REVIEWS 227

The Examined Life: Advanced Philosophy for Kids

David A. White
Waco, Tex.: Prufrock Press, Inc., 2005, 182 pp., $28 pbk., 1-59363-008-5

JAMES S. KELLY
This curious book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Kids and Philosophy,”
includes ten readings in primary source philosophy, although the readings
are quite short and well focused on particular issues. Each of the issues
examined (friendship, time, knowledge, existence of god, perception, free-
dom and society, existentialism and choice, social justice and nonviolence,
feminism, and technology) is accompanied by “discussion, commentary,
and analysis for educators, parents, or students who want to think about
important questions in the company of noted philosophers who share this
concern” (2). Given that the passages are focused and many of the issues
salient to children, children’s interest should be engaged by the teacher’s apt
selection of issues to examine.
Part II, “Education as Applied Philosophy,” consists of four discussions
centered on critical thinking, drawing, language acquisition, and music.
Included in this part is an interesting pairing of artistic creativity and criti-
cal thinking, and some sketchy suggestions for curricular integration. There
is also a disquieting chapter 13, “The Philosophy of French Funetics: An
Essay in Applied Gifted Intelligence.” I return to this below. Chapter 14,
“ ‘The Bohemian Life’: Opera and Gifted Education,” suggests an exciting
way in which the humanities can be used as discursive, abstract, intellectual
disciplines aligned with the categories of, in particular, value, meaning, and
personhood.
Part III, “A Philosophical Postlude,” raises many interesting questions
with regard to education, but the focus on gifted education is troubling, as
are the author’s presuppositions concerning moral education. Moreover, early
on, White asks if gifted students are any “better” than nongifted students;
White’s answer seems to be a careful ‘yes.’ But why go there?
This book is directed primarily at teachers of grades 6–8, although the
grade range is flexible. It is also obvious that there is “special emphasis on
educating gifted students” (2), thus limiting the audience to teachers of the
gifted, despite White’s insistence that non-gifted (regular) children can benefit
from his approach. I believe they can, but the text does focus on issues in
gifted education and should explicitly be directed to teachers of the gifted.
I now turn to more detail.
In part I, White states, “[t]he principal function of the presenter/teacher
is to explain and to defend the philosophical position represented in the pas-
sages read” (12). To that end he offers explanatory comments, suggestions for
developing discussions, and, where relevant, pitfalls to be avoided. White also
maintains, “[t]he teacher should be receptive to functioning as a member of
228 Teaching Philosophy, 30:2, June 2007

a democratic discussion” (12). The goal is to allow the classroom to become

“an arena of inquiry.” As White recognizes, there can be a difficulty for the
teacher in defending a position within an arena of (democratic) inquiry. Since
White provides rather skimpy details, practical and theoretical, on his notion
of an arena of inquiry, his text suffers from a glaring omission: he provides no
footnotes on the well-discussed community of inquiry (COI) approach used
widely in extant Philosophy for Children programs (e.g., Gareth Matthews,
“A Philosophy Startup Kit for Schoolkids,” at http://www.philosophyforkids
.com/startup.shtml; Karin Murris, “The Role of the Facilitator,” Thinking
15:2 [2000]: 40–47; Susan Gardner, “Inquiry is No Mere Conversation,”
Critical & Creative Thinking 16:2 [1996]: 41–49; and of course the work of
Matthew Lipman). As a result, teachers limited to this text will miss out on
an important feature of most philosophy for children activities. Still, teachers
familiar with the COI approach, who wish to have their students read selec-
tions from primary sources, may find White’s comments helpful to them in
their roles as facilitators.
In part II, chapter 11, White introduces a very general critical thinking
model that he, interestingly, instantiates in a student generated dramatic per-
formance. Although his model is very general, White does successfully pair
artistic creativity and critical thinking. Since critical thinking is especially
needed in part I, it is curious that White maintains “[t]here would be more
incentive to become reflective and analytical about something immediate and
tangible . . . than if students were merely placed in the presence of the works
of others and invited, perhaps compelled, to become interested in them” (123).
Yet, in part I, there is not sufficient emphasis placed on techniques for gen-
erating student interest and few remarks on critical thinking. One advantage
of mining for meaning in children’s literature, as opposed to the scholarly
work of noted philosophers, is that good children’s stories (grades 6–8) are
typically relevant to the lived experiences of children. But White claims that
the use of primary source material “penetrates more deeply into the doing
of philosophy than an earlier work of mine devoted to philosophy and kids”
(viii). My experience has been that children can do philosophy, wrestle with
philosophical issues of interest to them, without reading primary sources.
While I doubt that reading primary sources enables children to penetrate more
deeply into the doing of philosophy, it does enable them to do philosophy
with the philosophers, as long as the students remain interested. (See Gareth
Matthews, “The Ring of Gyges: Plato in Grade School,” International Journal
of Applied Philosophy 14:1 [Spring 2000]: 3–11.)
In chapter 12, White maintains that gifted children are especially sensitive
“to whatever is best in any area of human endeavor” (126). “The Chauvet
Cave art,” he claims, “can serve as an intersection of superlatives and there-
fore provides an opportunity to direct gifted intelligence, and its inherent
concern for the best, toward a variety of worthwhile educational objectives”
(128). For instance, by adopting a cave-dweller persona, students can imagi-
 REVIEWS 229

natively explore the lived experience of cave dwellers (but see below for a
caveat here). He then provides brief suggestions for curricular integration
in language arts, social studies and sciences, visual arts, and science and
mathematics. One wonders, however, how this chapter is relevant to teach-
ing “regular” students.
Chapter 13, “The Philosophy of French Funetics: An Essay in Applied
Gifted Intelligence,” will, in its application, be of interest only to teachers
of French. Funetics, as portrayed, involves a competitive game in which
students use logos for sentence construction. Since this chapter serves only
as a very brief introduction to Funetics, it strikes me as an advertisement for
a footnoted text White has co-authored.
The final chapter in part II describes how seventh grade gifted students
became interested in putting on an opera. Their interest in this project was
initially sparked by connecting operatic music with its appearance in various
forms of popular entertainment familiar to the students. By being involved
in all aspects of the operatic performance, these students, in the hands of
an alert teacher, could gain an appreciation of how the arts present to us the
feeling of life as lived within certain identities and forms and under certain
circumstances. By explicitly, through discussion, embedding the opera in its
cultural and social context, students can gain insight into the expressive and
evaluative role of art in the culture. Although White recognizes the expressive
role the opera can play, he misses an opportunity to explicitly examine the
ways in which the humanities are discursive, abstract, intellectual disciplines
aligned, for instance, with the categories of value, meaning, and personhood.
Teachers need to be encouraged to see the arts as not only expressive, but
as also playing an evaluative role in the culture. While not all schools will
have the resources needed for such an operatic production, creative teachers
may be encouraged by White’s insights to develop novel ways of using the
humanities in the education of children.
Part III opens with a chapter explicitly concerned with gifted education.
White argues that in order to maximize the education of the gifted, there is a
need to provide a theoretical distinction between “gifted students” and “regu-
lar students.” His advice, for educators of the gifted, is to critically examine
the literature on gifted education by looking for assumptions, checking for
consistency, and searching for implications prior to implementing educational
policies. This is good advice for educators of the gifted and further identifies
his target audience.
In chapter 16, White makes the point “that care must be taken before
applying the useful perspectives offered by multiple intelligences (MI) to
practical matters of education and curricula, especially for gifted children”
(161). In effect, White is here doing what, in chapter 15, he urges educators
to do; to critically assess theoretical claims relevant to educational practices.
His main argument is that the notion of multiple intelligences, made popular
by Howard Gardner, can have untoward consequences for educational practice
230 Teaching Philosophy, 30:2, June 2007

if one considers the seven “intelligences” equal in value. Such a “pedagogi-

cal democracy,” he argues, ignores Gardner’s insight that the “linguistic and
logical” intelligence (ability) is “the locus of an undeniably directive func-
tion in relation to these other abilities” (164). While his point is well taken,
White’s reasoning seems to rest on a presupposition that itself needs critical
assessment. Let me explain.
In response to an exercise in which children are asked to write an “imagi-
native” account of colonial life, White says, “[c]hildren can incisively write
imaginative accounts of occupations in colonial times, but only if their prior
understanding has been fully equipped with the appropriate facts about those
occupations” (165). Furthermore, he states, “[t]o exercise the seven intel-
ligences through the imagination helps only the imagination, not students’
comprehension of the reality toward which their imagination is directed”
(165). By labeling such exercises “edutainment” (cf. ‘entertainment’), he
denigrates imagination, indeed all our emotive powers, because, for him,
they are not knowledge-yielding.
White, it seems, assumes that since the primary goal of education is “to
instill understanding of a given subject” (165, my emphasis), such under-
standing must be based on “intellectual knowledge,” for other intelligences
are not cognitive enough. There is a body of literature relevant here. As
Robert Coles worries, there appears to be a disparity between intellect and
character (see The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 1995). As
Martha Nussbaum illustrates (Cultivating Humanity [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997]) and E. M. Adams argues (“Taking the
Humanities Seriously,” The World and I [December 1987]), with regard
to moral education, the imagination and our affective, emotive powers are
themselves knowledge-yielding under critical assessment. Adams argues that
as our “factual” knowledge is based on our perceptual experiences, our value
knowledge is based on our value experiences. Thus, one way of explaining
the “disparity” between intellect and character is that it is due to inattention
to our value experiences. Instilling values into children does not seem to
the best educational practice (see Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children
[Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996]). Thus, White owes us some
explanation of what moral education amounts to for him; I doubt that even
gifted children can infer “ought from is.” Chapter 17 can be seen as White’s
attempt to address this issue.
In the final chapter, White connects Piaget and Kohlberg with the theory
of justice put forth by Rawls. Using a Stoic account, he suggests that the
basis for the concept of justice is not self-interest. Although I applaud this,
White makes several troubling claims. He maintains “the child senses” that
it is good “that justice is done to everyone,” and “the child then senses and
appreciates this fundamental relation [between justice and all affected indi-
viduals] by focusing on the fact that justice itself grounds that relation through
its own unique value” (170). For White, to understand an end as intrinsically
 REVIEWS 231

valuable “is to recognize a kind of reality that is abstract” (170). Just how a
child senses, or recognizes abstract reality is left unexplained. But it is clear
that, for White, it is an intellectual “sensing” or “recognition.” What is rec-
ognized is justice as a principle. He states, when a “child observes what is
perceived to be an injustice . . . he or she acutely feels the wrongness of such
actions . . . because the unjust action is experienced as a violation against the
principle of justice” (171). This is because “perceiving and understanding
the importance of this principle [is] equal to, if not greater than, particular
concrete instances of actions or behavior considered just or unjust” (171).
Thus, a violation of the principle is reacted to “with the same, perhaps even
greater, intensity and fervor than if a particular person . . . had been treated
unjustly” (171). In similar fashion, the gifted child recognizes “excellence
as a principle existing in its own right,” and this ability is partly definitive
of the gifted child (171).
This is all rather strange. It appears that a child must first recognize the
principle of justice before he or she can feel the wrongness of certain actions.
But as lived experience, and much research suggests, it is more likely that a
child will feel that something wrong has been done to another well prior to the
acceptance of a principle. In fact, it seems that such principles will be accepted
due to one’s value experiences, not that one’s value experiences issue from
the principles one accepts. What is at stake here? Is moral education to be
thought of as the instilling of principles, or the facilitation of moral judgment
by critical reflection on value experiences? How this question is answered is
relevant to one’s concept of a person and the pedagogy of moral education.
It is here that White’s omission of relevant literature is telling.
Rather than drive a wedge between the intellectual and the moral self,
it may make more sense to understand value experiences as themselves
cognitive, much as we understand perceptual experiences (think of the five
senses) as cognitive. This may be a better way of understanding what White
means by “recognizing a kind of reality that is abstract.” While White does
recommend the critical assessment of theoretical claims relevant to educa-
tional practice, his own presuppositions may limit his view of our critical
abilities by limiting our epistemic powers to those recognized by a scientific
conceptual framework, or to some unexplained ability to grasp principles
independently of our experiences.
I would thus recommend that teachers, instead of instilling (moral)
principles into children, pay more attention to facilitating discussions about
children’s value experiences that are activated by (imaginatively) reading
children’s literature, or, for example, by imaginatively thinking about colonial
life. There is more to education than coming to know facts grounded in our
five senses. By feeling what it is like to live the life of a person in colonial
times, for instance, children can gain a thicker understanding of reality.
While it is true that value experiences supervene on knowledge of the facts,
knowledge of the facts is not sufficient for grasping all of reality. Moreover,
232 Teaching Philosophy, 30:2, June 2007

instilling principles will be of little avail if the principles are not connected
to value experiences.
For teachers familiar with the Community of Inquiry approach used in
many philosophy for children educational activities, this book is worth exam-
ining. It provides an alternative approach that focuses directly on philosophi-
cal issues as raised by noted philosophers. In the hands of gifted teachers,
White’s approach to philosophy for children, especially for gifted students,
may encourage a childhood study of philosophy more akin to philosophy as
done in many college classrooms. This can be a plus as long as the disparity
between intellect and character is avoided.
James S. Kelly, Department of Philosophy, Miami University, Oxford OH 45056;
KELLYJS@muohio.edu

Philosophy For Teens: Questioning Life’s Big Ideas

Sharon M. Kaye and Paul Thomson
Waco, Tex.: Prufrock Press, 2006, xv+152 pp., $20 pbk. 1-59363-202-9

ANDREW FISHER
This book is aimed at seventh to twelfth graders who are learning about, and
how to do, philosophy. It is brightly designed and has good illustrations and
photographs, something which will appeal to the younger reader. Ideally this
book should be used as a basic introduction to broad philosophical ideas in
classes of young teenagers. The book is split into four parts: Beauty, Truth,
Justice and God. Within each part there are chapters discussing different is-
sues related to the theme. So, for example, there is a chapter called, ‘Is lying
always wrong?’ within the part entitled, ‘Truth.’
Each chapter starts with a discussion between two students, which the
students are encouraged to act out (stage direction is usefully provided).
There are thought experiments for most of the chapters and there are lots of
discussion questions, further reading, follow up tasks and even ‘community
action steps,’ which suggest things like: ‘play music or do crafts at a nursing
home.’ The authors have put a lot of thought into making the book a useful
teaching aid. Of note is the ‘Teacher’s Guide’ which provides a number of
useful hints and tips on the practicalities of running philosophy/discussion
classes. I think that this very user-friendly layout to the book will, with the
appropriate input from the teacher, get discussion started by encouraging
students to talk. I do, however, have a number of problems with the book.
First, even though the title mentions ‘teens,’ this broad age range is far too
optimistic. The book would be too philosophically ‘lightweight’ for a college
prep course, or an Advance Placement course, or for UK A level students. I
think 16–18 year olds can, and ought to, engage with primary texts, and be
exposed to more substantial and in-depth philosophical discussions.