Why Do You Think That? Using Philosophy to Deepen Learning in Primary RE

In this RE:Online focus week ‘Ways of Knowing: Diving into Different Disciplines’ we asked several teachers to share how they use a particular discipline in their classroom. John Semmens is a primary school teacher and philosophy expert. He shares one way of introducing the tools of philosophy into the classroom.

Philosophy, meaning love of wisdom, is an ancient field of study that encompasses huge swathes of human enquiry. Philosophy concerns itself with questions like:

What is real?

How do we know?

How should we live?

What is the point of life?

These Big Questions can take your classroom enquiry to encounter many exciting places and ideas. However, it is difficult to pin down exactly what philosophy is and how it might be used in the RE classroom. As there is a philosophy of almost everything it can be a wishy-washy subject. It can also be a deeply elitist subject full of obscurantism and excessive verbiage. It has a ‘canon’ which can obscure its global and historical diversity and can easily be taught without leaving Europe at all. But it is a universal subject, found in everywhere from Africa, to China, to Baghdad, to Greece and throughout British history. If you are looking to get closer to authentic voices from other cultures then philosophy can help.

Why?

For anyone who has spent any time around small children they will have been asked this question, sometimes hundreds of times a day. In the classroom this question comes up often, and it is good practice to turn the question round and ask, ‘Why do you think?’  This invites children to call upon their own knowledge and understanding, using whatever wisdom they might have to construct a hypothesis. Why not introduce the Socratic Method to class discussions?  You might find that you teach like Socrates already by eliciting understanding from the child rather than simply topping up their heads with knowledge as if they were empty vases. Questioning the world, testing ideas and thinking about your thinking makes for stronger thinkers, after all.

Who?

Who to study is a complex question. I have a philosophy timeline on my wall that ranges all over the world and begins in Ancient Egypt with Ptahhotep and ends with Phillipa Foot, Peter Singer and Prof. Olúfẹ̣́mi Táíwò. It’s important to know at least a little about the people on the timeline so you can link children’s thoughts to the great thinkers of the past. Over the years children have contributed their own philosophers, if they’ve felt someone was missing, and each has struck a chord with that child for a particular reason. As many different cultures, religions and worldviews are present on the wall, the children can see that philosophy is something that all people do. It is part of their heritage, whatever that heritage may be.

How?

A great place to start is to look at a ‘Big Question’, perhaps it’s been raised in conjunction with another study – such as ‘the nature of God’. When looking into something like this, exploring deities from the monotheism of the Abrahamic faiths to the polytheism of Paganism, children might ask how much power does a/the God have? Exploring this question can take you to all sorts of interesting places and philosophy can be one of them. You can take a logical approach: If God is all powerful and all knowing (you could always trace where this idea comes from), does He know what I am going to do before I do it? Does that mean it’s ‘pre-decided’? Thinking about predestination can bring in thinkers from all over the world: Augustine of Hippo, Al‑Ghazālī of Persia, Śaṅkara of India, Chrysippus of Greece or John Calvin of France.  To forge a strong oracy focus you can indulge in wonderful class wide or small group discussions based on thought experiments[1] about actions and their causes, thinking about huge concepts like: Free Will and Fate, the Problem of Evil and Determinism. You can then challenge these classroom ideas with the words of great thinkers, simplified if needs be.

It is a good idea to set out some kind of structure for your class when bringing in philosophy. They aren’t just learning about philosophers, they are philosophers. So, thinking about thinking is the best place to start. Try something like:

In philosophy we:

• Ask Big Questions – these cannot simply be ‘Googled’
• Listen carefully – hear and even repeat back what someone else has said to make sure you’ve understood
• Give reasons – ‘I think this because…’ as a way of ensuring children reason out their thoughts
• Respect differences – understand that reasoning can lead to alternative conclusions
• Change our minds when we need to – I tell my class that ‘you are not married to your ideas and can change your mind if necessary’.

As you can tell from this brief structure you are inviting children to think carefully, this is metacognition at its base and can be complex for some learners. The reasoning aspect is perhaps most important and encourages children to know what they think and why they think it. It is this examination[2] of ‘knowledge’ that makes for the most interesting use of philosophy.

Philosophy can be an articulated orally, it can also be written or expressed artistically. Importantly, it can be a lens to view fundamental questions where all the children in your class can join a conversation that has been raging through history since the dawn of language.

[1] For more on this: How I… teach Phillipa Foot’s Trolley problem to 9-year olds – RE:ONLINE

[2] For more on this: https://www.philosophyinks2.co.uk/post/philosophy-is-about-thinking-sedimentary-my-dear-watson