Philosophy in the courtyard: what a school gains when it teaches how to ask questions

The fight started the way they all do: a ball, two poorly distributed teams, and a cry of "it's not fair!" that echoed across the entire schoolyard. Marta, a fourth-grade teacher, did what almost any educator has done at some point: cut it short, console, distribute again. But that afternoon, instead of closing the matter, she opened it. She wrote the phrase from the cry, "it's not fair," on the blackboard and asked the class what it would take for a distribution to be fair. For forty minutes, twenty-five nine-year-olds debated whether fair means equal for everyone or to each according to their need, whether drawing lots is fairer than choosing, and whether a rule that hurts someone can be fair. No one raised their voice. Upon finishing, one student said he had changed his mind, and he said it like someone announcing a discovery.

What Marta did has a name and a method, and it counts half a century of history. It is called philosophy for children, and it is worth explaining well precisely now, in an autumn where Spain has returned to debating education through headlines (the PISA results published in September, the debate on screens and academic rigor) and where the temptation to respond to every data point with a new tool is stronger than ever. There is another possible response, older and cheaper, and it involves teaching how to ask questions.

The story begins in the late 1960s, when Matthew Lipman, a university logic professor in the United States, noticed that his students arrived at college without knowing how to reason and decided that starting then was too late. He wrote a school novel (Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery) in which children discover the rules of thought on their own, and he established an institute in Montclair dedicated to bringing philosophy into classrooms. His approach was far from solemn. Lipman did not propose explaining Plato to eight-year-olds, but something more radical: that the classroom function as an inquiry community. A stimulus (a story, an image, a schoolyard fight), a question chosen by the students themselves, and a dialogue with rules: whoever makes an assertion must give a reason, whoever listens can ask for an example, and whoever changes their mind does not lose, but wins. The teacher does not hand out answers; they safeguard the rigor of the game.

Half a century later, this practice is one of the most studied in Western education, and its history with evidence deserves to be told in full, because told halfway, it has done harm in both directions.

The first half is what spread like wildfire. In 2015, the British Education Endowment Foundation (the agency that subjects educational programs to trials comparable to those of a drug) published the results of its first trial on philosophy for children: 48 primary schools, 3,159 students, a two-year program delivered by the organization SAPERE, with an independent evaluation by Stephen Gorard from Durham. The result measured two additional months of progress in reading and math, and something even more striking: among students eligible for free school meals (the variable the British system uses to proxy social disadvantage) the gain rose to four months in reading. Philosophy, the headlines claimed, improved the grades of those who have the least. It cost about sixteen pounds per student per year. It seemed too good to be true.

It was, at least in part, and here begins the second half, the one that almost no one quotes. The EEF itself warned from the beginning that the finding had moderate security and needed replication. They commissioned it on a grand scale: 198 schools, 3,601 students, independent evaluation by NFER, five out of five locks on their confidence scale. The report arrived in 2021, and the result was zero. Zero months of improvement in reading and mathematics at the end of primary school, including among disadvantaged students. The same program, the same organization, a better trial: nothing.

It would be easy to close here with a "philosophy doesn't work" and move on to something else. It would also be a poor use of the data, because the replication report contains two facts that matter more than its headline. First: two years after starting, 35 of the 75 intervention schools were no longer implementing the program at the intended level. Half of the experiment had dissolved in the real-world mix of schedules, sick leaves, and emergencies, the same finding that the meta-analysis by Durlak and colleagues on social and emotional learning pointed to in 2011: the results of a school program depend on how well it is implemented. And the second fact: 96% of participating teachers perceived that their students had improved in their respect for others' opinions (the survey of the pupils themselves detected no change in those skills), and the evaluation found no negative effect whatsoever on academic performance. Dedicating class time to thinking did not cost them a single point.

Perhaps the honest conclusion is this: philosophy in the classroom always loses when it is forced to compete on the wrong scoreboard. If a faculty adopts it to raise scores by three points on the next external assessment, the British replication saves them the effort. But that accounting says more about us than about the program. No one asks how many months of reading progress a music class provides, yet no serious school considers it a mere decoration. There are things a school does because they are the school itself, and teaching how to think rigorously (to give reasons, to ask for them, to endure disagreement without tearing down the table) belongs to that category with more right than almost any other.

Gregorio Luri, who has spent decades defending the school of knowledge against its caricatures, provides the exact criterion here. Learning with Socrates and not about Socrates: the difference between studying philosophy as just another subject and practicing the art of the question as the very form of thinking. Thinking for real means taking a risk, and that warning is the best vaccine against the watered-down version of classroom philosophy, the one that confuses an inquiry community with a circle where every opinion is worth the same simply by virtue of being felt. It is exactly the opposite. In a well-run session, an opinion that does not bring reasons is left at the door, and the student quickly discovers that changing one's mind in the face of a good argument is not a defeat but a sign of genuinely playing the game. For schools that fear such questioning will erode their certainties, the experience is usually the reverse: a school ethos that is thought through becomes stronger; one that is only recited remains a brochure.

There remains the condition that the British replication underlined in bold: none of this survives without the faculty. Philosophy for children is not a service to be contracted; it is a way of conversing that teachers must learn and practice first among adults. A school wishing to try it would do well to start small: one course, two trained teachers, one protected hour in the schedule (truly protected, not just until the first busy week arrives) and the patience to evaluate it for what it is: the quality of the students' questions in June compared to those in October.

The calendar offers a pleasant hook for that first step. Every third Thursday of November UNESCO celebrates World Philosophy Day, established to recall the value of thought in the life of any culture; this year it falls on the 19th. The school temptation for such commemorations is a mural and a photo; the alternative is a single real inquiry community session in each class, and seeing what happens. At Nomba, we have seen it happen: we work with Luri precisely because his defense of attention and Socratic questioning is the foundation upon which any serious humanistic education is built, and because faculties that dare to think together in front of their students teach, without saying it, the most difficult lesson in the curriculum.

In Marta's classroom, the session on justice did not raise any math grades, as far as anyone knows. It left something else: the following week, on the same playground, the same ball and the same teams, a nine-year-old boy, before shouting, proposed drawing lots for the kickoffs. Nobody called it philosophy. It was.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.