Junior Philosophers?

This is an interesting article, which appeared in the NY Times several months ago, about introducing young children to philosophical concepts: The Examined Life, Age 8, by ABBY GOODNOUGH. There's a discussion of children's literature and philosophical issues implicated therein. Looks like it might be fun to try looking at these questions with Mikro... I particularly liked this part of the article: One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree. “We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.” He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late. I'm all for anything that helps kids learn to question pat and formulaic answers and think for themselves. It would be great if this program spread to more schools. However, given the whole teach to the test focus of public education, I'm not holding my breath...