Philosophy For Children Courses Promote The Development Of Critical Thinking

For the past few years,the main concern of academic circles tends to be the development of critical thinking. Matthew Lipman founded philosophy for children courses in the 1970s,which aimed at increasing students’ critical thinking through improving their logical reasoning ability.In order to carry out education of philosophy for children,the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC for short),represented by Lipman, set up a series of curriculum systems which covered the range from kindergarten to high school.Matthew Lipman,Sharp et al. had been dedicated to create a series of textbooks l,including books for students and manuals for teachers.Thanks to their hard work,the texts of IAPC become the classic teaching materials of children philosophy education.This thesis takes IAPC texts as research object,using text analysis,focusing on indicating the connection between IAPC texts and critical thinking in philosophy children for courses.By analyzing the IAPC texts,we can see from the texts that it is the leading characters’ sense of critical thinking and situations in the novels that help to reach our goals of promoting critical thinking. When it comes to the leading characters’sense of critical thinking,this thesis involves five parts:strong curiosity of the world, considerable spirit of investigation,open mind,respectful criticism of authorities and actively reflection on themselves.As for situations in the texts,by creating conflicting situation,using daily situation setting up democratic situation and classroom seminars,critical thinking can be achieved.On the other hand,teacher manuals which constitute a wealth of practices of logical reasoning and teachers’ reflections on classroom seminars,students’ performances and philosophical classroom also aim at developing students’ critical thinking.There are different kinds of philosophy issues designed to practice logical reasoning in the teacher manuals which include practices of inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning and other reasoning rules.As principles of thinking,logic plays an important role in clarifying problems and ensuing the validity of reasoning. These principles can help to develop students’ critical thinking.In addition,the part of teacher reflection can help to manage philosophical classroom better and the classroom gives students a chance to speak out their thoughts and a critical view to themselves and others, which increase their critical thinking abilities in the process.