Philosophy for Children in India: The Changing Landscape
Rhea Kuthoore is promoting philosophy with children in India, and researching philosophy in children’s literature from an Indian context. She has degrees in philosophy and childhood studies.
For the last six years, I have been slowly and steadily trying to expand philosophy with children in India. I would describe my experience as idiosyncratic; the most receptive schools are the ones bridging the gaps that exist between government-run and private-run mainstream schools. For example, in Assam I worked with the children who are often marginalized. The children, whose parents were mostly tea estate workers, spoke five different home languages. In Gudalur, children were from five different tribes, many of whom were historically pushed out of educational systems. In a private school that implemented a sliding fee structure, bridging class differences that are otherwise a marker of private schools, the classrooms were filled with students from a range of classes, castes, and religious backgrounds.
In these spaces, philosophical literacy is important because its core value is to prioritise each child’s voice and to create space to dialogue between differences. In a community of philosophical inquiry, no child ought to be left out or left behind, and diversity is an inescapable part of receptive spaces that are bridging gaps. Facilitators, therefore, need to be aware of the power and language relationships playing out between individuals as they form diverse groups, and to act accordingly so that everyone feels included. The task for practitioners of philosophy for children is to provide access to material in regional languages and to provide relevant frameworks and lesson plans. My colleagues and I are working on this task. This year, Walter Kohan and I put together a two-day seminar about philosophizing with children of all ages. The seminar, the first of its kind, took place in Bangalore drew about 25 educators.
Encouraging philosophical literacy is more of a challenge in those mainstream schools that believe in the inevitability of separating students based on class, caste, religion, and language. According to this line of reasoning, students must be divided along these lines in order to cope with learning expectations, and because of existing differences in the literacies of their parents. However, philosophical literacy, like play pedagogy and art, creates a common space in which children from diverse backgrounds can learn by respecting everybody’s equal right to think well, engage in dialogue and silence, and imagine and change.
Philosophical literacy is for all children: children who have been historically marginalized or those who feel lost, confused, disenchanted, or disengaged from the educational system, and those who feel safe within the system. Recently, I visited two schools – in Bangalore and Pune – where students were given the opportunity to discuss the question, “When is a societal ban justified?”
For this activity, students were paired and given slips of paper detailing a specific activity that the government was considering banning. The teams of students had to determine whether they considered banning the activity justified, unjustified, or were unsure about their response. The students engaged with this exploration enthusiastically, as young people rarely have the chance to think philosophically about real-world issues that significantly affect their lives. At the end of the activity, several children shared their feedback:
“It felt like we were discussing things that are confusing in our lives.”
“At one point, I was arguing for one side, and at another point for the other side.”
“The more I thought about it, the more interesting it became.”
Still, there is a big barrier to bringing philosophical pedagogy to schools in India. In classrooms with more than fifty students, dialogical pedagogy is close to impossible. Philosophy is also not welcome in schools in which stakeholders are afraid of children thinking freely, critically, and collaboratively, and where there is resistance towards dialogue amongst diverse groups of people.
Despite this, I continue to feel hopeful about the growing nature of philosophy with children in India. From my observations, the educational landscape in India is changing and working to address the current needs of students despite monetary concerns. This capacity to adapt, I believe sprouts from the writings of philosophers of education who have molded the landscape of education in India and sown the seeds of awareness about the colonial and divisive mindset of the nation-state. There are schools inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi (Nai Talim), and Savitribai Phule, among many others. Additionally, schools adopting a variety of models are also opening. These include Montessori, Waldorf Steiner, and Reggio Emilia methods. Other schools – inspired by Unschooling (advocated by John Holt and others) and Democratic Schools (inspired by John Dewey) – are also operating.
This variety of educational philosophies boosts the possibilities and opportunities for philosophizing with children in India. What is needed are more concrete curricula and pedagogical approaches that are genuinely democratic and liberatory.
I am grateful to PLATO, a cornerstone of support for all my endeavours and a mentor for my practice since 2019. Recently, Jana Mohr Lone and I talked together at a virtual seminar organized by The Circle Labs, a grassroots organisation in India committed to supporting educators and reinventing education and schools.
