ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to make a contribution to the educational debate about the democratic nature of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). It recognizes that there is disagreement theoretically and in practice about what this actually means and engages with two particular lines of argument. The authors support the proposal that the CPI is a model of educational praxis which can enable the conditions necessary for democracy to exist (see Sharp and Splitter 1995; Lipman 1998a). By this we mean that the CPI offers an important educative possibility for not only advancing communicative rather than individualistic notions of autonomy (Code 2006), but also for advancing the conditions necessary for social justice and especially freedom (Arendt 1998) to be possible. Lipman’s (for example 1998a) and Sharp’s (for example 2009) view, which we support, was that philosophy, because of its capacity to enable people to think more deeply (Lipman 1998a: 7), would help to form the necessary social dispositions in children and young people that would enable them to improve their capacity to make good judgments (see Sharp 2007), and consequently the capacity for decision making necessary in a democracy.
