Philosophical Thinking Children's Training

Philosophy is a science to pursue the source of the thing. The original meaningof philosophy is the love of wisdom, is the love of knowledge and pursuit. Forchildren, philosophy is not mysterious. Matthews said that children were inbornphilosopher, and professor Lipman also thought that thinking ability of philosophycould be trained, and training could start from young. But philosophy for youngchildren came from the United States, and was popular in Europe, United States andTaiwan. However, mainland China is lack of such philosophical thinking training ofchildren. Many people have the wrong idea that children have no philosophy. Theauthor found that mainland China has just started to focus on philosophy for youngchildren in recent years after looking for data. The researches of philosophy foryoung children are only focus on theoretical level, and there is little practical level. Inaddition, for Shanghai, philosophy class only appear in some primary schools, not inkindergartens. nowadays, no one has established specialized agencies of philosophyfor young children.In view of this, the author refers to professor Lipmans theory to explore how todo philosophical thinking training of children. The author choose a whole class ofGrade Three in the kindergarten as the research objects to do seven experiments intwo months. Experimental methods is that select the childrens stories which containphilosophical questions, and combine with the auxiliary teaching of multimediatechnology, through teaching mode of the community inquire. Children can askphilosophical problems themselves. Teacher can also guide children to askphilosophyical problems. Teacher lead children to do philosophical discussions, letthe children form the philosophical thought, in order to do the philosophical thinkingability training for children.Through the experiments, the author concluded that children are born of aphilosopher. Children’s philosophy is different from adults’, they have their uniquephilosophy. It is original, vivid and lack of abstraction. Through the analysis of thebehavior of children, the author found that the philosophical thinking includes two aspects: thinking ability and thinking skills, both of which can be taught. And bothhave inner link, thinking ability which needed others’ guidance, and the way toimprove thinking ability is to improve thinking skills. At the same time, theexperiments also have the following problems, such as: children have rigided in afixed model answers, shown exclusive and conformity in the question discussion, etc.In addition, the author gives some referential suggestions, including selecting storieswhich are according with the childrens age, adopting diversified forms of teaching,paying attention to the teachers questions and guidance, etc.The author hope that we can fill the blank in the field of childrens philosophy ofpractice through the research, find the problem, put forward some suggestions, helpdevelopment of philosophy for young children in mainland China.