We lead off this issue of Childhood and Philosophy with a
collection of testimonies, homages, and brief memoirs
offered from around the world in response to the death of
the founder of Philosophy for Children, Matthew Lipman
on December 26, 2010, at the age of 87. To characterize
Lipman as “founder” is completely accurate, but barely
evokes the role he played in conceiving, giving birth to, and
nurturing this curriculum cum pedagogy that became a
movement, and which has taken root in over 40 countries,
from Iceland to Nigeria to Taiwan to Chile and everywhere in between. The movement itself
is broader than the program, which has in fact experienced multiple transformations in
multiple contexts over its half-century of life. In fact, as many of the testimonies below
either state outright or imply, the movement is an emancipatory one and thus implicitly
political, infused with all the long-suffering hope for our species inspired in us by the fact of
natality, and by our own intuitive faith in the transformative power of reason—or as Lipman
came to call it, “reasonableness.” For those seized by its educational possibilities, it presents
a sudden influx of sunlight and fresh air into an institution long stultified by its own rigid
habitus, and promises the reconstruction of schooling in the image of authentic democratic
practice that recognizes and honors the unique capacities of children. As Philosophy in the
Classroom—Lipman’s first and now classic statement of educational philosophy--puts it, the
movement promises a re-orientation of the goal of education from information (or
“learning”) to meaning, and inaugurates the dialogue with childhood and children that
follows from that. Lipman was not just founder of this movement but creator, inventor,
developer, convener, organizer, faithful soldier, ambassador, apologist, polemicist,
propagandist, and, finally, undying optimist
