g about what I can know, I can be sure that at least there is me thinking, even that's all I can know about myself or anything else."
Lone was blown away, she writes. "I told her that the philosopher René Descartes had come to a similar conclusion almost four hundred years ago."
Set for life
Both formal research and anecdotal evidence suggest clear benefits to teaching kids the finer points of philosophical thought.
In the latest study, in England, kids in the philosophy classes managed to improve their literacy and numeracy by the equivalent of two months of teaching. All that, with only once-a-week classes for an entire year.
"It gives them all the skills we want them to learn," Lone says. Learning philosophy has taught her students to listen better, accept different ways of seeing the world, speak clearly, and articulate their opinions.
One of PLATO's chief goals is finding creative ways for philosophy to tiptoe into a system that hasn't been all that accepting of disruption. Lone, for instance, only teaches once a week or every other week in her hometown of Seattle. Frequently, PLATO draws on graduate and doctoral students to work part-time in classrooms.
Graduate student Ariel Sykes has taught philosophy in elementary schools throughout the northeastern US.
"I find that students bring the conversation out into the schoolyard and use things we use during our discussions in everyday conversations," Sykes says. Kids will ask their peers to repeat or clarify their previous point, request reasons if asked to do something, and seek to solve problems before arguing.
Reticent to stray from the core curriculum laid out by the state, many schools fear bringing in additional resources for a program that, from a top-down view, doesn't seem integral. But for many teachers, philosophy supports other aspects of learning far more than it detracts.
"I think that philosophy has huge cross-curricular appeal," says Allison Cohen, who teaches philosophy at Langley High School in McLean, Virginia, and sits on PLATO's board of directors. When she and her students study applied ethics, for example, they ask big philosophical questions about genetic enhancement: Should we produce designer babies? Is cloning morally sound?
"My students will come back from their science classes and talk about what they learned that day," Cohen says. "And then in their science class they'll apply some of the concepts we talked about in philosophy."
In English class, the benefits are even more obvious. Many of the students Cohen teaches are juniors and seniors, which means they are right in the throes of prepping for the SAT and AP exams. The skills learned in philosophy — reason, argument, logic — are essential to aceing the written part of those tests.
"They have to be able to have the argument before they can express the argument," Cohen says.
Making room for philosophy
While Cohen has the luxury of seeing students five days a week for an entire school year, most elementary schools don't offer electives. But Lone is skeptical of schools that claim they don't have the time or money.
"You don't have to teach a philosophy class in order to get philosophical inquiry into the classroom," says Lone, who has conducted several webinars on non-philosophy teachers bringing concepts into their studies. "These questions come up in every subject."
Discussions about America's suburban sprawl after World War II can spark conversation on personal identity. Simple geometric proofs use logical thinking skills. And the best part, according to Lone, is that philosophy is democratic, so anyone can find a voice.
"I'll see a child really struggling to articulate what it is he or she is thinking, and the other kids, by April or May, are just quietly sitting there for him or her to finish," she says. "It's really powerful for me to see, and I see it almost every year."