Doing Philosophy for Children in Nigeria -By Leo Igwe

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an educational movement that fosters reasoning and argumentative skills in children. These skills include critical, creative, caring, and collaborative habits. American professor Mathew Lipman developed this educational approach in the 70s, and today the movement has spread across the world. As a standalone subject or as infused, P4C is taught and facilitated in schools across Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. The Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation has been working to introduce P4C in schools in Nigeria. Interestingly, the National Policy on Education anticipates the P4C educational movement. On page 10, the policy states that primary education aims to inculcate scientific, reflective, and critical thinking skills.

However, no subject specifically inculcates these skills. There are no books and educational materials that foster inquiry-based learning. Philosophy is an exciting subject. But many people find it too abstract and mentally demanding. So the challenge in doing P4C in Nigeria is how to make the subject attractive and exciting to parents, teachers, and pupils, who speak English as a second language.

To fill this gap, the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation develops materials, books, and charts to promote P4C in schools. These materials constitute an important resource in the project because they help deliver and facilitate this educational approach. These materials have operationalized two (critical and creative) of the four Cs (critical, creative, collaborative, and caring) that P4C inculcates. Critical thinking is operationalized as questionstorm, that is, the ability to interrogate and challenge ideas and experiences in all areas of human endeavor.

In its critical thinking aspect, P4C makes the generation of questions, not answers, identifying problems, not solutions, a test of intelligence and knowledge. Children are taught to think in terms of questions, fault claims, and propositions presented to them. Children, not teachers, are generators of questions. Teachers are guides and facilitators. Children are taught various questioning approaches, including the question-to-question, question-to-answer, referential, conditional, and quiz.

Creative thinking is operationalized as diverstorm, that is, the ability to think outside the box and generate solutions in an open-ended way. In Nigeria, children are brought up to think inside the box of their parents, teachers, and guardians. But with P4C, this habit will change. In this case, children are taught not to imitate, copy, or paste to demonstrate knowledge and intelligence.

Students are taught to think differently in all areas of human endeavour. In its creative aspect, P4C fosters disruptive and adventurous thinking. Children are made to show knowledge and ingenuity by thinking in terms of the new, the different, and the possible. In classroms, students diverstorm, solutionstorm, and imaginationstorm in reference to some metrics such as size and shape, scale and time, volume and depth, colour and sound, length, number, and age.

To advance the cause of P4C in Nigeria, the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation organizes training and workshops for parents, teachers, guardians, and other educators. These workshops build the capacity of teachers and educators. So far, the foundation has organized trainings in Benue, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Cross River, Imo, Katsina, Lagos, Ogun, and Oyo. More workshops are planned in the coming months. At these events, organizers teach parents and teachers the importance of P4C and the value that this educational approach adds to the school system in Nigeria.

Leo Igwe facilitates philosophy for children and directs Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation