The beneficial effects of philosophy on children

The philosophy is one of the disciplines most severely affected by the rise of the productivist mentality: what does not produce added value in a clear and manifest way is despised and is relegated to the trunk of confusing and useless elements.

Is degradation of the value of philosophy It has been seen very clearly in the university environment, but in compulsory education the prospects are not particularly favorable.

Philosophy and children

Why invest time and money in promoting a line of knowledge and competence that will be cut short when the time comes for the labor market?

To these sociological arguments we must add the psychological ones. It is a widely held idea that most schoolchildren do not need to benefit from philosophy, since developmental psychology shows the difficulty (or inability) of younger children to cope with abstract ideas.

See in this regard the theory of the stages of development of Jean Piaget. Of course, studies on the development of brain connectivity (necessary to create abstractions, which are properties shared by the most varied objects) point out that this is not fully consolidated until the third decade of lifetime.

So is education in critical thinking unnecessary for the little ones?

Beyond the contents, praxis

Recent research suggests that teaching children philosophy can significantly improve their intelligence level. The study, carried out by Spanish researchers (Roberto Colom, Félix García Moriyón, Carmen Magro, Elena Morilla) and whose results have been published in Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, is a longitudinal investigation in which a follow-up for 10 years, from 6 years to the completion of secondary studies, of a group that received weekly philosophy classes (455 boys and girls) and a control group that did not receive these classes (321 boys and girls). Both the control group and the treatment group had the same socioeconomic profile and both belonged to students from private schools in the Madrid area.

The results show that the members of the treatment group increased their IQ by 7 points (general cognitive ability) and 4 and 7 points influid and crystallized intelligence, respectively. In addition, philosophy classes with children they reduced the accumulation over the years of the number of students in the “risk zone” (with a relatively low IQ score), a typical problem for educational institutions.

Regarding the influence of these sessions on the Personality traits, philosophy students from an early age showed a tendency to extraversion, honesty and emotionality. These features could be enhanced, more than by the content of the classes itself, by the teaching modality required by the philosophy to be taught in classes: the discussion groups, the debate to question preconceptions and the continuous proposal of questions. Philosophy with children requires a much more democratic class structure in which the student is an active subject along with the rest of the classmates and the teacher becomes a facilitator and guide of student investigations (something that connects very well with the theory of Zone of Vygotsky's proximal development).

A new paradigm

If we recapitulate, we will see that the particularity of philosophy is not so much the content of these studies, understood as an "information package" that is transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the students, but the role of this discipline as a conducive framework to ask questions and propose answers, that is to say, to develop one's own way of seeing the world. This dynamic of questioning things does not have to be limited only to a few issues that cannot be covered by the mind of the child, like sport is important in all people, regardless of their ability to gain mass muscular.

Philosophy can itself be a healthy habit and training for questions. transcendental events that will come in later stages of development, as well as offering a space in which work on the management of intersubjectivity and understanding with others.