance of a child to educate our gaze, making us grasp in the ordinary of a daily life, made of races, fast passages and always the same paths, it roadordinary; reminding us, once again, that childhood is once from the life but also once Of life, which requires respect, care and patient guide.
Or as in Can you empty a puddle? by Katrin Stangl In which the questions of the protagonists chase each other in a swirl of colors, restoring the childhood, in addition to thoughts, also smells, laughter, tears and noises. It is among these pages that I imagine I be able to insert Eva’s question, that question that, if asked with a “but, in your opinion, how long does it last?”, She replies “forever” forever “.
