It is difficult to find just one place to look for children and childhood in the American philosopher John Dewey’s work. This is not because he uses the terms so often, but because the concept of childhood pervades his opus in and through another set of terms—development, growth, experience, plasticity, habit, impulse, and education. In Dewey’s language, none of these terms mean quite what they mean in other thinkers’ language, and especially not in the language of the human development theorists of the early twentieth century and after, who based their thinking on a monological, unidirectional developmental trajectory that could be applied at all levels of the evolutionary continuum. Dewey is an interactionist through and through, and thus all his terms should be understood as dialectical. He does not invoke the concept “child” without invoking the concept “adult,” nor does he describe anything that does not have a normative dimension, which by definition belies “pure” description. His is a language of possibility, and the limits of human possibility are incalculable. This is why the concept of childhood is so important in his work. In this text we present selections from two works, the first emerging at the sickening epicenter of the Great War, in 1916—a war in which youth was sacrificed to what he calls adult “infantilisms” on a historically unprecedented scale, and a war that, arguably, effectively suppressed the educational possibilities his work represents for the rest of the century. Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan) is his magnum opus on education, and characteristically both garrulous and brilliantly pointed, maddeningly oblique and trenchantly critical, painfully dull and fitfully enthralling, explicitly conservative and implicitly radical. The next selections are from Human Nature and Conduct (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press), published in 1922, when the orgiastic death-feast of the tyrants, the politicians, and their hosts of blind acolytes was (temporarily) over.

Our university research concerns the practice of debates with philosophical objectives (DVP) which take place in four urban co-operative pedagogy classes of ZEP (Zone of Educational Priority), along with the Integrated Corrective Course (CRI, a half-time reception class for immigrant pupils) of the school. Let us clearly specify that this research is contextualized, in a particularly innovating medium, and one should be careful to not draw exaggerated generalizations. The research, however, seems to provide us with a certain number of significant elements for the later development of practices, formations and research on this issue. The research was carried out from 2004 to 2006 in the form of a contract with Dafpi (Vice-chancellorship of Montpellier University) in the school A. Balard, whose staff has for several years been institutionally recognized for its innovative practices. For this research we established a research-action methodology, closely associating the practitioners of the classes, a researcher, and students. In this text we present the competences which appear to us to be developed by this activity by teachers in part I, and by pupils in part II. Finally, three remarks are expanded upon: the relation between DVP and religion, DVP and authority, DVP and single class.

This paper argues that paradox offers an ideal didactic context for open-ended group discussion, for the intensive practice of reasoning, acquiring dispositions critical for mathematical thinking, and higher order learning. In order to characterize the full pedagogical range of paradox, I offer a short overview of the effects of paradox, followed by a discussion of some parallels between the use of paradox in paradoxical psychotherapy and the use of the koan in Zen Buddhist spiritual training. Reasoning with paradoxes in a community of mathematical inquiry is interpreted as a comparative if not isomorphic pedagogical and cognitive phenomenon. Finally, some broad implications are drawn for mathematical inquiry with paradoxes.

This paper traces the genealogy of a long-enduring controversy in Western philosophy viz, whether philosophic and mathematical methodologies are equal but separate and distinct approaches to rational inquiry, or whether one is superior to the other from the standpoint of epistemology, and, ultimately, a pedagogy which supports and promotes conceptual and critical thinking. With the Socratic teacher in mind, philosophic methodology, viewed by Plato as a dialectical process of free-ranging inquiry, compelled him to distinguish the work of philosophy from that of mathematics, since philosophic methodology could not function unless freed from the constraints contained in a system built on axioms, propositions, and images. In his dialogue Meno, Socrates’ pedagogic demonstration, supported by the unique capacity of mathematics to provide epistemic closure, foreshadowed a slow-growing rift between philosophy and mathematics, one which came to a head in the 17th century rationalism of Descartes. In Descartes’ work on methodology, mathematics, by overriding the seemingly inconclusive meanderings of philosophy, became the supreme pathway to knowledge. Philosophy, thereafter, had to fight for its life, while pedagogy, questing more and more for “completeness” through formalization, ironically moved toward a fragmentation and reductionism which a mathematized Cartesian methodology supported. The curriculum divisions which resulted were presaged in Descartes’ writing on methodology; the isolation of the individual learner from the larger community of discourse was supported by Descartes’ “cogito.” Suggested here is that a pedagogic approach to the teaching of mathematics, which extends beyond the limitations of the “single solution” methodology utilized in Meno, is possible—an approach which allows pedagogy to spread the Socratic use of dialectical thinking even into that sphere of apodicticity. This suggests that an alternative to the monistic rationalism of Descartes’ mathematized methodology is possible for pedagogy in general, now bringing back into play what Descartes found expendable—viz. dialectical philosophy itself, dialogical inquiry, history, literature, and the arts. Had Socrates, who came to philosophy primarily as a teacher fascinated with intellectual paradoxes, explored, in Meno, the pedagogic possibility of a dialectical approach to mathematics, his larger work in dialectical pedagogy might have been less teacher-centered—notwithstanding his ironic “ignorance”; and given his historic significance as the most celebrated teacher in Western culture, modern pedagogy might have been less overwhelmed by the Cartesian drive toward mechanized and reductionist “single-solution,” non-communal teaching and thinking.

The idea of this article is to present the aesthetic education as a solution for the split of the man in body (sensitivity) and reason, understanding this split as an structural characteristic of the ocidental modern society. Such critical one of the culture appears in Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization, and is through it that we will visit some basic authors to the aesthetic question, such as Kant, with its notion of pleasure, beauty, reflection and dialogue, and Schiller, with its aesthetic utopia, where the "playful impulse" intends to reconcile sensual and formal impulses (rational). Through this trajectory, we intend to still point, that indirectly, to the recuperation of the education as global formation of the human being.

It has been asserted in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that children’s voices should have a place in society and that their views and opinions should be taken into account by policy makers and those others in authority. This paper suggests that children need to be empowered and enabled to become active, participative, political agents within society. Within certain countries – in this instance, those constituting Great Britain – Education for Citizenship is on the Governmental agenda. In order for children to be educated for citizenship, it is argued that they are treated as citizens not in the future, but citizens in the present. Additionally, to further enable younger members of society to partake in the role of citizen it is here suggested that the practice of Community of Philosophical Inquiry be utilised to promote the necessary skills for full participation.

This paper focuses on an event that makes us re-think our most important practices: a workshop in a retreat established in Mendham, New Jersey, under the direction of the IAPC (Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children) of Montclair University to facilitate the pedagogical goals of Philosophy for Children (PFC). The aim of this paper is to clarify and reconfigure a personal experience of what happened during those ten days. The sense of the author is that something extremely significant, that touches on the nature of pedagogy, and the fate of philosophy takes place in such a workshop.

This text considers art as an action of life and power, or stated slightly differently, how art is an aesthetic-political game of implication in the bio-political device of our time, especially, in the spaces of “exclusion”, or “social exclusion”. In this sense the present paper builds on Saül Karsz’s interpretation of exclusion as a “false concept for a true problem” (La Exclusión: bordeando sus fronteras. definiciones y matices. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2004): that is, the exclusion of groups, populations, people is real… but it is also true that the disciplines that to investigate the subject use this real problem (i.e., there are excluded groups) for their own purposes. Exclusion as a concept qualifies an enormous field of discourse and research practices that convert the true problem of exclusion into a false concept: a weapon used to give to read, to watch and to interpret the problem of exclusion. Nevertheless, exclusion exists. And it is necessary to think of how we can treat it without relying on empty rhetoric or a fashioned position, or participating in a blind activism that depoliticizes the necessity to think about exclusion in all its forms. After discussing diverse contemporary aesthetic theories, and in particular the theories of J. Rancière, this work presents the figure of the museum of the future in which art can be understood as an aesthetic-political game able to transform life in its spaces of power, a promise of emancipation and equality.

This article presents and explains the drawing, the materials and the activities of the project “The track of the dreams” carried through for the MINEDUC (Ministry of Education of Guatemala). This project was worked by 1001 young Guatemalan people in 2005, 85 thousand in 2006 and has 125 thousand ones as forecast for 2007. The project aims the development of ethical imagination starting from their dreams (sights of future) that, helped by a specific methodology, transform these desires into life projects, projects of nation and projects of inquiry-action with communitarian repercussion. A large and deep application of the concept of active, conscientious and participative citizenship. Philosophy functions as a net that gives support in two levels: a) conceptual: with subjects of areas as Ethics, Aesthetic, Epistemology and Social Philosophy, etc; b) methodological: with proposals like the communities of inquiry and dialogue as value and as method. Angélica Sátiro was the responsible for drawing the project, with its concepts, the specific methodology and materials that give support to the application of the project; she councils the different responsible teams for the management of the project, the formation of teachers and the assessment of the work in classroom.

In this article we try to answer the following questions What is philosophy? What do I understand by philosophy and which should be its role in our time? Can philosophy be taught? If so, how can it be done? What is philosophical attitude? Does it really exist something that we can call philosophical attitude? We consider that the best atmosphere to teach and to learn philosophy is created by the New or Active School Pedagogy because it understands the pedagogical relationship between teacher and students as a reciprocal relation of mutual respect. We refer to the three moments of its development and raise that the philosophical and pedagogical proposal of Matthew Lipman constitutes the continuation and development of this pedagogy. The group of Research in Education and Philosophy is constructing the concept of philosophical attitude. Philosophical attitude is reached when someone has become qualified to work in group because it is accepted that in a community of philosophical inquiry where knowledge in an open and participating dialogue between teacher and students is built, and where there is a listening capacity and arguments are based in reasons due to reflective thinking. Somebody with philosophical attitude is tolerant, self-corrective, constructs knowledge with others, and does not consider herself the holder of truth, is solidarious and shares ideas with her companions and teacher.