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ANALYTIC TEACHING AND PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS VOL. 37, ISSUE 2 (2017) 

  
 

 

Art & Dialogue: An experiment in pre-k philosophy   
 

 

 

Erik Kenyon & Diane Terorde-Doyle 
 

 

arly educators are in a bind. Teacher education programs are calling on them more and more 
to help students practice critical thinking and develop intellectual character (Ritchhart, 2002); 
yet school funding depends on meeting Common Core standards, which do not explicitly 

assess critical thinking until the high-school level (NEA.org). Add to that an over-engineered content 
curriculum, and thinking becomes a luxury that is quickly lost amid more immediate concerns 
(Cabrera and Colosi, 2012). As a result, we are raising a generation of “excellent sheep” who flourish 
amid standardized tests but are increasingly unable to think for themselves (Deresiewicz, 2014). The 
problem, we suggest, is that today’s teachers are in such a rush to give students the answers that they 
are not allowing them time to ask the questions. As a result, students cannot find the “deep structure” 
of issues. Bodies of knowledge thus strike them as disconnected facts, quickly forgotten. The solution, 
as suggested by recent work in cognitive science, is to teach critical thinking through teaching content 
(Willingham, 2007). In what follows, we propose a way of organically integrating content and 
thinking through games, story books and art. With this, we put children into the driver’s seat, 
encouraging them to ask their own questions, to propose their own answers and to join their peers in 
joint inquiry through dialogue. In a word, we propose teaching children philosophy as early as 
possible. Tom Wartenberg has made considerable progress with his picture-book philosophy 
curriculum designed for elementary schools (Wartenberg, 2014). But what of younger children? 
Combining the resources of Rollins College’s Philosophy Department and Child Development and 
Student Research Center, we set out to find “how low can we go?” Over four terms’ of trial and error, 
we have adapted and distilled Wartenberg’s methods into a model that works for the Center’s 4-year-
olds, and we have tested this model on a larger scale through a one-term collaboration with the 
Winter Park Day Nursery. 
  
Wartenberg’s Storybook Model 
 

As Tom Wartenberg has argued elegantly, figures from Plato to Descartes wrestled with the 
same “big ideas” that appear in familiar children’s books. While Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 
provides a useful springboard for thinking about courage, the Frog and Toad story, “Giants and 
Dragons,” presents many of the same issues and concepts. And it does so in a much more 
approachable way. Writing for second-grade teachers, Wartenberg argues against the assumption that 
to teach philosophy one must first have studied philosophy. On what Wartenberg calls the ‘teacher-
centered’ model, the teacher knows the content, the students don’t, and the teacher’s job is to pour 
knowledge into students’ empty minds. By contrast, Wartenberg articulates a learner-centered model, 
which recognizes that children are people with their own interests, concerns and ways of approaching 
things.1 

E 



27 
 

 
Wartenberg’s model channels children’s natural curiosity and imagination into discussions of 

big ideas about the world, knowledge and life. His typical lesson starts with reading a storybook aloud. 
After this, the teacher / moderator helps the group fill out a ‘story matrix’ or chart designed to focus 
children’s attention on the philosophically relevant big ideas at play in the story. When dealing with 
“Dragons and Giants,” for instance, the teacher may ask whether at various points in the story, Frog 
and Toad were (a) in danger, (b) afraid, (c) brave. From here, Wartenberg offers a set of “discussion 
questions” designed to get children thinking about the relation of bravery to fear and danger: Can 
Frog and Toad be brave if there is no danger present? Are they brave if they are afraid? Are they brave 
if they are not afraid? These questions lead the children from the particulars of the story to thinking 
about issues more abstractly. To facilitate this, the teacher encourages them to disagree with one 
another, to back their positions with examples from personal experience and to provide reasons for 
their views. In transitioning from one particular to another, children start to articulate the ‘big ideas’ 
that connect them. This exchange is structured by a series of nine rules which the moderator helps 
the children practice and internalize. The ultimate goal is not to arrive at a consensus, but to help 
children identify, articulate and give reasons for their own views about the big idea under discussion.  

 
We can attest to the fact that Wartenberg’s model works beautifully with the elementary 

school students for whom it was developed and, when presented the right way, with older students as 
well.2 Yet what of younger children, in particular those who cannot yet read? This is the question we 
set out to answer. 

  
An Experiment in Preschool Philosophy 
 

The partnership between this article’s authors came about by accident. In Spring of 2015, 
Kenyon’s undergraduates were working at Fern Creek Elementary which had to cancel two weeks of 
meetings on short notice. When asked whether we could work with the Child Development Center 
(CDC) instead, Terorde-Doyle responded, “why not?” We thus took four lessons, which had been 
designed for a 5th- and 6th-grade gifted course, and used them with 3- and 4-year-olds. The first lesson 
was characterized by mutual incomprehension. By the fourth, though, we had made enough progress 
to see the potential. The following Fall term, we made a concerted effort to see how low we could go. 
We initially drew the line at speaking in full sentences, and split our 3- & 4-year-olds into two groups 
of roughly 8 each. Each group met with undergraduate discussion-leaders in 20 minute blocks, 24 
times over the course of 6 weeks. Our guiding question has been: what would it take to adapt 
Wartenberg’s model for use in preschool? By the time we were done, little of the nine rules, story 
matrix and discussion questions was left. Given the CDC’s practice of referring to everyone as friends 
(children are “little friends”, college students and other adults are “big friends”), we came to refer to 
this as our “Philosophy Friends” project. In what follows, we will set out the Philosophy Friends 
Model we have developed. This represents an intermediate stage in a larger project. Longitudinal 
assessment of critical thinking in participant children as opposed to control groups would, of course, 
be ideal. The present study lays the groundwork of viable pedagogical methods that would make such 
a study possible. The evidence we have in support of our method’s success is anecdotal. Nevertheless, 
we have noted changes in how children interact with teachers, parents and each other. All of this 
adds up to a change in the culture of our school that is striking enough to warrant further research. 



28 
 

We ourselves are pursuing such work at the CDC and hope that the present study will prove useful 
for others interested in similar undertakings. 
 
The Rules of the Game 
 

As with all preschool practice, initial structure largely determines the quality of the experience 
for children and adults alike. Wartenberg gives nine rules of “How We Do Philosophy”…3 

1. We think about what we heard. 
2. We answer the questions as clearly as we can. 
3. We listen carefully and quietly, with our hands down, to what someone is saying. 
4. We decide if we agree or disagree. 
5. We think about why we agree or disagree. 
6. When it’s our turn, we say whether we agree or not and why. 
7. We respect what everyone says. 
8. We all have valuable comments to make. 
9. We have fun thinking together! 

These rules work wonderfully well with the elementary school students for whom they were devised. 
Our first step was to distill Wartenberg’s nine rules into three --we listen; we think; we respond-- and 
to present them in a way appropriate for our children’s developmental level.4 
 

Rule number 1: We listen. We symbolized the rule visually by moving a hand to an ear. In 
teaching the rule, we asked the children when they listen, how they listen, and why they listen.  Some 
typical responses were, “when others are talking”, “with our ears”, “so we can be safe.”  Recognizing 
that the rule itself was not enough for our purposes, we set out to practice listening skills with a series 
of activities.  Children participated in musical listening games, distinguishing certain sounds from 
different musical instruments. We played telephone, as each child was told a word and asked to “pass 
it on” to their neighbor as we sat in a circle.  The game brought laughter and silliness as children 
whispered into each other’s ears.  The game itself, while fun and interactive, showed us that perhaps 
children needed to “play” with the concept of philosophy before actually philosophizing. Over time, 
however, the skill took root. Children got better at listening to teach other. At the same time, we 
adults got better at actually listening to children as we helped them articulate their own ideas. 

 
Rule number 2: We think. We symbolized the rule visually by placing a finger to our heads and 

displaying an expression of deep thought. While easy to represent, the thinking rule required children 
to engage in a level of self-reflective ‘thinking about thinking’. The conversation about how we think 
was key in supporting their comprehension of this rule. We planned ways to connect their 
understanding of ‘thinking’ to particular moments in the day where we saw them actively thinking. 
There were many teachable moments when we verbalized for the children how their understanding 
was evolving. We asked the children to show us what thinking looked like. We asked, “How do we 
know if you are thinking?” We also began asking a series of open-ended questions at those points in 
the day when all students met as a single group. This became the time where we intentionally planned 
thinking games, just as we had planned listening games.  We asked questions like, “If you could be 
any animal, what would you be?” Children pondered these questions and then displayed or spoke 
about their ideas. In keeping with our philosophy curriculum, we asked the children to show us their 
thoughts in actions, pretending to be the animal in dramatic representation. We supported their 



29 
 

reflection by noticing their pondering as they enacted these animal ideas and stating that “you are 
thinking with your brain.” We asked, “why did you choose that animal?” The answers reflected their 
state of mind, with some children stating, “It’s because Mommy likes them,” or “I saw them at the 
zoo.” Asking children what they are thinking is itself a philosophical undertaking. Their comments 
exemplified the cognitive emphasis on children’s experiential base and their close affinity to familiar 
people and places. To get children to consider alternative reasons for their thoughts, we took every 
opportunity to ask them why they thought as they did.   

 
Rule Number 3: We respond. We invoke this rule by pointing to one child and then another 

saying, “<Child 1>, do you agree or disagree with <Child 2>? Say why.” To practice this, we tape a line 
on the floor and have someone make a claim, e.g. about the best flavor of ice cream. Everyone who 
agrees stands with that friend; everyone else moves to the other side of the line. We can then ask 
children why they have taken the stand they have, and we prompt them to use the phrase, “I 
(dis)agree because…” The habit of agreeing and disagreeing has led to a wide range of conversations 
during the children’s play experiences, such as a prolonged debate, initiated by the children 
themselves, about who owns the ocean. Rule number 3 has been an eye-opener. As teachers, we are so 
often dictating process, structure, or behaviors for safety reasons and management control, that we 
seldom allow children the chance to form clear opinions, to decide whether they agree or disagree. In 
a word, the rules encourage a form of metacognition which empowers children to think for 
themselves. 
 
Working with Pre-K Attention Spans 
 

Following Wartenberg's model, we began our project by reading books with small groups of 
children and then working through a story matrix. Given that our children could not yet read, we did 
this all aloud. We quickly realized that once the story was over, our children’s attention had moved 
on. Attempts to stretch out an activity were torturous for all involved. To work around this problem, 
we began raising questions from our story matrix during the reading of our books. In reading Dr. 
Suess’ Lorax, for instance, undergraduates focused the children on philosophically relevant details at 
key points during the story.  The children made predictions, drew conclusions and engaged the 
philosophical puzzle of how many trees the Once-ler should have taken. Children commented:  

“He’s going to cut down all the trees.”  
“He’s going to make them sad when they are all gone.”   
“They would be happy if some of the trees were cut down.”   

One child reflected on how her dad had cut down a tree because her mother was allergic to its 
flowers. Such instances of reflective thinking show the children taking positions, making assumptions 
and drawing conclusions (Daniel and Auriac, 2011). 
 
 But when it came to asking open-ended discussion questions, discussion quickly went off the 
rails. 4-year-olds are simply not cut out to sit still and discuss abstract issues for more than a couple of 
minutes. Our initial conclusion was that discussion of abstract ideas simply asks too much of a 4-year-
old’s cognitive development. Over time, however, we realized that our asking them to sit still was the 
real problem. We thus took two steps to meet the children where they are, allowing them to think in 
the embodied manner that comes naturally to them.  



30 
 

Thinking with our Bodies. First, we augmented Wartenberg’s standard lesson by introducing our 
stories’ big ideas through games and activities. For instance, as preparation for discussing moderation 
in the Frog and Toad story, “Cookies,” we had our children mix paints. While they were occupied in 
this very hands-on activity, our undergraduate leader asked: Is this too much blue? Is this not enough 
red? Is this green just right? By the time we turned to the story, the children had a working vocabulary 
of excess, moderation and deficiency. Over time, we found that the activities made more of an 
impression than the storybooks. To prepare for discussing courage in “Dragons and Giants”, for 
instance, we blindfolded individual children and had their friends guide them around the room. Four 
weeks later, when we were reading Madeline for other purposes, a child brought up the blindfolding 
activity. By the end of term, our undergraduates were divided on whether it would be better to get rid 
of storybooks altogether when dealing with preschool. 

 
Thinking through Art. Second, we recast Wartenberg’s open-ended discussion questions as 

prompts for art projects: How many trees should the Once-ler have cut down? What does bravery look 
like? How many cookies are just right? As children worked, we asked them about their creations. 
Rather than get in the way of verbal discussion, the art enabled it. Children who could not sit still to 
discuss abstract ideas would narrate their creations at length, engaging with us and with each other as 
they worked. In the terms of developmental psychology, the art project provided scaffolding for the 
free-flowing discussions which the children could not carry out while sitting still. In the spirit of the 
Reggio Emilia tradition, art provided a vehicle for learning that was ultimately not about the art.5 
  
Preparing Carefully: Philosophical Puzzles & Backwards Course Design 
 

Early in the project, we enlisted our colleague from Theater, Thomas Ouellette, to lead 
undergraduates through a workshop in reading storybooks aloud. After sitting through one of our 
sessions at the CDC, Thomas commented, “this is the kind of thing where you have to prepare 
carefully and then just wing it.” This has become our mantra. According to the Philosophy Friends 
Model, “careful preparation,” amounts to a form of backwards course design, as we start with our 
ultimate goal and work backward in our planning: 

 
The Goal: Children's Discussion. What we are ultimately after is the children having their own 

discussion, which we facilitate by enforcing the philosophy rules.  
 
Step 1: Articulate a Puzzle. To spark such discussions, we seek out questions that will allow 

children to articulate and plausibly defend opposing views. We are not, however, interested in matters 
of mere opinion; e.g., “What is the best flavor of ice cream?” Nor are we engaging in the ‘Socratic 
Method’, if that is understood as asking questions which had already been answered by adults; e.g., 
“Why do some rocks float?” Rather, we seek out authentic philosophical puzzles, i.e. problems that 
matter, for which there is not a single clearly agreed upon answer at present, but mostly likely only 3 
or 4 main contenders. For instance, “Why should we share?” This question, which may seem simple, 
can be answered in a number of different ways, each of which has been defended in the philosophical 
literature: 

a. An authority told me to do it (relativism / divine command theory) 
b.It makes my friend happy (altruism)  
c. It makes me happy (egoism)  



31 
 

d. It makes everyone happy (utilitarianism)  
e. It treats everyone fairly (deontology / rights-theory)6  

By choosing questions that we adults cannot answer conclusively, we set the stage for children to have 
substantive disagreements and make them our peers in very real ways. For instance, during an activity 
involving sweets, we asked children whether we should share left overs with their other friends. One 
child replied, “No” (egoism). Another replied, “yes, because it’s being a good friend” (deontology). 
When pressed about why friends should share, another child responded, “because it’s happy when 
everybody’s happy” (utilitarianism). 
 

Step 2: Design Activities. Children have amazingly creative minds and tend to think in concrete 
terms.7 To introduce them to our puzzles, we devised a series of activities. Unlike normal Pre-K 
teaching, we encouraged disagreement, albeit within carefully controlled parameters. We would, for 
instance, set the children a task but give them insufficient resources for each of them to carry it out. 
Such activities set the stage for teachable moments: when Adam needs a paint brush, but Susie 
doesn't want to share, we can ask both Adam and Susie their reasons and get them to listen to each 
other's. If a suitable story book is available we follow Wartenberg's lead, albeit raising questions 
during the reading, not after it.8 While reading Doctor Seuss’ “If I ran the Zoo,” the children were 
asked, “what if the zoo unlocked all the animals?” Responses included: 

“I would lock the zoo up, I wouldn’t want the animals going crazy.”    
“Are there rules at zoos?”  
“I would get new ones, they will show you tricks.” 

These exchanges tend to last no more than a minute, yet they plant the seeds of ideas.  
 

Step 3: Process Ideas by Creating Art. The final step in our lesson planning is to devise a closing 
art project. If our mini-discussions plant the seeds, engaging with artistic media allow them to 
blossom. The switch from one kind of activity to another resets the attention clock in a way that 
allows children to keep processing their new ideas. To guide them along, we put our philosophical 
puzzles in the form of open-ended prompts, e.g. paint a picture of friends sharing, which will allow us 
to engage children in conversation while they work. 

While these lessons are carefully crafted around philosophical puzzles, what children 
experienced is a series of games, storybooks and art projects, albeit with a fair deal of talking along the 
way. In effect, we take the activities that fill a 4-year-old’s normal day and arrange them to serve a 
philosophical purpose. 
  
Winging It: A Culture of Philosophy 
 

Through this careful planning, we established an “intellectual environment” for thinking 
(Ritchhart, 2002). During formal lessons, we observed children wrestling with puzzles, taking 
positions and engaging each other in critical discussion. On the playground, we noticed the use of 
philosophical vocabulary, as children began to structure their own interactions phrases such as “I 
disagree, because…” Critical thinking seeped into everyday routines, and reflective thinking 
flourished. One child’s father, himself Rollins faculty, reports that during bedtime stories his 
daughter informed him, “Daddy, you’re doing it wrong. You’re supposed to ask questions.” For the 
children, philosophy was license to express and explore their thoughts on ethical puzzles and life’s big 
ideas. 



32 
 

 Over time, we realized a difference between how teachers and undergraduates approached the 
Project. Given that undergraduates met with children for relatively short periods through the week, 
there was a good deal of planning involved, as they actively sought to precipitate disagreement and 
discussion during the little time they had. The CDC’s teachers reported a shift in how they viewed 
their own interactions with children: rather than trying to snuff out disagreement and confusion, they 
came to fan the flames, albeit in productive, rule-governed ways. The Project’s most lasting benefit is 
perhaps how it has transformed the culture of the school. While lesson plans carefully designed 
around philosophical puzzles provided the opportunity to practice new skills and nurture various 
perspectives, it was only after these skills and perspectives became second nature that the project really 
took off. Our children took the driver’s seat, asked their own questions and engaged each other in 
thoughtful, rule-governed dialogue. When it comes to the content curriculum, such students are well 
poised to see connections between ideas and to retain what they have learned, for the simple reason 
that they are teaching themselves. 
 
 The CDC is not a typical school but a developmental psychology lab blending the traditions 
of Dewey’s lab school at the University of Chicago and the art-based curriculum of Reggio Emilia. 
Many of our students are the children of faculty, while all of them benefit from close daily contact 
with undergraduate researchers. This is a mixed blessing. While it provides the opportunity and the 
support for things like the current Project, the fact that we could get a bunch of professors’ kids to do 
philosophy is not likely to impress skeptics. The point of the Project is to bring about social change, 
inoculating students as soon as possible against the current culture of standardized testing. For that to 
succeed, we need to work on a much larger scale.  
 

In Fall 2016, we thus put our methods to the test at Winter Park Day Nursery (WPD). While 
only three blocks from Rollins’ campus, this Pre-K serves families of a socio-economic status which is 
much more representative of a typical US state-supported school. While our long-term goal is a multi-
year, formal assessment, our present goal was simply to find how well methods developed at a college-
run lab school would translate into a more representative pre-K. After six weeks working with four 
groups of six to eight 4-year-olds, our answer is quite definitely: yes. In general terms, children 
engaged in the Philosophy Project tend to develop along similar lines. We thus propose the following 
benchmarks for assessing children’s interactions during lessons, unstructured play time and at home: 

1. Engage with stories and activities at a basic level 
2. Give relevant answers to questions 
3. Disagree with peers in a civil way 
4. Give reasons for positions 
5. Revise positions based on peers’ reasons 

 
While our data collection up to this point has been anecdotal, our WPD groups generally 

made less progress than the one group running simultaneously at the CDC. The WPD groups did, 
however, make better progress than CDC groups did the first two terms we worked with them. This 
suggests that pedagogical method is at least as significant a factor as the children’s socio-economic 
status. In many respects, a 4-year-old is a simply a 4-year-old. By the end, most children had advanced 
to benchmark 3 or 4 and sometimes 5 during our meetings.9 The other significant factors came down 
to space, time and culture. At WPD, we worked with four groups in a single large room. Children 
showed marked improvement those times we could bring individual groups outside and away from 



33 
 

the distraction of other groups. What’s more, half of the CDC’s 4-year-old’s had worked with a prior 
Philosophy Friends class when they were 3.10 Just as importantly, their teachers have been at it longer: 
after four terms, the philosophy rules have become part of the CDC culture. Logistical challenges 
working with WPD often left teachers unaware of undergraduates’ goals. As a result, children were 
exposed to mixed messages, as undergraduates would encourage disagreement only to have teachers 
tell them to reach a consensus. By the end of the project, we were all much more on the same page. A 
month later, teachers report that they have “become more open to introducing abstract ideas such as 
courage and friendship,” whereas before they would “assume the children were too young for that.” 
Some have begun integrating such ideas into their cultural lesson plans, e.g. talking about peace and 
friendship in connection with China, and have come to a new appreciation that for some subjects, 
“everything is perspective.”  

 
For those engaged in early education, we hold out this change in school culture as a goal that 

has long-term value and may be accomplished within the pre-K system as it currently stands. In 
practical terms, this means teaching the three rules, embracing philosophical puzzles when they spring 
up, and treating children --at least in some registers-- as our intellectual peers. While formal training in 
philosophy is not necessary to undertake such a project, the children’s wonderments and deep 
thinking inspired us grown-ups to expand our own horizons. It is in this last respect that children 
have something to teach us: if we honestly listen to what they think and join them as they explore 
life’s big questions, then we might nurture and develop the childlike wonder that Aristotle once 
identified as the beginning of philosophy. 

 

References 
 

Bang, Molly. (1999). When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry. New York: Scholastic Inc. 

Cabrera, Derek and Laura Colosi (2012). Thinking at Every Desk: Four Simple Skills to Transform 

your Classroom. New York:  Norton. 

Daniel, M & Auriac, E. (2011) Philosophy, Critical thinking and Philosophy for Children.  

Educational Psychology and Theory 43 (5) 415-435.  

Deresiewicz, William (2014). Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite. New York: 

Free Press. 

Dr. Seuss. (1971). The Lorax. New York: Random House. 

Dr. Seuss. (1950). If I Ran the Zoo. New York: Random House. 

Gaardner, Jostein (2007). Sophie’s World. New York: FSG Classics. 

Hertzog, Nancy (2001), “Reflections and Impressions from Reggio Emilia: “It's Not about Art!”” in 

Early Childhood Research and Practice 3:1. 

Kenyon, Erik and Diane Terorde-Doyle (2017), “The Three Rs of Thinking: Nurturing Discussion 

in Preschool” in ASCD Express 12:10. 

Lobel, Arnold (1971). Frog and Toad Together. New York: Harper Collins. 

http://philpapers.org/s/Marie%20Daniel


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Matthews, Gareth (1994). The Philosophy of Childhood. Boston: Harvard University Press. 

Matthews, Gareth (1999). Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford 

University Press. 

McClintock, Michael. (2007). A Fly Went By. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books. 

Ritchhart, Ron. (2002). Intellectual Character: What it is, why it Matters, and How to Get it. San 

Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Stuhr, John (2000). Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press. 

Wartenberg, Thomas (2014). Big Ideas for Little Kids. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Rowman & 

Littlefield. 

Wartenberg, Thomas (2013). A Sneetch is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries. West 

Sussex:  Wiley-Blackwell. 

Willingham, Daniel (2008). “Critical Thinking: Why Is It so Hard to Teach?” Arts Education Policy 

Review, 2008, Vol.109 (4). 21-32. 

 
Endnotes 
 
1 Wartenberg falls in line with the Pragmatist tradition exemplified by John Dewey, “Education as Growth” 
(1916) in Stuhr 2000. 
2 Kenyon’s students have spent one term working with a 5th- and 6th-grade gifted class at Fern Creek Elementary 
and two terms working with 1st- through 6th-graders at the Walden Community School, both in Orlando. 
3 Wartenberg 2014, 44. 
4 The following discussion of the Philosophy Rules is also laid out in our (2017) “The Three Rs of Thinking: 
Nurturing Discussion in Preschool”. 
5 Nancy Hertzog (2001), “Reflections and Impressions from Reggio Emilia: “It's Not about Art!”” in Early 

Childhood Research and Practice 3:1. 
6 As Wartenberg argues, one does not need formal training in philosophy to teach it. Yet, some background 
research into the history of philosophy will be quite helpful when it comes to identifying puzzles. Jostein 
Gaardner’s novel, Sophie’s World (2007), offers a historical overview of Western Philosophy in a fun and 
accessible way. Wartenberg, A Sneetch is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries (2013) takes a topical 
approach, introducing adults to philosophical big ideas through familiar children’s books. For those with a bit 
more background, Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (1999) is a goldmine of puzzles. 
7 Piaget’s developmental model might suggest that children’s concrete thinking would preclude them from the 
abstract thought required for philosophical discussion. Matthews 1994 argues elegantly against this suggestion.  
8 Similar to our activities, a ‘suitable’ storybook is one that encourages questioning and disagreement. While 
there are certainly plenty of these out there, few of them are short enough to work for 4-year-olds. The works of 
Arnold Lobel and Leo Lionni are notable exceptions. 
9 On one occasion, for instance, two children got into a raised-voice disagreement over whether each animal in 
Michael McClintock’s A Fly Went By caused the next to run away. They kept talking, however, eventually 
realized that they in fact agreed and then calmed down. To my thinking, this exceeds the level of rational 
discourse displayed in some recent presidential debates. During another discussion, prompted by Molly Bang’s 

http://na02.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/uresolver/01RC_INST/openurl?frbrVersion=5&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&ctx_id=10_1&ctx_tim=2016-10-13T12%3A20%3A36IST&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info:sid/primo.exlibrisgroup.com-eric&req_id=&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:article&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Critical%20Thinking:%20Why%20Is%20It%20so%20Hard%20to%20Teach?&rft.jtitle=Arts%20Education%20Policy%20Review&rft.btitle=&rft.aulast=&rft.auinit=&rft.auinit1=&rft.auinitm=&rft.ausuffix=&rft.au=Willingham,%20Daniel%20T.&rft.aucorp=&rft.date=2008&rft.volume=109&rft.issue=4&rft.part=&rft.quarter=&rft.ssn=&rft.spage=21&rft.epage=29&rft.pages=&rft.artnum=&rft.issn=1063-2913&rft.eissn=&rft.isbn=&rft.sici=&rft.coden=&rft_id=info:doi/10.3200/AEPR.109.4.21-32&rft.object_id=&rft.eisbn=&rft.edition=&rft.pub=Heldref%20Publications.%201319%20Eighteenth%20Street%20NW,%20Washington,%20DC%2020036-1802.%20Tel:%20800-365-9753;%20Tel:%20202-296-6267;%20Fax:%20202-293-6130;%20e-mail:%20subscribe@heldref.org;%20Web%20site:%20http://www.heldref.org&rft.place=&rft.series=&rft.stitle=&rft.bici=&rft_id=info:bibcode/&rft_id=info:hdl/&rft_id=info:lccn/&rft_id=info:oclcnum/&rft_id=info:pmid/&rft_id=info:eric/((addata/eric%7d%7d&rft_dat=%3Ceric%3EEJ794281%3C/eric%3E,language=eng,view=01RC&svc_dat=single_service


35 
 

 

When Sophie Gets Angry-- Really, Really Angry, one girl said “it is okay to get angry but you still have to be nice,” 
while another held to her position, “you shouldn't get mad.”  
10 At the time, these meetings where frustrating enough, e.g. children contradicting themselves without 
recognizing it, that we decided to focus our efforts on 4-year-olds instead. That said, the children we worked 
with at 3 ended up being the strongest of the group of 4s. This suggests that there is further work to be done in 
pushing the minimum age for philosophy even lower. While working through puzzles requires children to 
recognize and respond to contradiction between views, 3-year-olds are quite capable of learning the philosophy 
rules through games, and may be exposed to philosophical concepts (courage, friendship, fairness, etc.) even if 
they are not yet encouraged to interrogate those concepts. 
 
 
Address Correspondences to: 
    Erik Kenyon      
    Director of Student & Faculty Engagement 
    Hamilton Holt School  
    Rollins College 
    ekenyon@rollins.edu 
 
   Diane Terorde-Doyle 
   DTERORDEDOYLE@Rollins.edu 
 

mailto:ekenyon@rollins.edu

