ABSTRACT
The issues which have driven this study are being increasingly recognized as significant. I have already referred to work by Baird Saenger (1993) and Zipes (1996) in the United States and, in Britain, recent publications by Murris (1992) and the Citizenship Foundation (Rowe and Newton, 1994) show concerns and approaches which are illuminating in the ways they reflect and diverge from the arguments developed over the previous chapers (see also Fox, 1996). Both British projects are aimed at primary schools and are presented as teachers’ packs, with stories as their central resource. Murris, in particular, is openly indebted to the work of Lipman (1980, 1988) and the Philosophy in Schools Project he inspired. As such, moral philosophy is one of its major concerns and its pedagogy is almost entirely centred on classroom discussion aimed at encouraging children to move from the particularity of the stories into a consideration of ‘the universal laws that govern our thinking’ (Murris, 1992, p. 10). She comments:
A philosophical discussion can start off with personal, emotional experiences, but should move on quickly to get to the more general rules about how people should behave-rules resulting from an enquiry based on reason. (ibid., p. 10)
So, for example, in work related to Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, children are questioned about issues relating to Mischief, Manners and Punishment and asked to consider, for instance, whether wolves are bad, whether they know the difference between good and bad and to postulate on different meanings of the word ‘bad’. The emphasis it puts on rules, universal laws and objective rationality are clearly distinctive from my own work.
