ABSTRACT
Listening is central to any educational enterprise and teachers work hard, both at listening to children and at finding imaginative ways of encouraging children to listen to them. The Italian philosopher Corradi Fiumara argues it this way:
Philosophical work is an ‘effort’ if listening is to be both accepting and critical, trusting and diffident, irrepressible and yet consoling. The coexistence of these irreducible contrasts is the very strength it anchors to.
