Mind Change

To me, one of the most delightful experiences in philosophy is having your mind changed.

It’s refreshing on any number of levels, none the least of which is that popular culture, at least as I understand it, tends to look down on it. For instance, politicians who change their position on a given issue are called “flip-floppers;” or parents who occasionally give in to their kids are seen as weak and inconsistent.

So, there’s something charmingly rebellious about being willing to admit that you were mistaken—or at least, to allow your views on some issue to evolve. This is just what’s happened to me over the last 24 hours, although it only took about thirty minutes in a single presentation by a former principal of school in Australia to effect the change.

Yesterday, I was skeptical about the effort to expand the reach of philosophy for children into more schools. I expressed my concern that doing so might water down the curriculum, but even more, might undermine that subversive nature of philosophy. If P4C is institutionalized, I thought, it might mean that students wouldn’t receive one of its primary benefits: the space to question pretty much everything, without the hegemony of the “right answer” beating them down.

But after seeing a presentation by Lynne Hinton of Buranda State School in Queensland, Australia, I now have a different view. She talked about—and gave statistics showing—how the entire culture of her school changed over a six year period as a result of requiring all the grades, one through seven, to do one hour of philosophy a week in every classroom.

It wasn’t just that test scores went up—although they did significantly—it’s more that kids learned how to talk to each other, and as a result, treated each other different; one student’s quote that stuck with me was something like, “If we didn’t have philosophy in our school, there would be bullying.”

Who wouldn’t want something like this at every school in the world; I can hardly believe I ever thought differently.