TH!NK

(doing philosophy at the 5th-grade level)

What if philosophy were regarded as just as unexceptional as the studies of literature, mathematics, language arts, history, and science? Then 5th graders would study it.

And what they would say about it is something (more or less) like this:

“Philosophy is thinking critically about something”

- Student from Mariners Elementary (Newport Mesa USD) (2018)

In my time at UC Irvine, TH!NK was (itself) an adolescent program that brought graduate students from the departments of Philosophy and of Logic and Philosophy of Science into elementary school classrooms. While the curriculum of TH!NK is still evolving, during my time with the nascent program the objective was simple: get students to think carefully about everyday concepts that they might otherwise take for granted, and get them to realize that, in doing so, they were doing philosophy.

As designed, the program was intended to bring us graduate students into the same classrooms for four consecutive weeks, to meet with the same groups of students for about an hour each week. During those periods, we would do philosophy. Content was each of ours to choose (and, especially in the early days, to find in the first place); ordinarily, the hour would begin with us reading together a short story, or else an excerpt from a longer work.

My personal favorites included a passage from (a gentle translation of) Beowulf, wherein Beowulf recounts his journey into the underwater den of Grendel’s mother. This excerpt would lead my groups into discussions about the testimony of unreliable narrators and truthmakers in fiction, as well as (sometimes) the ethics of blame and responsibility, alongside the phenomenology of grief. Another personal favorite was an excerpt from the children’s novel Clockwork, by Philip Pullman, in which a child built of clockwork turns out to be in need of a human heart. This latter reading provided us with the foundations for a variety of discussions, depending on the interests of the students, about life and death, autonomy and action, or even the nature of technology and the obligations we might have toward that which we create.