During the past decade, the Philosophy for Children Program has offered teacher-training workshops throughout the United States and elsewhere. The workshops frequently supported by grants, enable teachers to work with a professional philosopher in developing the skills required for teaching critical thinking to elementary and intermediate schools.

Community of inquiry is most often seen as a dialogical procedure for the cooperative development of reasonable approaches to knowledge and meaning. This reflects a deep commitment to normatively based reasoning that is pervasive in a wide range of approaches to critical thinking and argument, where the underlying theory of reasoning is logic driven, whether formal or informal. The commitment to normative reasoning is deeply historical reflecting the fundamental distinction between reason and emotion. Despite the deep roots of the distinction (...) and its canonization in current educational thought, contemporary cognitive neuroscience presents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the distinction and thus to any effort that sees education for reasonable judgment to be based on the remediation of cognition in isolation from its roots in the emotions. Cognitive neuroscience looks at the deep connections between emotion and memory, information retrieval, and resistance to refutation. This conforms with earlier studies in experimental psychology, which showed resistance to changing beliefs in the face of evidence, including evidence based on personal experience. This paper will look at the recent research including speculations from neurological modeling that shows the depth of connection between, emotions, memory and reasoning. It will draw implications for dialogic thinking within a community of inquiry including systematic self-reflection as an essential aspect of critical thinking. (shrink)

The attempt to generate adequate courses in Ethics at the secondary school level preceded Philosophy for Children as it is generall thought of today. But despite this early momentum, problems inherent to secondary school applications have shifted interest toward the early school years. Curricula furnished by, for example, the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children has, in recent years, been increasingly geared to the elementary school. Programs rarely go beyond the intermediate school years. However desirable or necessary that (...) state of affairs, it does not respond to the apparent need of educators to address themselves to the crucial period of adolescence through some organized program of values education. (shrink)