Can children be philosophical?

In writing this article I have been inspired by the current peculiar concern of decision-makers in Jordan with incorporating philosophy teaching into education curriculum at all levels, including the elementary schools.

In his poem” Anecdote for Fathers, Showing how the Art of Laying may be Taught”, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth presents a lengthy conversation between a father and his little child, Edward. Edward is only five years old, nevertheless father and son engage in a long conversation over the relative charms and attractions of two English countryside farms: Clive and Liswyn. As the conversation proceeds the father asks his son this question: “My little boy, which like you more?” It turns out that the child has a viewpoint distinct from that of his father. Edward strikes as a child who is capable of philosophical reasoning typical of Plato’s “philosopher child”. Due to Edward’s sustained reasoning the poem concludes with the two interlocutors merely repeating their distinct points of view. In other words, neither the father nor the son has succeeded in gaining the upper hand in the conversation.

While the “power relationship”, so to speak, has remained unchanged in Wordsworth’s poem, William Blake’s poem “Nurse’s Song” provides an example of how children can really get the better of adults by deploying solid reasoning. In the initial situation in this poem the nurse requests that the children should go home before the sun goes down. “Then come home my children, the son is gone down.”

In response to this request, the children put up resistance against the nurse: “No, not!  Let us play, for it yet day.” Like Wordsworth’s child, the children demonstrate philosophical reasoning capacity which leads to the nurse’s relinquishment of her authority. As a result, a new power relationship seems to have been established in the last part of the poem. So much is implied by the nurse’s compliance with the children’s wish in the final stanza of the poem: “Well, well, go and play, till the light fades away, and then go home to bed.”

The two poems reveal, it may be concluded, that philosophy can be taught for children at a very early stage of their live.