According to a new study conducted among 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England, philosophy courses led to better literacy and math skills for a period of two years — despite that not even being the goal of the study.
These kinds of courses — ones that get kids thinking about life's big questions — are becoming more common.
And it's not just in research settings, but in schools around the world.
Inside the classroom
Jana Mohr Lone has taught philosophy at all levels, from preschool to college. For 20 years, she has directed the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, and she's the current president of PLATO, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing philosophy to schools.
Over that time, she's learned an important lesson: It doesn't take much to get kids thinking.
"Our general approach is to start off with some kind of stimulus," Lone tells Tech Insider. For younger kids, that's often a picture book or a game. In middle or high school it could be a novel or work of art. "Then we ask the children, 'So what questions does this make you wonder about?'"
After the inevitable outpouring of curiosity, Lone says teachers will typically put the lesson to a vote — which question do people want to explore the most? The winning topic then forms the basis of a discussion.Pretty much anything is up for grabs.
Scout and Atticus Finch can stimulate a discussion on the nature of courage. "The Velveteen Rabbit" gets kids thinking about the question, "What is real?" Often, Lone says, the simplest stimuli can produce profound insights. In her 2012 book "The Philosophical Child," she recalls one particularly poignant lesson involving the nature of existence.
After asking a fifth-grade class whether we can know for sure that we are real people and not part of a virtual simulation, a bright 10-year-old girl sitting up front offered her take.
"Okay," the girl said, "maybe I can't know that I am not just the mind of a computer or living in a cave and seeing only shadows. But what I can know is that if I'm thinking 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 dir