Matthew Lipman was in his late forties when – in 1972 – he took the bold step of quitting his tenured professorship in philosophy at Columbia University in New York.
The story goes that he spent the next few months working from a caravan. But the caravan story may well symbolise his move from the towers of ‘higher’ education to the schools where ‘small’ children are educated. The plain truth is that Lipman had a job to go to, and knew there was a job to be done.
He had been invited by Montclair State College, earlier a teacher training college and now a university, to establish the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children on its campus. The aim was to redesign philosophy for children’s use.
Almost immediately this involved reorienting education as a whole – for adults as much as for children. That is why his project has as much relevance and urgency in 2001 as it had nearly 30 years ago.
“If you could get education to centre on thinking,” said Lipman, in the 1990 BBC documentary Socrates for 6 year olds, “rather than rote-learning, then you’d be preparing for a very different world.”
Neither Lipman then, nor advocates of philosophy for children now, would contend that modern education is all rote-learning. Teachers at all levels offer a much more varied and potentially exciting intellectual diet than their predecessors of 100 years ago.