Eventually, I wrote Philosophy and the Young Child (Harvard, 1980), whic has as its main thesis that some children naturally raise questions, make omments, and even engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognise as philosophical. When at the very beginning of that book, Tim, age six, asks, "Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?" he raises one of the oldest and most persistently baffling questions in philosophy. And when Tim later seeks to reassure his father with the reasoning, "If it was a dream, we wouldn't go around asking if it was a dream," he offers a solution to this problem that can be usefully compared with the responses of Plato and Descartes.
My informal research suggests that such spontaneous excursions into philosophy are not at all unusual for children between the ages of three and seven; in somewhat older children, though even eight and nine-year-olds, they become rare, or at least rarely reported. My hypothesis is that, once children become well-settled into school, they learn that only 'useful' questioning is expected of them. Philosophy then either goes underground, to be pursued privately, perhaps, and not shared with others, or else becomes totally dormant.
What is it to be a child?
How do children's ways of thinking differ from "ours"?
Do young children have the capacity to be really altruistic?
might it be that children have the right to "divorce" from their parents?
Might some works of child art be artistically or aesthetically as good as "stick figures" or blotches of paint by some famous modern artist?
Does literature that is written by adults for children have to be, for that very reason, inauthentic?
- Gareth B. Matthews (1994)
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