ABSTRACT
The wide variety of educational programmes promoting the development of children’s critical thinking reflects concern about the changing nature of the skills needed in contemporary society (Trickey and Topping 2004). These programmes can be differentiated in various ways, including the extent to which they are incorporated into the existing curriculum, and their specific characteristics in terms of the tasks and methodology adopted to develop children’s thinking. The Philosophy for Children programme (Lipman and Sharp 1978; Lipman, Sharp and Oscanyon 1980; Lipman 1981, 2003) is one of a group of multi-method educational programmes employed to develop critical thinking as either additional to the set curriculum, or more widely across the curriculum as an aspect of teaching subject specialisms such as English language and literature, personal or social education, maths, science and history. The programme is designed to develop critical, creative and caring thinking through a dialogical process whereby children are engaged in discussion and debate in a ‘community of enquiry’. This differs from programmes employed separately from the rest of the curriculum, as in the case of the Instrumental Enrichment programme (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman and Miller 1980) using context-free pencil-and-paper exercises to develop children’s critical thinking. It can also be differentiated from subject-based educational programmes, such as the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) programme (Adey and Shayer 1994), developing critical thinking skills through special lessons taught by science teachers.
