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The Deweyan Background in P4C 
 

Maura Striano  
 

Introduction 
 

  
n a 1992 interview, Matthew Lipman affirmed that P4C was “a Deweyan way to go beyond 
Dewey” thereby explicitly acknowledging the Deweyan inspiration of his project but also 
asserting his own original contribution to the creation and development of a new 
educational approach. This achievement was the outcome of his effort to overcome what 

he later described as “the apparent inconsistency in Dewey’s formulation of the relationship between 
philosophy and education” (Lipman,  2008, p. 147). This inconsistency had been, indeed, the leading 
motivation for Lipman’s educational inquiry to the point that finding the solution to this problem 
would be his “life’s work” (p. ivi).  
 

Starting from this acknowledgment, I will try to highlight the Deweyan background of the 
P4C pedagogy, showing how Dewey’s ideas constitute a strong educational framework, which grounds 
and organizes both the curriculum and the device of the community of philosophical inquiry (COPI). 
However, I will also identify the original contributions offered by Lipman in the development of a 
new pedagogical framework, which successfully operationalizes a “practical” understanding of the 
educational role of philosophy. 

 
In my analysis I will focus in particular on three elements within the P4C pedagogy, that 

represent Lipman’s original contribution to the development of the Deweyan legacy in accordance 
with  a new pedagogical framework: the idea of teaching for thinking; the pattern of the process of 
inquiry in a P4C session; and the “reconstruction” of a new understanding of philosophy and its 
educational value, which constitutes the effective overcoming of the inconsistency that Lipman had 
found in Dewey’s educational thought. 
 

1. The Idea of Teaching for Thinking 

In a 2005 interview, Lipman states that “Philosophy for Children didn’t just emerge out of 
nowhere. It built upon the recommendations of John Dewey and the Russian educator, Lev Vygotsky, 
who emphasized the necessity to teach for thinking, not just for memorizing” (Naji, 2005, p. 23). 
Here Lipman points out that one of the main points of contact of P4C and Dewey’s educational ideas 
is the focus on thinking and, in particular, on the peculiar relationship that Dewey identifies between 
thinking and education.  

 
As Andrea English points out, the common association of Dewey’s educational theory with 

the idea of “doing” has caused educational scholars to overlook his understanding that “thinking is 
both the aim and the condition for the possibility of education” and has, therefore, limited their 
exploration in depth of the Deweyan vision of the nature and function of thinking within a 
pedagogical framework (English, 2016). 

I 



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This is not the case with Lipman, who refers to Dewey focusing explicitly on the relationship 

between thinking and education, and identifies thinking as a peculiar form of agency, overcoming the 
false dichotomy between thinking and doing, theory and praxis, that has often misled educational 
scholars in their understanding of Dewey’s pedagogy. Lipman refers to Dewey’s vision of thinking as a 
reflective process strictly interconnected with his understanding of the life associated with it, 
according to a democratic perspective. However, he also focuses on the social elements embedded 
within individual thinking processes from a psychological and pedagogical point of view.  In so doing, 
he makes explicit the latent influence of George Herbert Mead on Dewey’s thought and defines a 
clear pedagogical framework for his educational project. 

 
Choosing as a scientific reference the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who explores the 

development of individual thinking capacities according to a socio-cultural approach, Lipman 
successfully highlights the intersubjective matrix of individual thinking, which would lead him to 
identify the “community of philosophical inquiry” as a “social matrix” that generates a variety of 
social relationships, building up the framework of the cognitive matrices which, in turn, generate 
fresh cognitive relationships (Lipman, 1991, 2003). The reference to Vygotsky is essential for Lipman 
as his main pedagogical focus is not only on the structure of thinking and on its functioning, but also 
on the educational context within which it would be possible to teach for thinking, a process which 
involves multiple actors, interactions and moves.  

 
Lipman refers to Dewey’s idea of thinking with a strong pedagogical focus, and this leads him 

both to explore the conditions that promote it but also to look for the educational contexts, tools and 
methodologies that are most suitable for education for thinking, thereby operationalizing what he 
identifies as the pedagogical “criteria” implicit in Dewey’s writings and work (Lipman, 2008).  In fact, 
the title of Lipman’s masterpiece, Thinking in Education, is an intentional quotation of the title of 
chapter twelve of Dewey’s “Democracy and Education,” highlighting how the relationship between 
thinking and education should be understood, focusing on the cultural, political and social 
conditions useful for the improvement of educational models and practices in order to make them 
more respondent to the needs of a democratic society. 

 
In the above-mentioned chapter, Dewey clearly states that “the sole direct path to enduring 

improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the conditions 
which exact, promote, and test thinking.” Moreover, he is also very explicit in the definition and 
description of what should be understood as thinking, stating that: “thinking is method, the method 
of intelligent experience in the course which it takes” (Dewey,1916, MW, p. 9). Indeed, in Democracy 
in Education, Dewey is contextualizing and finalizing the ideas developed in How We Think (1910, 
1933), where he highlighted the necessity to achieve, through education, a discipline of cognitive 
processes according to a reflective pattern, within which reflection can be seen as a process aimed at 
sustaining the development of conceptual understanding.  

 
As Megan Laverty notes, this procedure is at the basis of the formation of concepts, a factor 

which is of paramount importance as these concepts have the function of  “introduc(ing) permanency 
into an otherwise impermanent world,” working as “established meanings, or intellectual deposits” 
useful for the founding of a better understanding of individual and collective experiences. The 
capacity to form and transform concepts can be achieved only if people are in the condition of being 
reflectively engaged in a sustained communication with others (Laverty, 2016). 

 



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Here it is necessary to point out that we should consider Dewey’s understanding of thinking 
in connection with his understanding of education, intended as a practice which can direct and 
facilitate activities leading to an organized and reflective use of inner forces and potentialities. 
Accordingly, in a Deweyan perspective, the main objective of education is to sustain and enhance the 
“power of the mind,” which emerges from a continuous mental discipline, through activity and 
reflection. The “discipline of the mind” is, first of all, a discipline of thinking, understood as a 
reflective process which develops through different stages, and can be educated according to socially 
acknowledged criteria and values. Therefore, Dewey develops what we could define as an “educational 
theory of reflective thinking,” within which thinking is explored in its emergence and unfolding 
within different fields of human experience. Within this framework, the emergence of thinking 
derives from a condition of uncertainty and perplexity, which is at the core of individual and 
collective experience. 

 
Indeed, from a pedagogical point of view, the most interesting aspect of Dewey’s idea of 

thinking, a feature which has significant educational consequences, is, as Vasco D’Agnese points out, 
the disclosure of an “inescapable uncertainty” at the core of human thinking. This realization is 
particularly challenging given “Dewey's firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education 
as the means by which human beings grow and create meaningful existence.” In this perspective 
education must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the 
means to create new, unpredictable experience, introducing new forms of transaction with the 
environment in which individuals live (D’Agnese, 2017).  

 
This understanding of education is particularly interesting since it focuses on the necessity to 

design educational contexts within which individuals can be exposed to uncertainty in order to 
acquire the ability to cope with new experiences through multiple thinking paths in accordance with a 
reflective approach.  For his part, Lipman acknowledges the necessity to disarticulate reflective 
thinking (understood as “complex thinking”), identifying the different threads and cognitive postures 
embedded within reflective processes.  What he defines as “complex thinking,” is a kind of thinking 
that is “aware of its assumptions and implications as well as [....] of the reasons and evidence that 
support this or that conclusion.” This articulated thought structure takes into account the various 
angles and points of view assumed in different contexts and situations and is “prepared to recognize 
the factors that make for bias, prejudice, and self-deception” by including within itself recursive, meta-
cognitive and self-correcting dimensions (Lipman, 1991; 2003). 

 
As Peter Paul Elicor points out, Lipman’s idea of thinking contrasts with a linear and 

unidimensional vision of human thinking, which has frequently dominated the whole practice of 
education; instead, he proposes a multidimensional understanding, within which critical, creative and 
caring dimensions are strictly interwoven (Elicor, 2016).  It is the interplay or the “transaction” 
between these three dimensions that allows thinking to explore in depth, through a reflective process 
of inquiry, the various aspects of human experience, taking into account different epistemic positions 
and contrasting different perspectives. 

 
Lipman acknowledges the educational value of pluralism and looks for an educational context 

within which complex thinking can sustain a multi-perspectival exploration of individual and 
collective experience, within which different cognitive patterns and epistemic positions can emerge 
and be appreciated and compared. Accordingly, he understands educational practice as a facilitating 
device useful to promote the emergence and development of reflective processes sustained by multiple 
reasoning threads.   



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2. The Pattern of the Process of Inquiry in a PFC Session 

 
The emergence of reflective thinking occurs when thinking encounters a particular kind of 

situation, which Dewey defines as “indeterminate” and describes as “disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, 
confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure (LW12: p. 109). Explicitly disavowing categorical 
divisions between emotion and reason (a distinction which is also rejected by Lipman, who 
understands emotions as a form of thinking) in “Logic, the Theory of Inquiry,” Dewey describes the 
genealogy of reflective processes and identifies the different phases of their unfolding within the field 
of individual and collective experience, pointing out that, wherever he uses the term “inquiry,” he 
could just as well have used the term “reflective thinking.” 
 

According to Dewey, the process of inquiry unfolds in five phases. The initial phase of inquiry 
begins with a feeling of something amiss, which endures as a pervasive quality within the whole 
process. This feeling grows out of the encounter with an “indeterminate” situation, which is explored 
by elaborating a number of “suggestions” in order to devise and formulate, through a process of 
“intellectualization,” a specific “problem” which will become the focus of the inquiry.  

 
In order to address the problem, a hypothesis is constructed, utilizing both theoretical ideas and 

perceptual facts. Next, this is tested through imaginative actions and forms of “reasoning,” which 
explore the reasons sustaining the hypothesis and the meanings involved, sizing up the implications 
or possible contradictions, and thereby reformulating the hypothesis or even the problem, if this is 
necessary.  

 
Finally, the process of inquiry comes to a close with an evaluation and testing of the 

effectiveness and validity of the hypothesis. in this final phase, it is revealed whether or not the 
process of inquiry has converted an “indeterminate situation” into a “determinate one” and has 
transformed the experience into a meaningful one.  

 
Donald Allan Schön wrote that the most important legacy bequeathed by Dewey to education 

is his “theory of inquiry” (Schön, 1992) since it grounds the development of a reflective approach to 
educational processes and practices and gives birth to what Cam identifies as the “tradition of 
reflective education” (Cam, 2008). Dewey’s “theory of inquiry” focuses on the context, on the 
conditions and on the process of the emergence and development of thinking in terms of its frames 
of reference, its norms, and its rules. Moreover, it also concentrates on the best conditions for its 
development within human experience, shedding light both on the relationship between thinking 
and experience within human formation processes, as well as on the educational conditions necessary 
to promote the development of reflective processes. 
 

Inquiry is explored by Dewey both in its cognitive and logical structure, also considering its 
cultural and social implications, and is understood both as an educational device and as an 
educational model. Thus, it supports an educational process of growth and understanding, both at an 
individual and at a social level. Indeed, as Lipman points out in Philosophy goes to School: 
 

Just as scientists apply the scientific method to the exploration of problematic 
situations, so students should do the same if they are ever to think for themselves. 
Instead, we ask them to study the end results of what the scientists have discovered. 
We neglect the process and fixate on the product. When problems are not explored 



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at first hand, no interest or motivation is aroused and what we continue to call 
education is a charade or a mockery. Dewey had no doubt that […] the educational 
process in the classroom should take as its model the process of scientific inquiry. 
(Lipman, 2003, p. 20).  
 
The outcome of this process is the acquisition of a specific method which is the epistemic 

grounding of the different disciplines interwoven in the educational curricula.  
 

As Zongyi Deng points out, in Dewey’s pedagogy subject matter has a central role in teaching 
thinking. It is a very important intellectual resource for conceptual understanding, an assertion which 
is also consistent with current advances in cognitive psychology (Deng, 2001). According to this 
framework, as Lipman puts it, “it is not enough to learn the events of history, we must be able to see 
and think historically" (Lipman, 2003, p. 24). This happens progressively through the acquisition, 
mastery and dissemination of the method of inquiry with the support of educational practices aimed 
at promoting the acquisition and development of attitudes and competences which favour inquiry. 
These attitudes and competences can be achieved through the engagement with inquiry experiences, 
which are the only contexts within which they can be developed and fostered.  

 
 Nonetheless, while the experience of inquiry is always an on-going experience which stems 
from “indetermination and uncertainty,” normal educational situations are very often predetermined 
and oriented, and therefore do not offer the possibility to think reflectively and to be engaged with 
meaningful processes of inquiry; as a consequence, it is necessary to design dedicated educational 
situations which reframe what happens in the average classroom. 
 

As Lipman points out in Thinking in Education, “Dewey had no doubt that what should be 
happening in the classroom is thinking—and independent, imaginative, resourceful thinking” which 
unfolds and develops within a context aimed at enhancing and promoting inquiry (Lipman, 2003, p. 
20).  However, he did not explore the educational conditions which could orient and sustain the 
emergence and development of reflective inquiry processes.  

 
Accordingly, a session of philosophical inquiry starts with the reading of a short story 

describing an indeterminate situation from which different kinds of “suggestions” stem in the form of 
inquiry questions collected within an “agenda.” The questions and suggestions are analyzed according 
to a process of “intellectualization,” which helps in the identification of one or more specific 
“problems” and dedicated inquiry paths aimed at exploring these questions in depth, organized into a 
“discussion plan.” The following step is the construction and comparison of several hypotheses 
through a process of conversational “reasoning” within which the reasons sustaining each hypothesis 
and the meanings involved are explored in depth. The culmination of the process of inquiry consists 
in a close testing of the effectiveness and validity of each hypothesis. The effectiveness of the process 
of inquiry itself is represented by the transformation of the “indeterminate situation” into a 
“determinate one.”  

 
Moreover, Lipman refers to Dewey's understanding of reflective thinking as a form of inquiry 

and acknowledges the organization of the inquiry process in different steps. However, his operational 
model is not, as it is for Dewey, scientific inquiry.  He refers, instead, to philosophical inquiry, which 
aims to address particular kinds of questions and is focused on logical, aesthetic and ethical 
dimensions of human experience. Therefore, Lipman reproduces the pattern of the process of 
Deweyan inquiry, but organizes it in the form of a “philosophical inquiry,” and embeds it within a 



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social dimension, which facilitates the emergence of, and encounter between, different epistemic 
positions and inquiry threads. 

 
The interplay of the pattern of scientific inquiry with philosophical questions and issues is the 

first epistemological move which contributes to the overcoming of the apparent dichotomies and 
inconsistencies which Lipman had identified in Dewey’s thought.  The second epistemological move 
is the acknowledgment of the educational value of philosophy, introduced within educational 
contexts in the form of philosophical inquiry, in accordance with Dewey’s legacy.  This move is based 
on an in-depth analysis of the cultural and educational scenarios within which philosophy could have 
a significant role, if it is understood not as a discipline, but as a process of individual or collective 
inquiry into different dimensions of human experience.  

 
The Development of a New Understanding of Philosophy and Its Educational Value 

 
Dewey was particularly interested in reframing curricular subject matter in the form of 

scientific inquiry and focused essentially on the subject matter available within primary or junior high 
school curricula.  Therefore, he did not refer to philosophy as a curricular subject matter.  Moreover, 
as Lipman pointed out in Getting our Thoughts Together (Lipman, 2003), Dewey did not consider that 
philosophy could be used as a transdisciplinary tool to ground the school curriculum and make it 
more meaningful. 

 
Lipman addressed this issue more clearly in the essay Philosophy for Children’s Debt to Dewey 

where he writes: 
 
 

[S]o, what of philosophy? What could Dewey tell us about how it was to be 
employed? Dewey minced no words, when he said that philosophy would be ‘the 
general theory of education.’ He meant that it was to be the exception to the rule. 
In every other discipline, there had to be an interpenetration of theory and 
practice, but in the case of philosophy, not so. Philosophy, like Victorian 
womanhood, was to be put upon a pedestal, where it could receive 360 degrees of 
respect, but where it would be fully set apart from educational practice. Nowhere in 
his writings does he refer to the practical use of philosophy in education. It was for 
him, I believe, unthinkable (Lipman, 2008, 148).  
 
Stefano Oliverio (2012) argues that what prevents Dewey from “mobilizing philosophy in 

education” is what Dewey  himself defined as the “permanent Hegelian deposit” in his own thought, 
which leads him to understand the task of philosophy as cultural rather than educational. In his life 
experience and in his writing, Dewey did have the opportunity to investigate also the educational 
value of philosophy and to discuss the reasons why philosophy should be studied, but he did not 
consider philosophy as a part of the primary school curriculum and did not explore in depth its 
educational potential.  Dewey’s experience as a teacher of philosophy both at high school and at 
university level led him to strengthen and clarify the cultural and social necessity to study philosophy. 
We can see this analysis in his early essay “Why Study Philosophy” (Dewey, EW, p. 4) where he 
describes the study of philosophy as a “deliberate and reflective overhauling” of ideas that need to be 
extracted from the cultural tissue grounding human experience and explored in their meaning. 



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However, he did not explain according to which educational approach and within which educational 
context this could be properly done. 

 
Hints and suggestions regarding the educational potential of philosophy are disseminated 

throughout Dewey’s works, but they are not organized within a clearly defined pedagogical 
framework.  In “The Child and the Curriculum,” Dewey explained how no form of knowledge can be 
inserted into human life “from without” since “learning involves reaching out of the mind” and 
“involves organic assimilation starting from within” (Dewey, MW, 2, p. 277). For this reason, any 
kind of study should have its starting point “from within” one of the different fields of human 
experience. 

 
According to Dewey, we should take into account the fact that individual and collective 

experience “already contains within itself elements —facts and truths— of just the same sort as those 
entering into the formulated study; and, what is of more importance, of how it contains within itself 
the attitudes, the motives, and the interests which have operated in developing and organizing the 
subject-matter to the plane which it now occupies” (Dewey, MW, 2, p. 278).  This requires an 
exploration of the complexity of human experience and the discovery within this of the ideas, issues 
and problems that have generated the construction of a specific form of knowledge, considered as the 
by-product of a process of inquiry, deeply embedded in these fields. 

  
Within this framework, according to a Deweyan approach, the study of philosophy also 

should be conducted through the identification of philosophical motivations and interests emerging 
within individual and collective life, and through the recovery and reconstruction of ideas, problems 
and themes from the past, which can be actualized within current experiences in order to make them 
more meaningful. As Dewey will later point out in “The study of philosophy” (MW, p. 6), 
philosophical studies are extremely powerful since they “acquaint the student with the forces that 
create ideas and make them potent” and  endow her/ him with “some increase of expertness in the 
use of the tools by which the leading ideas of humanity are worked out and tested” (Dewey, MW, 6, 
p. 138).  In this perspective, the study of philosophy provides individuals with cultural, intellectual 
and linguistic tools which enable them to become part of a process of creation, implementation and 
validation of ideas which are not abstract entities, but concrete realities that can be operationalized 
into actions and practices aimed at promoting individual and collective growth.  The emphasis here is 
upon philosophy as an activity rather than upon the products of such an activity: those distinctions, 
canons, theories, and systems which have advanced to become the content of philosophy as an 
academic discipline and a historical tradition.  

 
Lipman’s merit is to have developed Dewey’s intuitions within a consistent and clear 

educational framework, thereby operationalizing the educational potential of philosophy, focusing on 
its epistemic structure and functioning.  In Thinking in Education he points out that “It should not be 
forgotten that Dewey makes a strong case in Experience and Nature for a conception of philosophy as 
criticism” (Lipman, 2003, p. 37). Moreover, he explains that Dewey locates philosophy as “a special 
non-scientific form of cognition that is concerned with the judgment of value as a unique form of 
inquiry: a judgment of judgment” (Lipman, 2003, p. 38). 

 
We can say, then, that Lipman shares with Dewey the understanding of philosophy as a 

particular  form of inquiry but goes further, trying to identify the educational context and the 
pedagogical guidelines according to which it would be possible to promote and sustain individual and 
collective engagement with multiple forms of philosophical inquiry.  On this basis he  elaborates the 



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idea of a “philosophical community of inquiry” whose logic, is, as Kennedy points out, “Deweyan and 
Pragmatic,” since “it is based on problematization in the interest of the improvement of a lived 
situation”(Kennedy, 2012, p. 41) which is explored through a process of inquiry that, as we have seen, 
follows the Deweyan pattern of inquiry. 

 
“Inquiry” within a community of philosophical inquiry (COPI) begins, as Kennedy states, 

“when the relationship between a concept and the lived experience and narratives to which that 
concept relates shows enough dissonance,” and when “the automatic steering and control 
mechanisms of the vehicle of communicative culture no longer assure a stable meaning to the social 
values and qualities” that “saturate” our experience” (Kennedy, 2012, p. 41).  According to Lipman, 
the process of inquiry experienced in a COPI is of a particular kind, as its focus is on the 
philosophical, conceptual and linguistic tools used in its performance. It refers to the diverse 
dimensions of philosophical thinking, which, as we have seen before, allow us to develop inquiry 
paths useful to explore the logical, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of human experience.  This is 
consistent with Dewey’s description of the different types of philosophical thought that can be 
cultivated within an academic context.  

 
In the “Syllabus: Types of Philosophical Thought” that he prepared for his students at 

Columbia University (Dewey, MW, 13, pp. 349-395), Dewey identified logic, aesthetics and ethics as 
the three features of philosophical thought, thereby introducing philosophy as a multidimensional 
and multi-logical method of inquiry.  Lipman agrees with Dewey in acknowledging the different 
dimensions of philosophical inquiry, but adds to this vision the idea, grounded in the Socratic and 
Platonic tradition, that philosophical inquiry is essentially dialogic. In the essay “The Educational role 
of Philosophy,” he writes:  
 

Philosophy may begin in wonder and eventuate in understanding, or even, in a few 
instances, in wisdom, but along the way it involves a good deal of strenuous activity. 
This activity generally takes the form of dialogue. When one engages in such 
dialogue about traditionally philosophical matters — abstract or generic concepts 
such as truth and justice and friendship and personhood; methods and procedures 
of inquiry; criteria as the opinions of criticism or justification, and so on — it could 
reasonably be said that one is doing philosophy” (Lipman, 2014, p. 7). 
 
This focus on the dialogic structure of philosophical inquiry is consistent with Lipman’s own 

experience as a professor of philosophy.  He was teaching Logic at Columbia University when he had 
the intuition to introduce philosophy into the primary school curriculum, and made the first move 
toward the design of the P4C curriculum, aimed at engaging junior high school students with a 
process of inquiry into logical and linguistic structures. P4C involves students in the exploration of 
ideas and problems emerging from individual and collective experiences and is strictly connected with 
agency and practice, through a process of shared inquiry that highlights multiple dimensions and 
unfolds through multiple logical paths. 

 
As we have seen, for Dewey the study of philosophy involved the exploration, but also the 

deconstruction and reconstruction, of the leading ideas to which individuals and communities refer. 
Accordingly, Lipman develops the P4C curriculum around “leading ideas,” which become the focus 
of the processes of philosophical inquiry. In the P4C curriculum, the “leading ideas” are approached 
and explored within various contexts and are embedded within a narrative framework. 

 



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As Lipman pointed out in Getting our Thought Together, the manual accompanying the novel 
“Elfie” dedicated to primary education, the P4C curriculum unfolds at different levels of complexity. 
At the elementary and junior high school level the “leading ideas” around which the narratives can be 
identified are defined, simple, and directly connected to lived fields of experience. At the high school 
level, they become increasingly organized and interconnected with the cultural texture from which 
they have been extracted. In fact, at high school and university level, “philosophical inquiry” offers 
the possibility of engaging students both with philosophical problems emerging from their areas of 
experience, but also with philosophical ideas and problems culturally embedded in the philosophical 
tradition. 

 
Within the context of the COPI it is possible to explore the ideas “from within”, reproducing 

and recovering the process of inquiry that has generated them, by making it explicit and visible. The 
students are therefore accompanied in acquiring a growing expertise in the use of conceptual tools, 
thinking skills and language skills, that sustain the working out and testing of leading ideas at 
multiple levels. The teachers, who act as facilitators of the process of inquiry, progressively introduce 
further ideas, questions and problems in the context of what is being explored by the students, who in 
turn are actively engaged and learning within this process of inquiry. 

  
Finally, the pattern of inquiry is slowly interiorized by the participants and becomes what 

Dewey would define as a “habit,” a frame of mind that accompanies and sustains individuals in the 
engagement with their own life experiences.  Individuals learn to explore philosophically their own 
experiences, to make meaning of them and to reconstruct them according to new and different 
frames of reference. This long-lasting outcome can be considered, according to a Deweyan 
perspective, the most effective educational achievement that P4C can produce over time in different 
contexts.  It should therefore be explicitly identified as an educational objective and be constantly 
pursued as what Dewey would define an “end in view,” collectively shared and transferred from one 
educational context to another, in order to create the conditions that favor the development of 
critical, creative and caring individuals and communities.  
 

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D’Agnese V. (2017) The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking: Education and Subject in John Dewey. 
Journal of Philosophy of Eucation. Volume 51, Issue 1, February, pp. 73-88, 
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Deng, Z. (2001). The centrality of subject matter in teaching thinking: John Dewey's idea of 
psychologizing the subject matter revisited. Educational Research Journal. 16(2), pp. 193-212. 

Dewey, J. (1972) [EW] The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898. 5 vols. Carbondale and Edwardsville: 
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_____. (1978) [MW] The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. 15 vols. Carbondale and 
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_____. (2008) The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953. Supplementary Volume 1: 1884-1951. 

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Address Correspondences to:  

Maura Striano  
University of Naples, Federico II 
maura.striano@unina.it 

 
 
 

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1185001

