Four Hermeneutical Schools of Philosophy for Children

• In Event: The Role of Texts in Dialogic Teaching

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the use of texts in Philosophy for Children (P4C). Started by Mathew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and Gareth Matthews in the early 1970s, P4C is now a world-wide movement with numerous approaches to engaging pre-school through high school students in inquiry into questions about ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and other philosophical areas. Over the past 50 years the movement has diversified to the point that it is used to further disparate educational agendas. Shaun Gallagher’s (1992) heuristic of four schools of hermeneutics in education is helpful in distinguishing some of these competing agendas and the role of texts in P4C programs that support them.

Conservative hermeneutics is the attempt to practice interpretation that uncovers and preserves truth or original meaning without distortion or bias. Thus, some P4C programs use children’s literature and philosophical novels written for young people as means for students to appropriate not only the fundamental questions and ideas of (Western) philosophy, but also the kind of argumentative dialogue that typifies (Western) philosophical thinking.

Critical hermeneutics approaches interpretation as a method of liberating the interpreter from the racist, sexist, capitalist, and other ideologies that distort thinking, feeling and behavior and underlie oppressive systems of power. P4C programs that function as “critical pedagogy” encourage students to interrogate philosophical (and all other) educational texts in order to uncover and contest hegemonic meta-narratives in them. They also use texts that raise students’ consciousness regarding issues of social injustice.

Radical hermeneutics holds that every text is a set of signs held together in complex, dynamic relationships, that don’t refer to any stable, underlying meaning such as an author’s intent. The purpose of interpretation, therefore, is not to artificially constrain that plurality but to play with the text’s signs in order to achieve fresh insights—usually after diffusing the text’s pseudo-authority by means of deconstructionist techniques. P4C programs in the radical tradition use texts that contain self-contradictions or that otherwise resist “reasonable” interpretation, or even being reduced to argumentative terms, leading students to give up trying to understand what the text is “really” saying and, instead, to discover new possibilities of meaning the text and dialogue around it may suggest for them.

Moderate hermeneutics holds that interpretation is the attempt to reach meaning or shared understanding in a process that is modeled on dialogue between the familiar and the strange, such that both will be transformed. Moderate P4C programs assume that philosophical traditions can still give meaning to (young) people’s lives, but only as they are reinterpreted by successive generations. These programs use texts in ways that attempt to make the ‘vertical conversation’ of successive generations of philosophers intersect with the ‘horizontal conversation’ of contemporary students’ vocabularies and concerns. These programs also understand dialogue and argumentative thinking as tools for inquiry that facilitate mutual understanding and creative reconstruction, rather than truth. Applying Gallagher's hermeneutic framework to P4C offers important understanding of four very different educational agendas P4C is currently being used to further.

Author

• Maughn Gregory, Montclair State University