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Our main focus in the Institute will be on
the basic humanistic categories of value, meaning,
self-hood, personhood, rationality, and freedom.
From these categories come the humanistic themes
we will investigate. This Institute has three
main educational aims for children’s classrooms.
(1) To demonstrate how children’s literature
provides models of humanistic thinking, feeling,
and acting that are of great importance in preparing
children to responsibly participate in the civic
enterprise. (2) To examine ways in which children’s
literature and humanistic themes mined from
it can be used to promote reasonableness, understanding,
and apt judgment in children. (3) To provide
a link between reasonableness and the humanistic
development of children’s judgment-making
as they struggle to understand themselves and
others, and their role in the community, the
society, and the world.
In structured discussions we will reflect upon,
come to understand, appreciate, and evaluate
our particular educational roles as a means
for promoting humanistic thinking. Through an
examination of selected readings (often in discussions
facilitated by the authors) we will gain an
informed appreciation of why the strengthening
of practical judgment, effective reasoning,
and critical understanding is a worthy and vital
goal for our classrooms. In theoretically integrated
hands-on sessions we will also investigate how
the humanities (including literature, drama,
song, paintings, and poetry) can provide us
with a framework for constructing classrooms
in which basic questions about how human beings
think and know can be considered alongside equally
fundamental questions of how we ought to treat
one another and the world itself.
The Institute is based on the premise that
philosophical thinking, as with reading and
writing, is something children and we naturally
do when conditions permit. An advantage of introducing
philosophical and humanistic thinking into the
elementary and middle school is that this is
an ideal way of having children study values,
for in philosophy, conceptual analysis plays
a major role, and values are, among other things,
concepts of importance. The aim is not simply
to study classical humanities texts but to examine
the basic categories of humanistic thinking.
That is, to identify, discuss, and practice
unearthing the recurring topics and themes that
emerge from a discerning focus on lived experience.
Philosophical inquiry focuses on the larger
meaning of human experience and in the Institute
we will learn how to increase philosophical
discussions among children on these larger issues.
By practicing and evaluating the “community
of inquiry” approach to learning, we will
become more apt at promoting and integrating
the humanistic themes that emerge when children,
as excited inquirers, enter into dialogue with
each other over issues of importance to human
beings. |
