Jana Mohr Lone

Philosophical Themes in Fairy Tales

Guest Blog Post from Wendy TurgeonEditor-in-Chief of PLATO’s Journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People Recently I published Philosophical Adventures with Fairy Tales (2021), which introduced ways to do philosophy with 13 European tales, mostly familiar, from the Grimms Brothers collection. Building on that work, I am going to be editing a new collection that will examine fairy Philosophical Themes in Fairy Tales

Intergenerational Ethics Event

What is the moral significance of naming and renaming public buildings? Does wealth allow people to make more ethical choices? Is it ever appropriate for a school to implement policies that directly contradict parents’ values and preferences? PLATO is joining the University of Washington Retirement Association (UWRA) for our first event to bring together UWRA Intergenerational Ethics Event

“I Am Actually Somebody”

I finished my last classes in the schools for the summer earlier this month, and was presented with a beautiful booklet in which some of the children wrote to me about how they felt and thought about philosophy this year. It was particularly interesting to me that so many students wrote about the impact of “I Am Actually Somebody”

Elementary School Ethics Bowl Judges

Yesterday we held the second session of the Ethics Bowl unit in a fourth/fifth grade classroom. Two teams of students each gave presentations, engaged in an open dialogue, and responded to judges’ questions about the case I wrote about in my last post, “The Mischarging Mishap.” Three students acted as judges. Other students were spectators, Elementary School Ethics Bowl Judges

The Year We Learned to Fly

Jacqueline Woodson’s new book, with its magnificent illustrations by Rafael López, is an inspiring story of the power of our minds to overcome challenges and hardship, and to imagine other possibilities. Over the course of a year, two young siblings experience boredom, anger, loneliness, and rejection. Their grandmother tells them to use their minds, saying: The Year We Learned to Fly