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Lipman, Dewey, and the Community of Philosophical Inquiry

The revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two dimensions. The first—introducing philosophy as a subject matter in the elementary school—is based on the assumption that childhood is an appropriate stage of life to read, think, and talk about philosophical issues like justice, friendship, what we mean by self, and so on. As such, it represents a change in the way some adults understand children as thinkers, meaning makers, communicators, and moral agents. The second dimension is pedagogical. It is the idea that a guided, open-structured, dialogical speech community which he called "community of philosophical inquiry" (CPI)--is the most appropriate way to practice the philosophical curriculum that he had developed with students. This paper explores CPI as a concrete application of John Dewey's educational theory, which posits a drive towards the reconstruction of habits—including, and perhaps primarily, the reconstruction of habits of belief—as an ongoing result of the dialectical relationship between our current habits and what he calls "impulse," and works to overcome through dialogue the gaps Dewey identified between child and curriculum, the "psychological and the logical," and ultimately, between child and adult.