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Book Review 

Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp:  
Philosophy for Children’s Educational Revolution 

 
Authored by Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo 
Springer, Copyright Year 2023 
118 pages 
Softcover  € 46.79, ebook €37.44 
ISBN 978-3031241479 

 
 

Review by Maria Miraglia 
 
 
 

  
f I had to define this volume with only one expression, I would use the word “dense”. When I 
read an essay, I usually highlight or underline the salient points to consider for a more systematic 

study. However, as I was reading, I realized that I was underlining pretty much the whole text. Indeed, 
there is no part in which the difficult journey of the reconstruction of the pedagogical methodology and 
the fruitful encounter between Lipman and Sharp is not worthy of note, with the author adding, 
paragraph after paragraph, an important element for the understanding of the complexity and novelty 
that the construction of the curriculum of Philosophy for Children (henceforth P4C) has constituted 
initially in the USA and later in the rest of the world. To address the “educational revolution” of P4C, 
Tibaldeo travels through the times and the spaces it has occupied (and still occupies). And he does so 
with a style worthy of a thriller writer, who gradually reveals the unfolding of the plot until its 
completion. In just a hundred pages, all the reasonings, doubts, sources and theoretical and practical 
attempts which have characterized the growth of the curriculum to its present form are masterfully 
described.  
 

P4C had a complex history. The idea and the need that Lipman felt - and that converged with 
those of Sharp - to create a pedagogical tool aimed at the cultivation of complex thinking passed through 
years of study, experimentation and reinterpretation which gradually led to the form now inherited by 
the current P4C practitioners. A flexible form, adaptable to each context and age of the participants at 
the various communities of inquiry operating around the world. 

 
However, the merit of the development and dissemination of the curriculum is undoubtedly 

attributable, as Tibaldeo points out, to the tireless work of Ann Sharp. The program, in fact, would not 
be the same without her. First, because the continuous confrontation with Lipman has been a generator 
of careful reflection and experimentation at the base of the research for the construction and the good 
functioning of the curriculum - from the creation of stories and manuals to the training of teachers. 

I 



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Secondly, for her constant dedication to the implementation of the program and its communication 
and dissemination. One of the purposes of the book, indeed, is precisely 

 
to underline that the whole of Philosophy for Children […] relies entirely on the fruitful 
cooperation between Lipman and Sharp-an enduring interpersonal and philosophical 
partnership that has been generally overlooked by scholars until the recently published In 
Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp […] (Gregory & Laverty, 2018)” (p. xi of the 
introduction). 

 
It is also the intention of the author, through an approach of historical-genealogical reconstruction 

of the educational and philosophical perspective of Lipman and Sharp, to offer a space for pedagogical 
reflection in a historical moment like the current time in which a dangerous reductionist trend is 
affecting teaching and education (ibid.). 

 
The text - the result of extensive research also in the IAPC (Institute for the Advancement of 

Philosophy for Children) archives - is developed in five chapters. The first two (Intellectual-Biographical 
Sketch and The Contest of Lipman and Sharp’s Educational Revolution) are dedicated to a biography of the 
two scholars - with the anecdote related to their meeting in 1973, which the author defines as 
“providential” - to the foundation of the IAPC at the Montclaire State College (where Lipman had 
moved from Columbia University) and to the historical framework, within which their reflection on 
the need to make a renewal in the field of education was inserted. 

 
It was a period in which scenarios of war ignited moral dilemmas and the struggle for civil rights 

pressed on the consciences of North American society. The political and intellectual commitment of 
Lipman and Sharp necessarily led them to reflect on the responsibilities that the school system had in 
the formation of the citizens of the future. The school, as structured, lacked commitment to the 
development of critical thinking. 

 
Their reflection was included in the pedagogical debate that, from the end of the Second World 

War onwards, discussed which educational structure should implement the school system to ensure 
equal opportunities for all in order to overcome economic inequalities and train responsible citizens. 
Educating to critical thinking seemed the leitmotif of the educational reflection of that period, because, 
starting from the argument that the Piagettian paradigm was unsatisfactory, a preference for the 
influences of the thought of Vygotsky and Bruner was being expressed. The watchwords in the 
educational field – states Tibaldeo quoting Lipman – became “thinking, cognitive skills and metacognition” 
(p. 21). However, recognizing such a theoretical centrality would not have been sufficient if a way had 
not been found to reform the same educational paradigm on the one hand and teacher training on the 
other. In order for the assimilation of critical thinking to take place, it was necessary to rethink the 
curriculum from a philosophical perspective and at the same time also involve elementary school 
students. 

 
The educational promise of the development of critical thinking, in fact, had failed, according to 

the two scholars, because it was based on a vision of thinking understood too narrowly as logical 
thinking, it did not take into account the imaginative, emotional and value-based component, it did 



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not acknowledge that the training of teachers was not adequate for such a purpose and, ultimately, it 
was not “supported by an appropriate pedagogy […]. As a result, although critical thinking had been 
successfully included in many educational (high school and college) curricula, it had mostly been 
reduced to a school subject among others, taught in a traditional educational context” (pp. 21-22). 

 
Sharp and Lipman were therefore looking for a radically different approach, which was able to 

combine the acquired knowledge of school subjects with the reasoning process, which adopted the 
guidelines of the debate on higher-order thinking dating back to Bloom and others, which had a strong 
practical component and which involved students in the same process of acquiring higher-order 
thinking (later reformulated as multidimensional thinking) starting from the elementary school. 

 
As was mentioned above, a pedagogy founded on philosophy would be the tool capable of 

achieving the objectives by which the debate begun in the post-war years had been nourished. 
 
A philosophy for (and not with) children would finally respond to the need children have to ask 

and search for meanings. It would be a pedagogical means that would transform students into young 
philosophers able to discuss philosophical ideas and at the same time it would be the instrument to 
improve the learning of all the disciplines of the curriculum (p. 23). It would be a proposal that would 
constitute an education philosophy rather than a renewal of the philosophy of education. The intention 
and the realization of these goals are discussed in the next chapter (Lipman and Sharp's Philosophical-
Educational Vision), in which the author traces the genesis of the creation of the P4C program. Lipman 
and Sharp’s idea was to operate an inside-out transformation of education, which meant making the 
student an active participant in the learning process, shifting the axis from the individual to the 
community, and enriching the learning contents with the experience of the students themselves. 
Liberating, rather than indoctrinating, in a relational and community context would mean a significant 
development of higher-order thinking. This objective was also a subject of reflection for Lipman and 
Sharp, since they believed that the function which rationality should play in the development of critical 
thinking was not sufficient to justify the learning of reflective habits that should have a lasting influence 
on children’s behavioral habits. Although they recognized that the rules of formal logic were necessary 
for the development of higher-order thinking, the question was how to transmit the rules of logic in a 
form that was not the result of indoctrination, moving beyond the idea of mere rational education. 

 
The philosophical inquiry would shift the focus onto reasonableness, thanks to the 

multidimensional thinking approach, and the narrative text would have the task of conveying the rules 
of formal logic, where experience would constitute the starting point (and the arrival point) of the 
investigation. 

 
And here begins the outline of the profile of Lipman and Sharp’s educational project. It is 

precisely in this chapter that the very essence of P4C is discussed, starting with the debt of the two 
creators to pragmatist thought. Philosophy, in fact, as understood in the program, constitutes the 
fulcrum of the community of students who dialogue, precisely, philosophically. Here, through the 
description of the steps that led to the completion of the program as we know it today, the author 
identifies the fundamental issues on which Lipman and Sharp’s project is based, primarily their debt to 
Dewey, in particular to his Democracy and Education, “and especially to the idea that achieving democracy 



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required citizens to be properly educated” (p. 32). A better education meant making the class itself more 
democratic and, in order to reconstruct the Deweyan democratic ideal, it was necessary to think of a 
type of school oriented towards the education of active citizenship and participatory democracy as well 
as the acquisition of civic values. However, this could not happen through direct teacher-student 
transmission, but through the democratization of the class itself, which would be transformed into a 
community (the community of philosophical inquiry) in which dialogue between peers would put into 
practice the activity itself of democratic participation. In this way there would be no teaching of dogmas, 
but students would be encouraged to think for themselves through practice. This was an important 
point for Lipman and Sharp, in order to let children acquire freedom and autonomy and to defend 
themselves against the manipulations of an adult-centric and consumerist society. Even the texts of the 
curriculum had to fulfill this function: contrary to traditional texts (which are themselves manipulative), 
those of P4C had to induce critical reflection about the established order and, at the same time, lose 
their centrality because they would constitute a simple stimulus, a support for the common inquiry. 
And it is here, with the concepts of community and inquiry, that we arrive at another key point of the 
P4C program, the result of another debt contracted with pragmatist philosophy and in particular with 
Peirce. The philosopher, in his essay The fixation of belief, had shown that the best method to fix beliefs 
was through (scientific) inquiry shared within a community (of scientists). And Lipman and Sharp made 
the Peircean combination of community and inquiry their own but overcome the scientific connotation 
-which also Dewey had proposed- and instead recover philosophy as its fulcrum. They in fact deemed 
that Dewey in “his inquiry-based proposal had resulted in him neither recognising philosophy’s 
educational potential, nor conceiving of the possibility of enacting it with children” (p. 37).  

 
Philosophy in the community practice, recovering the Socratic model, overcomes, through the 

dialogue between equals, the individualistic tendencies and develops the sense of solidarity. Moreover, 
its ability to support reasonableness contributes to the development of “better thinking”, which means 
self-correction, sensitivity to context, reasonableness and fallibilism.  

 
In their new and different way of understanding childhood Lipman and Sharp opted for a type of 

child-centered and bottom-up education, a generative education, in which children, through reflection 
on the problems coming from their everyday life experience, were able to develop their own personhood 
together with the foreshadowing capacity fed by “imagination” - another concept borrowed from Dewey. 
This idea, dear to Sharp, denotes the ability to imagine oneself and others in a possible future, 
something that goes beyond putting oneself in the other’s shoes, where the validity of one’s position is 
evaluated with and through the relationship with the others. For the development of higher-order 
thinking, imagination has an important educational role in the vision of Lipman and Sharp: it implies 
an open door to value and creative reflection. However, the concept itself of higher-order thinking, 
reinterpreted under the Deweyan lens of reflective thinking, was, in 1995, reformulated by Lipman and 
Sharp with the concept of multidimensional thinking, constituted by three dimensions: the critical, the 
creative and the caring. 

 
The features of these three dimensions, (overlapping and developing together), can be summarized 

as follows: 
 



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• Critical thinking is, among other things, inquisitive, deliberative, justificatory, conductive 
to judgment, self-corrective and sensitive to context. Moreover, it is rule-governed and 
devoted to problem-finding and solving. 

 
• Creative thinking’s characteristics are originality, productivity, imagination, 

independence, experimentation, holism, expression, self-transcendence, surprise, 
generativity, maieuticity and inventiveness. 

 
• Caring thinking, finally, has to do with the sphere of values and emotions: it is appreciative 

or valuational, affective, active (in the sense of “taking care of”), normative and empathic.  
 

• Caring thinking, finally, has to do with the sphere of values and emotions: it is appreciative 
or valuational, affective, active (in the sense of “taking care of”), normative and empathic.  

 
• Caring thinking, finally, has to do with the sphere of values and emotions: it is appreciative 

or valuational, affective, active (in the sense of “taking care of”), normative and empathic.  
 
Tibaldeo focuses on this last point to frame Ann Sharp’s peculiar contribution. The author 

repeatedly underlines how the development of the P4C program was the result of a continuous 
confrontation between the two founders and, in particular, Sharp’s contribution to the framing of 
caring thinking was fundamental. Sharp’s vision is undoubtedly (albeit subtly) different from Lipman’s. 
For Sharp, indeed, the focus is on the interrelational character of caring thinking. Tibaldeo analyzes 
very well the differences in perspective between the two, finding the genesis of Sharp’s vision in her 
feminist studies and identifying how this distinction actually meant an enrichment of their educational 
project. For Sharp care is an ontological category of human beings which cannot be realized without 
inquiry toward what is valuable, and such inquiry involves an intentional reaching out to the world and 
to others with curiosity and trust. Caring thinking enhances communality, understood as the relational 
environment where people can commit themselves to practice. 

 
This attention to care leads us to understand how the educational approach of both scholars is 

oriented by moral education: it is the structure itself of the P4C program, which is strongly connected 
to moral education. In Tibaldeo’s words, 

 
the core of Lipman and Sharp’s normative approach to education was the relationships 
between the members of a community, who could benefit from the tools of inquiry provided 
by philosophy to achieve relational awareness and mutual recognition, be engaged in a joint 
quest for meaning, and ultimately be transformed and capable of transforming society. This 
entailed a dynamic and evolving view of morality, based on the persons’ capability to jointly 
conduct an attentive and meaningful inquiry (pp. 61-62). 

 
Now, achieving the goals of this educational philosophy depended on two important factors: the 

first was the transformation of the class in a community of philosophical inquiry and the second was 
the role of the teacher. It was (and still is) a very delicate and important issue, because the teacher has 
the difficult task of granting the flourishing of children’s inquiry without imposing any predetermined 



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and pre-established vision, while taking care to give voice to everybody. S/he should ensure the free 
expression of children’s ideas in a safe environment in which solidarity and caring attitudes are fostered 
through inquiry. For this reason, Lipman and Sharp, and in particular the latter, worked hard and 
continuously in training teachers in the new pedagogical approach. The teachers, in fact, in fulfilling 
their delicate role, “had to be trained from both a pedagogical and philosophical point of view to comply 
with the educational vision developed at the IAPC” (p.87)  

 
The structure, tools and aims of teacher training are covered in the 4th chapter (Philosophy for 

Children’s Educational Curriculum), which also describes the function of the curriculum and how Lipman 
and Sharp constructed it, starting from Harry Stottlemayer’s Discovery -the first of Lipman’s novels- and 
then continuing to its completion with the drafting of the instructional manuals. Lipman’s first novel, 
in fact, had served to conduct the first experiment of an in nuce P4C with the fifth-grade students of a 
public school in Montclaire. The experiment gave exciting results, but it was after the meeting with 
Sharp that the curriculum and structure of the P4C sessions took shape. At this stage, during the 
revision of Harry Stottlemayer’s Discovery, Lipman and Sharp worked on overcoming the Piagettian 
orthodoxy, whose paradigm affected the realization of Lipman’s first novel, and adopted the perspective 
of Mead and Vygotsky, thanks to which the categories of abstract-concrete, universal-particular and 
rational-irrational were resolved in reasonableness (p.80). The relationship between theory and practice 
was the key, and bearing that in mind, the curriculum took the form we know today. 

 
The stories and manuals that make up the curriculum are designed for the various school stages 

from kindergarten to high school. The former have the function of modelling the philosophical 
dialogue that, it is imagined, will develop within the class-community, together with the skills for the 
development of complex thinking and the behavioral attitudes of the community which will gradually 
be internalized. However, these also have the function of modelling the heuristic posture of the teacher 
-who in turn serves as a model for the inquiry of the community. The characters of the stories, in fact, 
are fictional children who, in a masterful work of translation into an everyday language, embody the 
theories and epistemic positions of the Western philosophical tradition. The few fictional adults, on 
the other hand, who mostly personify the figure of teachers, represent a discreet presence that supports 
in a way which is not intrusive the process of inquiry of the fictional community and thus shape the 
action of the real teacher. The manuals relating to each novel, on the other hand, are a support to the 
facilitation. The discussion plans and exercises, focused on students’ performances, are the toolbox for 
the facilitator’s moves; the leading ideas are addressed directly to the teacher-facilitator and constitute a 
simplified guide of the philosophical theory present in the stories, exercises and discussion plans. The 
manuals, therefore, were designed to support the work of facilitating, in particular for those teachers 
who lacked a philosophical preparation.  

  
However, the difficult facilitating role could not be learned from leading ideas and discussion 

plans. Facilitation work is extremely complex, requiring an adequate posture and a set of skills ranging 
from ensuring that the dialogue is truly philosophical to providing the plurality of voices and 
opportunities for student expression. Therefore, an appropriate and equally complex teacher training, 
as well as a control of the procedures exercised in their classes, had to take place with trainers adequately 
prepared for the achievement of the difficult objectives of the program, to give teachers the pedagogical 
and philosophical tools for the revolution proposed by Lipman and Sharp.  



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The volume ends with a brief excursus (An Open-Ended Educational Proposal) on the dissemination 
of the project in the world (UNESCO recognized the program in 1998) and a reflection on the future 
possibilities of cultivating the great and complex educational initiative of Lipman and Sharp. Although 
the program is still used in many countries, Tibaldeo warns us, “this proposal remains on the periphery 
in both present-day school system and academic research” (p. 100). It is a sad reflection which we must 
be aware of in a historical moment when the neoliberal paradigm has taken possession of most of the 
school systems in the Western world. Moreover, increasing digitalization is undermining the very 
existence of the real concept of community, the essence of which is constituted by the corporeality, the 
gaze and the voice of the Other (Han, 2023: 25). The community of philosophical inquiry consolidates 
the relationship of otherness. Within it, members recognize themselves and others through looks, voices 
and emotions and learn, meeting after meeting, to recognize and respect the plurality of values and the 
freedom of thinking through philosophy not understood as knowing, but as a method of reflective 
inquiry in the experiential reality. That is why the publication of the text presented here is very 
important both to continue the process of dissemination of the program, at the academic and non-
academic level, and because it calls for a pedagogical reflection through the reconstruction of the 
educational aims of P4C: a pedagogical program that, through its flexibility, still retains all its 
revolutionary power. 

 
The book is also an excellent guide for those non-experts who want to approach the methodology. 

The clarity of the writing makes even the most complex passages of the program’s history and structure 
easy to understand. The author takes the reader by the hand through the difficult dilemmas that arose 
for the two creators during the construction of the curriculum and the complexity of the pedagogical 
and philosophical structure of its entire system. However, the book is also a point of reference for the 
expert P4C researcher due to the precision with which the author has been able to reconstruct the stages 
of the development of the project and its sources. I would like to thank Tibaldeo for giving us such a 
clear and passionate systematization of the educational revolution of P4C. 
 
References 

 

Gregory, M. & Laverty, M. (Eds.). (2018). In community of inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp: Childhood, 
philosophy and education. Routledge. 

Han, B. (2023). Le non cose. Come abbiamo smesso di vivere il reale. Einaudi. 
Peirce, C. S. The Fixation of Belief. Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), (pp. 1-15) 
 
Articles published by the author on the theme: 

Community of Enquiry and Ethics of Responsibility, Philosophical Practice 4 (1): 407-418. 2009. 
Cidadania e Comunidade No Contexto Democrático Ocidental: Análise Filosófico-Educacional 

(with Bruno Fonseca Ortega), Childhood and Philosophy 19 (n/a): 01-25. 2023. 
Reframing And Practicing Community Inclusion: The Relevance Of Philosophy For Children, 

Childhood and Philosophy 10 (20): 401-420. 2014. 
The Relevance of the Idea of “Community of Inquiry” to Contemporary Ethics. In memory of Matthew 

Lipman (†2010), Ethics in progress Vol. 2 No. 1 (2011). 
Un felice connubio di razionalità e libertà: la pratica “riflessiva” della “Philosophy for Children” (P4C) 

di Matthew Lipman, Itinera 10. 2015. 

https://philpapers.org/rec/TIBCOE-2
https://philpapers.org/rec/ORTCEC
https://philpeople.org/profiles/bruno-ortega
https://philpapers.org/rec/FRARAP-8
https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=TIBTRO-6&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.14746%2Feip.2011.1.3
https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=TIBTRO-6&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.14746%2Feip.2011.1.3
https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/eip/issue/view/837
https://philpapers.org/rec/TIBUFC
https://philpapers.org/rec/TIBUFC


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Address Correspondences to:  
Maria Miraglia,  
PhD student,  
University of Naples Federico II (Italy)/Universitat de Barcelona (Spain) 
Email: maria.miraglia@unina.it 
 
 

 


