childhood & philosophy

a journal of the international council of philosophical inquiry with children

Young children discuss conflict

David Kennedy

ABSTRACT

The transcripts from which I draw in this reflection on how young children think together about conflict reflect two four-part sets of conversations with two second grades in a small school of roughly 300 students in a predominantly middle to upper middle class suburban town in a heavily populated metropolitan area in the northeastern U.S. Large sections from four of the transcripts are included, with commentary. In the first, conflict is represented by the group as a competition, either between two people or two possibilities only one of which can be fulfilled (the “fork in the road”). There is disagreement as to whether interpersonal conflict can be avoided. The second section revolves around the reorganizational or reconstructive potential of conflict. The third section takes up the question of whether we can say that there is conflict within nature beyond just living things—i.e. whether it can be considered a metaphysical or at least ontological principle. Transcript and analysis of arguments are accompanied by reflections on the differing social atmospheres of the two classes, their possible relationships to the discussion styles of the two, and on the possibility of a form of pedagogy which allows for the self-organizing character of group life and the role of conflict in the dialectics of development.

Key Words: conflict, young children, conversation, dialogue, classroom

Two kinds of classrooms

If there is one constant, uninvited guest in the typical public school classroom—or indeed in any setting in which children gather in numbers—it is conflict. This is not to say that there is more conflict in schools than in any adult office, or in some as-yet-undetermined percentage of families. But adults in offices—and, of course, in schools, which are in fact a type of “office”—have learned to handle it, to tone it down, to suppress their reactions. The more common and less menacing variety gets siphoned off and developed in different, political directions in gossip, or quasi-confrontations, or it simmers in latency, mostly invisible but felt, and works to slowly blunt—perhaps necessarily—the lived edge of life together. In a collective work setting like a school, mutual wariness, one might be (but is not) astonished to find, easily keeps company with familiarity and even a sort of comfort. Life is flattened out, loses color, but not unbearably—in fact it might even help us to know that the workplace is not one’s home, or the place where one’s personal salvation gets worked out, and so to maintain some socially and personally necessary distinctions.

Nor is it hard to imagine a school in which all the teachers basically resent and mistrust or are jealous of or just plain resistant toward the overbearing principal, or coordinator, or anyone else with any sort of officially bestowed power over them. They sit in after-school staff meetings watching the clock, like a weary band of derelicts huddled in the rain. The principal is bright, cheery and decisive, in bizarre but all too predictable contrast to the stagnant emotional chill in the room. The teachers are wooden, as if in some kind of slow motion. But when they communicate with the boss individually, conflict is dissimulated: power puts a hand on their neck from above and they can’t resist the impulse to fawn, cower, or, at best, to maintain a stoic reserve.

Children have not come this far in the possibilities of emotional and relational stagnation of various kinds. For the second graders who are the protagonists of this narrative, conflict on the whole does not yet trigger insoluble grievance, despair, avoidance and deception. The child’s natural, organismic self-love is more often than not baffled rather than wounded by rebuffs from the reality principle—nor, in most cases, has self-love begun its devious descent into vanity. Conflict, for the child, like the weather, may in fact be—after physical pain and discomfort—her first major lesson from the reality principle. What can one do but accept it? It seems not yet to be a moral problem—although it’s possible that for many adults it never becomes a moral problem either, that its inevitability may be added to death and taxes; indeed, this may be the most moral way to look at it. Besides, in this culture adults are usually—apart from those terrifying Lord of the Flies moments—all around to be called upon for help mediate it.

Children have a rather sophisticated way of categorizing adults according to how they deal with their (children’s) conflicts, which in fact will be the main indicator of their emotional style in the classroom—whether irritable, explosive, patient, peremptory, authoritarian or dialogical, dismissive, pedagogical, perceptive or dimwitted, tolerant or moralistic. Certainly one moment of painful and shocking truth testified to in many childhood memoirs is the one of flagrant adult injustice—when the adult holds a child accountable for something she didn’t do, or the less traumatic but equally morally scandalous case in which the whole class is punished for something that one person did. This is a particularly poignant example of the conflict between adults and children that characterizes life in school as we know it, but there are many more. We might say that the traditional school is the place, not just where children learn to deal with conflict with each other, but where adult-child conflict becomes institutionalized, and of course constructed so that adults will (almost) always win.

The children whose voices are recorded and transcribed and reflected upon here—roughly fifty second graders—both spoke about and, during or around the edges of the discussions we had, were involved in plenty of conflict, whether with each other or the adults around them. Most appeared minor—conflicts over pencils or trinkets or seating, or whose turn it was, or a place in line, or how close someone is standing next to you, or an accidental trip or shove, or losing in a game at recess, or someone making a face at you or even saying something nasty to you or about you, or a sharp reprimand from a teacher, or friends or potential friends choosing to spend time with others rather than you; and as one gets older, just barely dissimulated competition over who is “smarter” or “cooler” or more athletic. Malicious or stupid (or both) false accusations by other children. Ridicule. Gossip. Bullying. Or a teacher yelling at or otherwise haranguing you or the class, which is just as bad. Or a teacher just being plain unfair, or irritable beyond reasonable measure, or acting like a suspicious, mean-spirited cop, and in no case can you ever expect either a recantation or an apology, and if you try to do something about it chances are you will be in worse trouble, downstairs getting grilled or lectured or therapeutically sweet-talked by the principal.

How minor in fact are these conflicts when taken cumulatively, day in and day out? Take Sean, perhaps the most philosophically astute in Ms. River’s second grade group, a quiet, gentle blond boy, slightly phlegmatic (in school anyway), who sat just outside our weekly discussion circle at a table—the circle was seated on the floor—every week, taking notes and occasionally raising a question or making a comment that showed how closely he was listening. When the school year was over, Ms. River shared with me that his life had been made miserable by another, troubled and “underachieving” boy in the class, who hounded and persecuted him continually, all year, mostly out from under the eye of the teacher. Or take the challenges, recorded in the transcripts, which the second grade boys Samuel, Abraham, Peter, Talbot, and Pablo dealt each other—the instant contentiousness, the tone so easily slipping into agonistic sparring, the sense of precious personal psychological space that one must guard. It’s not so clear to me that conflict among children has any less high stakes than among adults.

In fact all of the twelve philosophy discussion sessions that were facilitated, observed and videotaped and transcribed unfolded in an atmosphere that included an element of conflict, sometimes more and sometimes less controlled. There were various kinds, at various levels: small conflicts over immediate issues like seating, or someone who somehow has your pen or the class pen you have been using; conflicts over participation, for example when you’ve had your hand up forever and the facilitator keeps overlooking you; conflict between adults and children over order and politeness and enthusiasm and motivation, expressed by adults either yelling or barking or flaring or smoothly reprimanding children who were openly or half-covertly disrupting or subverting the group conversation by talking with each other, getting caught up in self-perpetuating laughter at comic incidents or ideas, or the whole group simply “going out of control”; and finally, conflicts of ideas and judgments—which is what, as practitioners of philosophy with children, we are generally after—sometimes so heated that it disrupted the group altogether. On an even more general level, the whole structure of events lay on the fault line of a conflict between the goals of the classroom teacher and/or the visiting discussion facilitator, and the goals of the children. The teacher wanted more or less perfect order, interest, politeness, and some evidence of “learning.” The facilitator wanted order too, but was willing to sacrifice a bit of it (how much was never exactly clear) for a rich response to the ideas he was presenting for discussion.

This is all complicated—although what sort of complication is not completely clear—by the fact that the facilitator (myself) held a particular educational, developmental and pedagogical ideology, or counter-ideology: he believed in the self-organizing capacities of groups and individuals—put abstractly, the spontaneous tendency of both individual and group systems to reorganize in the direction of greater order, integration and effectiveness—in other words, the long-term self-perfectibility, given the right conditions, of human nature. In short, the facilitator was a philosophical anarchist. Correlative with this belief was the notion that both individuals and groups will not self-organize unless they have the responsibility to do so, because without the responsibility there will not be the need—and that the reason many children actively or passively resist school or find school unbearable is that they are disempowered there, and kept from developing except in the most perfunctory ways, or in defiance of or unnoticed by the iron hand of the system that grips them. A corollary of this notion is that, given a “smart” psycho-social environment, the positive expectations and enabling dispositions of the adults around them, and both the autonomy and responsibility to do so, that they will learn both adequate self-control for the situation, and reinforce, through various group dynamic means, group self-control.

There is nothing esoteric about this belief: it is the same persuasion that informs the self-actualization theory of the mid-twentieth century, most versions of ego psychology from the same period, and democratic theory in education in the Deweyan and the Freirean sense. The stubbornness of this belief among those who hold it and the hint of scandal it communicates to most others is only exacerbated by the current climate of educational reaction, and is probably reinforced by the fact that it cannot be tested. In a society based on surplus repression, for administrators, teachers and, most importantly, parents, to consider really trying it out in schools evokes the spectre of King Darius, come again to isolate an infant from birth and confirm his suspicion that when he starts to speak, it will be in Persian (it was, of course, discovered only that the child would die of grief before he began speaking). Children are just too precious a resource, we love our children too much, goes the proscription, to do anything but house and surveil and in general put them in the iron grip of the law, and not allow them their own experience, to learn their own lessons until we absolutely have to.

Nor does philosophical anarchism offer anything like the promise of a conflict-free school. In fact in certain cases—depending to an as yet undocumented and perhaps undocumentable extent on the relational chemistry and resultant group dynamics of each particular classroom—even a classroom run painstakingly and compassionately and intelligently as an experiment in democracy, as an embryonic community in which power is to the greatest extent possible shared, in which adults respect to the greatest extent possible the agency and the autonomy of the children, can be a hotbed of conflict and subversion. But this is also true for adults attempting to build community, as those of the facilitator’s generation who embarked on multiple experiments in intentional community well know, and as defenders of organizational hierarchy claim as its chief justification. But the argument for constructing classrooms that are organized as experiments in democracy is precisely that it offers the hope that the children who experience it will become adults who are better at dealing with conflict. From there, it is up to each of us to decide what we think the positive limits of human nature to be, and what role education can play in equipping us to explore those limits.

As it was, in this case I accepted the limits of human nature assumed by the adults in this particular “nice” middle class school, which were nothing out of the ordinary, implicitly soft-authoritarian view. I acceded to these assumptions by 1) accepting and even welcoming the presence of the classroom teacher-as-order-and-etiquette-enforcer in the group or even just in the room; 2) not protesting when teachers or teachers aides spoke in ways that privately I found rude to the point of offense to children whom they thought were getting too wild. In other words, I depended on the repressive system which I saw as at the heart of child disempowerment in order to maintain the order that I was convinced had to be dialectically constructed and reconstructed by the children themselves if it were to be of any worth or value; a self-organizing order which, I was further convinced, had most usually to be preceded by disorder—or by the falling apart of the externally imposed order—in order to emerge and take systemic shape.

Given the ubiquity of conflict, the project here described—to talk about conflict in the abstract, as if in fact it were not present at all, as if it was some distant phenomenon about which I could philosophize without fear of having to deal with it at that very moment while in fact it was all around us—might be accused of promoting a category mistake, although it might also be suggested (and often is by the enemies of philosophy) that this category mistake is characteristic of philosophy in general. On the other hand, and like the “untestable” hypothesis of collective self-regulation in an intentional community like the classroom, it could be argued that philosophy seems abstract and removed from experience only to the ears of an educational culture so intellectually hobbled by a crass instrumentalism that it wouldn’t recognize the value of collective philosophical reflection in the classroom even if a god came down to offer it. The desired “outcomes” of the conversations which I facilitated, taped and transcribed—characterized, say, as the ability to deal more reflectively and effectively with the conflict in their own lives and with the conflict they see around them—cannot, if they exist, be quantified, and for this I am grateful. To understand that what one was giving in a classroom—to children and, more indirectly, to their parents, to the adult-child community which is the school, to one’s fellow practitioners and to those practitioners who will come after us—as only to exist according to formulae of replication, or coefficients of correlation which make a mockery of the complexity of causality, is in my view scandalous. Such an approach to developing good pedagogy is about as useful for others as replicating Yo Yo Ma’s cello playing on a synthesizer.

The transcripts from which I draw in this reflection on how seven-year olds think together about conflict reflect two sets of conversations. I worked with two second grades in a small school of roughly 300 students and 32 teachers (including teacher “aides”) in a predominantly middle to upper middle class suburban town in the heavily populated Greater New York area. The student population was roughly fifty percent white, thirty percent African American, ten percent Asian, and ten percent Hispanic. 25% of the students received free or reduced lunch. Although the town was quite decidedly politically “blue,” and prided itself on the legendary claim that it had the highest rate of inter-racial marriage in the country (in a town in which approximately 40% were “minorities”), it also dripped with huge mansions, sky-rocketing real estate prices, colossal property taxes, and the most businesslike of soccer moms zipping around in eternally new SUV’s. It was the kind of town where the streets of the rich neighborhoods feel like the set of the Truman Show, each house a masterpiece of outsized conventional taste, manicure, and radical isolation, and not a soul to be seen—completely empty, even of cars, which are not even allowed to park there between 2AM and 5AM. The impression was one of dramatic but quite affable psycho-social lockdown.

Mr. Palermo’s room was at the end of the hall on the second floor. Palermo was a teacher who yelled at children lovingly—a Santa Claus pretending to be a drill sergeant—or, sometimes, a drill sergeant pretending to be Santa Claus—almost like a movie character, or an odd cross between Mr. Rodgers and Gradgrind. Children treated him like a big, loving, well-meaning animal who sometimes lost it, and at those moments they had better respect it, because he was that much bigger and louder than they were. Sometimes, influenced by his sadistic bad-cop aide, whose whole style was based on losing it, he did too, and said some really outrageously moralistic and manipulative things to children in rebuke of their disorder. Fortunately, for the most part this was left to her—who always sat on the sidelines during philosophy sessions with busy work of some kind, and when things got too lively for her liking, threatened children in a loud, outraged voice—still sitting with her busy work—with loss of recess and other “privileges,” hurling admonitions like curses, professing astonishment at their atrocious, unacceptable behavior, the broken trust, the rudeness, the unbelievable effrontery . . . . At this, they typically ducked their heads in a frozen, neutral silence, as if wanting to avoid the flying debri from an odd but, they had learned, predictable explosion. I ducked my head too, then, when she was finished, in a quiet voice, led us warily back to what we had been talking about.

Unlike most of the other teachers in this school who hosted philosophy sessions, Palermo loved listening to children talk this way, and although he didn’t have much of a gift or an education for doing it himself, supported me faithfully by sitting in circle every week, following each intervention closely and with interest, a smile of pleasure on his quick, pleasant, emotionally expressive and observant face. But it would have been impossible for any observer to deny the implicit conflict between his goals and the goals—or at least one set of goals—of the children. When things began getting chaotic—which is something which doesn’t particularly bother second grade children—he barked, hectored and cajoled, threatened (and sometimes abruptly executed) expulsion from the circle, ordered children to sit up, hands in lap, to quiet down, to listen, to stop grinning, to take a deep breath, whatever. It was a sort of cat and mouse game between his (and implicitly mine, for I welcomed his presence—it meant I didn’t have to lift a finger to keep order) idea of what’s the most rewarding thing to do when you sit down in a big circle on the floor. And yet because he was the inimitable Palermo, it was understood at least partially as a histrionic event—the theatre of school and second grade, where the chief character actor is the loving but stern, demanding but caring, dangerous but also cuddly, schoolmaster. A perfect surrogate father for the launch into the “big world.”

We were working with a children’s philosophical novel, designed to be read aloud and then discussed, called called Elfie.1 I was working with the same text in Ms. River’s room, three doors down the hall of the old, two-story school. I had been meeting with both groups once a week for forty minutes or so since October (now it was March)—and by this point the discussions in River’s class had, for my (and her taste) become unbearably chaotic. The level of disorder—children calling out loudly, interrupting others, small but loud personal disputes, general collapse into side conversations or side-silliness in the circle—had, just two weeks before the first of the four sessions specifically dedicated to conflict—reached a peak. It seemed to make no difference whether River, who was a tolerant and sympathetic veteran of the second grade classroom, was sitting in the circle or not. There was a kind of obsessive inwardness about the class, a feeling of being in the wilderness somewhere, as if each member was lost in a search for self which both required the other and to which the other was always a real or potential obstacle. One sensed chronic struggles among a handful of the boys for, if not power, then some recognition for which they had to, by hook or crook, advocate in order to survive; while among the girls, the sense of who was “inside” and who “outside” among middle class immigrant Mexicans and Indians and Brazilians and middle and upper middle-class whites and African Americans was mostly unconscious but bewilderingly complex.

The children came to circle with a sense both of mild interest in what this male visitor (me) had to offer, and of stoic neutrality, as if called to a task which, although they did not quite understand, they were willing to take on. But the sessions had begun fairly quickly to short-circuit on the loose wires of the complex politics of their day-in-day-out life together, exacerbated no doubt by my bemused unfamiliarity with the subtler rules and terms of the game of this particular classroom. Nor was it directly influenced by River’s real interest in discussing philosophical concepts with children, which was slightly hampered by her belief that she had no idea how to do it. In fact she had quite a good idea how to do it, and her sense of inferiority was based, I think, on her sense of unfamiliarity with the philosophical tradition. She was not satisfied, as some good teachers are, with her intuitive sense of the resonance between the philosophy which we find all around us, whether among 7 or 70 year olds, and the way that was reflected in the tradition. She had an unhealthy respect for the academy.

Ms. Rivers and I had agreed that for this, our third year together, we could swap sessions—she would take one, and then I, the “expert” from the University, the next. But when I did sit in circle with her, she deferred to me with such abject regularity that it only added to the ambiguity of power relations that already haunted the class. And this ambiguity had reached such a peak in the weeks leading up to the conflict sessions, that I did what I usually do when disorder begins to reach epidemic proportions—a strategy directly based on my anarchist convictions. The week before our first conflict discussion, I had announced that this particular class session would be handled completely by them: they would choose what we were to talk about and deal with the mechanics of the conversation themselves. I would make no demands—not introduce or ask that we stick to any sort of topic or theme, nor rebuke anyone or ask for any kind of response. The only ground rule on which I insisted was that people would stay seated in their place in circle. Otherwise I was there to listen, and to share myself when so moved.

The resulting session was of a sustained chaotic intensity which left several children complaining of headaches at the end of the 40 or so minutes—an argument about what they wanted to talk about which lasted the whole period, and in which three or four children dominated the proceedings through initiative, persistence, and their capacity to over-ride the others through rhythm or bravado. Interestingly enough it was an African-American girl who had hardly attended any of the previous sessions (and didn’t attend any of the following) because she was usually attending a “special needs” session during this time, who captured the initiative, and became the leader in the high-jinks combination of joking and grandstanding which characterized the session. When we finished, it seemed that all of us—the children and the three adults in the room (myself, River, and her aide, both of whom who listened attentively from the sidelines)—were bemused, in a faint state of shock at what had just happened.

The following week we began our four-session discussion about conflict, and I introduced the “name recorder system.” This is a classroom practice whereby one or more of the students is given charge of keeping a written list with the names of those who raise their hands in order to speak, and of calling on them in order. The name-recorder system quickly became both a cause of and the controller of conflict. The controller because, to the classes obvious relief and interest the moment it was introduced, it provided a structure of containment for the somewhat desperate sense of competing self-interest in the form of a game protocol that everyone could participate in and master, even if they argued about the rules from time to time. Most importantly, it involved writing things down, making a record that could be referred to as an arbiter in any dispute over scarce resources, an emergent tally which objectively reflected the distribution of turns, a plain and obvious index of the equity which the class was unconsciously searching for in the sometimes fury of their interactions. When I suggested that the designated name recorder—a new one was chosen each week by each class member (excepting those who had already served) guessing at a number which I had arbitrarily chosen—use a clipboard, another student asked if the rest of the class could use clipboards too, and within a short minute eight or ten children had left the circle and returned with clipboards, paper and pencils. This continued in all the discussions that followed, and the clipboards were used for various purposes—often for students to spontaneously take notes on questions and statements made in the discussion, sometimes to draw. From then on, the children monitored the name-recorder process carefully and with increasing expertise, well aware that there was a new interlocutor and authority in the struggle over order and disorder within the group, and perhaps in fact more interested in that than in mere conceptual deliberation.

Most of the examples of conflict which the second graders chose to offer were located in their lives with friends or acquaintances or siblings, or incidents among adults that they had witnessed. There seemed to be a level of tolerance, even expectation and affirmation of these small conflicts in their lives—they had already become such natural occurrences for them. Samuel, who carried himself with a distinctive sense both of ease and self-confidence and with a quick, quirky intelligence—who easily dominated the conversation with his responsiveness and straightforwardness and comfortable willingness to challenge whatever he wished to, said, “Well, sometimes they just have to fight—like ‘that’s my ball’, ‘no it’s mine’, ‘no it’s mine’—then they just get into a fight.” And Hillary, with a different sort of self-confidence—one which bespoke a sense of personal emotional order in her life, and a passionate interest in explaining the world, somewhat as if she was explaining it to herself as well as those to whom she was speaking—illustrated the notion of conflict with a story about two people drawing in the classroom: “. . . and the person who was making the mouse had the black marker and the person who was making the ladybug says, ‘Hey, I want that black marker’. Or like, ‘Can I have that now?’” Then Elenor, who always sat near or next to Hillary, and who seemed to share with her a sophisticated if not in any way overstated way of being an intelligent and reasonable citizen in this odd wilderness experience which was River’s second grade for that year, said, “Well I sort of agree with Hillary, because that happens a lot during our class . . . One time me and my friends were playing a money game, like there is over there [she points] . . and um a girl came over here and said ‘I want to play that game’. And she kept on saying it even when we asked her to stop it. Then all of a sudden we get into a big fight. We tried to tell her to stop, but . . . Not many people in our class use words.” Her last sentence was pronounced with a combination of ruefulness, confessional honesty, polite diffidence and, of course, implicit self-exception from being one of those who couldn’t “use words.”

It seemed clear to me that Elenor was talking about a girl in the class. That girl may or may not have been in the room—I thought it inadvisable to pursue the matter. It is as likely as not that the girl to whom she was referring did this chronically, and that Elenor, who sat next to Hillary in the circle, and shared her general maturity, also shared with Hillary a feeling of . . . fatalism? towards this girl’s depredations towards her as a token or symbol or index of the kind of stubborn, mute inchoate incomprehension of the skills through which conflict could be mediated. And indeed, it was Jodi in Palermo’s class—Jodi already a radical individual, glowing mutely with a resilient self-love which had, one felt, already been challenged by others—adults, I sensed, including Palermo—as selfishness or inattention to others—Jodi who never stopped paying attention, and who would keep her hand up for fifteen minutes with something to say—who first made the proposition, when I put the question of whether conflict was unavoidable or not, that “you can go without fighting.” In fact in all cases it was the girls who made this particular proposition or ones like it, who seemed, that is, to have higher stakes in conflict mediation. For them, the idea that you can live without conflict was a proposition which was held in some doubt, but remained as an ethical imperative in the face of an ontological point of view which understood conflict as inscribed in the structure of being itself. In other words, it was some kind of contradiction.

Is conflict avoidable?

The segment included below, from the very first session with Palermo’s group, put all the pieces of the concept of conflict more or less on the table quite immediately, and set up the contradictions within the concept which, as we shall see, were the preoccupation of River’s class as well. We had just finished a section of the first discussion dedicated to clarifying the term “conflict,” in which a distinction had been teased out between internal and external conflict. Stephen had begun with defining conflict as “one person meaning to do something and another person, like stopping him from doing so.” This had quickly morphed through another example—“Like maybe you have two things at the same time like Tai Kwan Do and violin lessons at the same . . . And, and you have to pick one because they conflict”—into the notion of internal conflict. Hans, in a dialectical move which was quite common in these conversations and which I will call very generally “mediation,” acted to synthesize whatever contradictions or distinctions had emerged in the conversation in a new statement: “Conflict is like people trying to go two different ways—like some people this way and some people that way [gestures with two hands in two directions] and they’re kind of in conflict?” This is a synthesis of mediation because he has gone from one person stopping another, to two internal goals which are incompatible with each other, to two people “trying to go two different ways,” i.e. a simple crossing of intentionalities, which can include both the stopping and incompatability, and the inner and the outer.

The conversation which preceded the bit of transcript included here continued for several more minutes on this theme of internal conflict, with examples given by Abdul, Charlie, Stephen and Jeremiah—four boys—from sports, video games and, from Stephen, the notion that in family or relational conflict, both internal and external conflict are present: “I think if you were, like, depressed or like very like sad, or if you’d gotten in a fight with a lot of people you could have a problem, and you could have conflict. Like a family conflict.” As was characteristic of all the conversations with both groups of second graders, the facilitator tended to work the discussion by posing questions which followed from or were implicit in the example just given—in this case I had followed the examples from video games and sports with, “. . . what about conflict inside yourself?”—and the children responded with brief propositions followed immediately by more examples, which the facilitator interpreted as development of the propositions in this direction or that, which led to his further questions or interpretations—e.g. “you seem to be saying that there’s a connection between conflict with other people and conflict within yourself”—and further examples. There were in fact several children—in particular Stephen, Martina, Jeremiah and Veronica—who seemed to have more mastery of the distinction between a contextually isolated “abstract” proposition and an example, but in most cases the children thought immediately and intuitively through the latter. These examples were actually “abstract” in the sense that they were a way of thinking about the concept in response to the facilitator’s question, and thus moved the conceptual work along. But now to a more detailed look at a particular segment, with some commentary interspersed:

David: I want to ask whether conflict is avoidable. Would it be possible to live your life without conflict? (excited no’s and yesses from group). There are yesses and no’s, so let’s hear both sides. Martina?

Anon: We’re having a conflict right now.

David: (Jokingly) Not yet. Don’t put any gasoline on it.

The facilitator does not take this opportunity, offered playfully, to explore the concept in situ. Lulled by its playful irony, he responds in kind, and lets it slip.

Martina: Well, conflict can mean many different things. And maybe, like Hans was saying, maybe you can maybe you can’t, two people could be like going in different directions . . .like Jeremiah was saying not making up your mind, and— . . . .

David: And like Davida was saying, want, it’s two different wants.

Martina: Well yeah, but like, it’s life. So I think you have to have it.

David: You have to have it?

Martina: Yeah, for example Mr. Palermo says you can’t learn if you don’t make mistakes. Cause . . . everybody has to make mistakes, that’s just life.

David: So without mistakes no learning, and making mistakes is conflict—a kind of conflict—is that what you’re saying? (Martina nods) That’s—that’s kind of like a logical thing: that mistakes are conflict, mistakes are necessary, therefore conflict is necessary. Yeah? That seems to be how you’re reasoning.

Martina is associating conflict with learning, an idea which had not yet been introduced, but which is the basis for cognitive learning theory at least since Piaget. She reasons syllogistically in order to arrive at the conclusion that all people make mistakes, using as her first premise an argument from authority, and arguing, implicitly, modus tollens:

If they don’t make mistakes, people don’t learn (if p then q)

All people learn (not-q)

Therefore all people make mistakes (therefore not-p)

Or she could be arguing from a simpler categorical syllogistic form, using an ontological assumption, tagged as such by the phrase (“that’s just life”):

All people make mistakes (all a’s are b’s)

All mistakes lead to learning (all b’s are c’s)

Therefore, all people learn (all a’s are c’s)

David: (Looking at Jodi, who has her hand up) Did you agree?

Jodi: No.

David: O.K. So let’s hear your side. You said (when all were calling out “yes” or “no”) that conflict could be avoided.

Jodi: Yeah, you can go without fighting.

David: That you can live without fighting.

Jodi: Yeah, because if you just take it one step at a time, and like, hold your temper, you can live without it.

David: O.K., This is a different proposition, right? Jodi is actually saying that it’s actually possible if you do the right thing, if you don’t respond, if you hold your reaction, that you can actually live without conflict. And Martina has said that conflict is necessary even to learning. So we’ve got two different positions. Could somebody help us to talk between those two positions? Amanda?

Amanda: Well I don’t think you can live without conflict. I just agree with Martina.

David: Can you address Jodi’s point? Jodi is suggesting that you could actually, if you knew how to do it you could check your anger, your . . . You don’t agree with that? Can you give a reason why?

Amanda: Well everyone has temper, you can’t just stop it.

David: You can’t just stop your temper. Jodi, do you want to respond to that?

Jodi: Yeah—well, . . . you can . . . because if you take a deep breath you just walk away.

Brian: I disagree with Jodi, because you have to have conflict, otherwise you won’t settle the problem, that the other person agrees and you agree . . . Because my parents fight all the time. (Some titillated laughter among the group. Brian smiles as well)

Brian introduces a new concept, analogous to Martina’s, about mistakes and learning. Just as the conflict which is “making a mistake” leads to self-correction, so the conflict of “fighting” leads to the resolution of the difference which led to the conflict. We will encounter this argument again.

David: So you’re saying that unless the problem gets expressed that it will never be solved. Is that what you’re saying? Did everybody get that? So (to Jodi) he’s sort of responding to your point. He’s saying that it would just pretend to be solved, but it doesn’t really get solved. (calls on Hope, who has her hand up, but she has forgotten, and is silent)

Joan: I think . . . I disagree with Jodi, because whenever me and my sister fight we can’t drop the subject . . . Like we keep on fighting and we want to stop except we can’t.

Joan offers a counterexample both to Jodi’s and to Brian’s point: to Jodi’s in that Joan claims that at least in this case, you can’t “just take a deep breath”; and to Brian’s in that, at least in this case, fighting does not lead to the settlement of the problem.

David: Want to stop—yeah, I think everybody knows this feeling, right? Where you’re in an argument and you want to stop but it just keeps feeding and feeding and feeding. Jeremiah?

Jeremiah: Uh well, I like half agree with Jodi and half agree with Joan, because you could hold your temper half the time but half the time you can’t—and there’s the other kind of conflict that you face sooner or later. Like if you’re going to your friend’s house and there’s this fork in the road and you need to decide which way to go . . . ”I’ll go this way, it looks good—but no, I think I should go that way” . . .

First Jeremiah mediates the issue of whether conflict in the sense of “fighting” is avoidable, and suggests that, although there might be a categorical imperative, there is no guarantee that’s it’s possible to carry out. Then he offers, almost exactly in John Dewey’s (1997/1902) language,, a restatement of Stephen’s category of conflict between two goods (Tai Kwan Do and violin lessons) as a “fork in the road” situation. Dewey, of course, characterizes it as the situation which characteristically leads to what he calls “reflective”—i.e. “critical— thinking.

David: So you’re saying that for this reason conflict is unavoidable—because there are forks in the road. There are those kinds of choices that you have to make and therefore it’s impossible to do without conflict. Stephen?

Stephen: Well I think that . . . I think that you can’t live without conflict because if you don’t have conflict then everybody . . . it’s just a thing that everybody lives . . . . It’s like these kids go to the store and there’s only one thing left and they all want it, and like if the person who took it would get it and then everybody would have to hold their temper and then the next time that happens they’re gonna have to build it up even more and you can’t just keep building your temper up, eventually you won’t be able to hold it any more, so eventually you would have to have conflict. . . . Or like if everybody wanted something, then everybody might not get it, then who will get it? You have to get to conflict once in a while.

Stephen deepens the discussion about the inevitability of conflict by identifying what, on a Hobbesian view, is its fundamental cause: competition for scarce resources (“there’s only one thing left and they all want it”). By this time, and with the facilitator’s unconscious complicity, “conflict” has been defined as a behavioral event, and not something which leads to a behavioral event. This ambiguous distinction sticks, and in fact is never fully explored and clarified during the second grade discussions.

David: O.K. so you’re giving an example—Stephen I think is introducing another category—Davida said “want,” but Stephen says maybe there are more people in the world—or in the way we’ve built the world—there are more people in the world than there are things for everybody. So there’s always gonna be—

Stephen: Well there will be [enough things in the world] but there might not be enough in one place . . . So that everybody’s gonna go there and say “I want that, I want that,” and you can’t just hold it back—somebody would say “No, I want that,” and that would be the start of a conflict.

Prompted by the facilitator’s restatement, Stephen refines his proposition. It’s not even the fact of scarcity, but the statistically inevitable problem of unequal distribution which ensures that there will always be conflict. It’s not just, as the facilitator suggests, “the way we’ve built the world,” but the way the world is regardless of how we build it.

David: So Stephen seems to be suggesting that one cause of conflict is—I don’t know if you guys know this word—“scarcity.” Scarcity means there’s not enough of it. So if you say, well . . .

Stephen: Food is scarce.

David: Yeah, “food is scarce,” it means there’s not enough in the stores, and people are competing for it, like one person wants the loaf of bread and another person wants it too. So he’s saying that this kind of situation is in the world and so it’s impossible to avoid conflict. . . . We need to be finishing up now, so I want the people who speak now to be summarizers, meaning we want to end with a sense of what’s been said. What have we said about conflict? Where have we gotten to in our inquiry, into our dialogue, in our thinking about conflict? . . . Because we want to go on next time. So we want to know where we stopped.

Samantha: I’m kind of responding to Jodi. Like, what if you were fighting and you tried to hold your temper, what if you got so mad that you couldn’t?

David: So you’re kind of agreeing with Stephen that eventually it’s gonna build up, it’s just impossible to keep it down. Stephanie are you gonna be a summarizer?

Stephanie: No.

David: I’m looking for a summarizer. (Veronica raises her hand, and facilitator nods at her)

Veronica: You have to have conflict in the world.

David: You have to have conflict in the world.

Veronica: Because if you don’t—if you hold your temper but you still have conflict because you want to, eventually you have to . . . Like say your sister was mad at you for doing something, and like she wouldn’t say that, she would just hold it . . Like I was using her pen that she liked a lot, and like she would be acting like . . . she wouldn’t tell you, but then she would have to say “That’s my pen.” You have to have conflict.

Veronica builds on Joan’s previous sibling-related example with her own, and deepens it. Conflict here seems to be understood as such a natural outcome of problems of use and distribution of resources that to think one could eliminate it from experience would be equivalent to thinking one could eliminate a body function, or the weather.

David: O.K. but um Hans, you want to speak now—could you remind us what Brian said and what Martina said, because I think those are two important aspects of conflict. Do you remember what they said? (Hans shakes his head,, having forgotten). Wendy, what did Martina say?

Wendy: Um, she said that …(inaudible) …. Learning.

David: Yeah, something about learning.

Samantha: You have to make mistakes once in a while.

David: Yeah, and anybody remember what Brian’s point was? (Joan struggles to remember, then gives up) O.K., we’ll just ask Brian to repeat it.

Charlie: I think he had something about . . . I forgot.

David: O.K., let’s let Brian say it.

Jeremiah: Oh that’s right . . . . He said that his parents always fought, but then settled it down.

David: Yeah, he seemed to be saying that unless you have a conflict, problems won’t go away, right? So that’s interesting because that might mean that a problem would be a different thing from a conflict. You might have a problem and you never talk about it and you never get upset, you stop yourself from getting upset about it, but something is wrong . . . So I’m wondering if we can make a distinction between whatever that problem is and the conflict, if you see the conflict as just the fight about it. . . I hope I’m not going in the wrong direction. Veronica?

The facilitator attempts to explore the distinction mentioned above between conflict as a problem of any kind and conflict as a behavioral event. But he is temporarily forgetting that he’s looking for a summary, is at the very end of the session, and loses confidence.

Veronica: Conflict must have something to do with decisions.

David: With decisions. And this was Jeremiah’s point.

Veronica: Because like if you hold your temper you’ve made that decision. (Glances at Davida, who is sitting next to her) Because if your sister won’t let you in her room to get to your room that’s a decision. And like to solve your problems, that’s a decision. . . . Yeah, and so conflict must have to do with decision. Pretty much everything we all do has to do with making decisions.

Veronica, in the process of summarizing, has found herself with a new criterion for defining the concept of conflict. She uses two examples which have already been offered to demonstrate their decisional nature. She seems in fact to be implicitly upholding Jodi’s earlier claim that conflict can be avoided. She moves naturally from the descriptive to the normative, and identifies the ethical dimension of conflict—that whether it occurs or not, at least interpersonally, depends on whether one decides it will occur.

In this first conversation, the concept of conflict was built up—under instigation and sometimes suggestion by the facilitator, but by no means by anything like “instruction”—in the following points:

· Conflict can be interpersonal, intrapersonal, or both

· Conflict represents a competition, either between two people, or two possibilities only one of which can be fulfilled (the “fork in the road”)

· It is not completely clear whether interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict can be avoided. The reasons given against it are:

o Scarce resources and/or necessarily unequal distribution of resources means that there will always be competition for them

o The process of learning itself involves conflict. Here a “mistake” is understood as a conflict, and mistakes are considered necessary to learning

o In a related way, except in interpersonal terms, conflict is necessary to the resolution of problems.

The reasons given for it are:

· When conflict threatens, it is possible through an act of the will to suppress or avoid it. Implicit here is a categorical imperative

· All conflicts are, in the last analysis, the result of decisions. Decisions in fact can be said to underlie all behavior, and the behavior described as conflict is no different.

Do we need conflict? Dialectical approaches

It could be claimed on a reading of all the transcripts (which represent 100 manuscript pages) that this initial conversation with one second grade laid the same basis for conceptualization of conflict that appeared in the other second grade. It is true that Samuel, in River’s class, added the classic category of territory to Stephen’s of scarce resources, but these are analogous—both examples of Sean’s (also in River’s class) suggestion that “some animals”—like his example of the dinosaurs—“need conflict for a living.” But during their third session, River’s class made an advance—already emerging in Veronica’s assertion that “You have to have conflict in the world”—on this conceptualization by adding a dialectical element, and an argument was made, not just for the fateful necessity of conflict, but for its necessity for transformation, and thus, if it is possible to claim it, a hint of “purpose.” This might have come earlier if the first two sessions had not been dominated, first by a passionate argument about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was beginning during those very weeks; and in the second week by a discussion about a problem happening right outside the window and across the quiet street in the public park, where the resident Canadian geese were befouling the grass with their excrement, and the city was dealing with the problem unsuccessfully by setting off flares, whose hissing explosions could be heard outside on a daily basis. This second conversation quickly turned into an argument about the responsibility of pet owners for taking care of their animal’s offscourings, decorated with numerous lurid examples, most of them about neighbors and their dogs. As River remarked afterwards, “poop” was a topic which second graders delighted in, for its slightly transgressive quality and its frank appraisal of the relation between custom and instinct, a theme which is, quite understandably, of interest to humans who are still at or near the peak of their activity level. But it should also be recognized that both conversations—Iraq and the Canada geese—were about very real conflicts, and that the argumentation in both was very close and intense.

And indeed it could be said of River’s class that they were, because of the measure of autonomy they felt as a result of their teacher’s unstated but implicit trust in their developmental potential for self organization, oriented to discussing conflict, not through abstracting the concept, but through practical application of it. This is also indicated by the enthusiasm with which they took up the name recorder procedure as a way of dealing with the small and atmospheric conflicts in their class process. Because they had a teacher that encouraged their autonomy (if only sometimes through a vague neglect which seemed more related to an incalculable combination of pedagogical wisdom and fatigue than to self-absorption) the group was taking a different kind of responsibility in the doing of philosophy than Palermo’s class. In fact they were ready to take on actual problems, and were ready to discuss them on their merits.

I started River’s third session with a question which Samuel had presented to me just after the second session—the session about “poop” management among animals—had ended. He had approached me as I was rising from the floor and getting ready to leave, with that air of his—mindful of how I imagine the young Emile—which somehow suggested he was addressing an equal, in spite of the slightly embarrassing difference in our relative heights. “I have a question,” he said. “Do we need conflict?” I was delighted to have some return from a conversation whose combination of scatological glee, giddy contentiousness, and sovereign inattention to my continual attempts to “take it to a higher level” in the form of propositions and generalizations rather than examples had left me feeling tired and ground down. I suggested we take it up first next time, and I didn’t forget. When I put it to him the following week, he answered, “I don’t think so, but some people think we do, but I don’t care. I don’t know if we need conflict. We might need it and some people think we do. I don’t think we need it, but if some people think they do it’s O.K. with me. I don’t want to say conflict in itself. If I say ‘We don’t need conflict’ they say ‘Yes we do’, and I don’t want to start with myself.”

I was startled and a bit confused by this crafty session-opener, and only managed to say “That’s an interesting position to take. Anyone want to respond to it?” This was followed immediately by Jasmine stating categorically “I don’t think we need conflict,” and then lapsing into silence, then a hesitant, half audible response about people doing something one doesn’t like, and feelings getting hurt. Instead of circling back to attempt to unpack Samuel’s slightly obscure reasoning and elliptical semantics, I pushed forward with “Can conflict ever end up well, or can conflict ever do something good, or, or is there any kind of conflict which leads to positive . . . ?” Only later, when the colleague who was filming the session pointed it out to me, did I realize what in fact Samuel seemed to be saying: if he argues that we don’t need conflict, he is engaging in conflict, which is contradictory, and therefore he won’t make the claim, although he believes it. This kind of contradiction and even suggestion of paradox, ignored here, arose, as we shall see, in another, playful and fantastic way in Palermo’s last class.

David: Can conflict ever end up well, or can conflict ever do something good, or, or is there any kind of conflict which leads to positive . . . ?

Peter: Next is Martha (Peter is the Name Recorder for this session)

Martha: We sort of need it. There would be no United States if there wasn’t—if it wasn’t for conflict. So . . .

David: How is that?

Martha: If George Washington didn’t have to fight with all sorts of our . . . (pausing, thinking) . . . all sorts of our states. Like he had to fight with California and Texas. And there probably wouldn’t even be a United States as big as it is now. There would only be thirteen states.

It was Martha who put the question early in the first session—“Why do people fight wars anyway?”—which led to the discussion about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

David: So without conflict, you’re saying, there’s no growth—there’s no reorganization.

The facilitator jumps to a generalization from Martha’s example. Although his inference is correct, he jumps too far, since Martha doesn’t understand the word “reorganization” in this context.

Martha: There would be thirteen colonies.

David: O.K. Could somebody respond to that? Could the next person who speaks respond to that?

Peter: Martha . . . She’s on the list three times in a row.

David: No, you just go once, and then . . .

Peter: O.K.. Elenor.

David: (to Martha) And then you can go on the list again after you’ve spoken. (long silence, as Name Recorder looks at list for next speaker)

Elenor: Um, I sort of agree with Martha because . . . Let’s say that other people were coming to America and start destroying it. And we’re trying to stop them from destroying America.

David: And that’s conflict.

Elenor: Well I think that sometimes we need conflict.

David: In order to protect ourselves.

Talbot: (Begins to speak, thinks, then says, “I forgot”)

Abraham: Well I don’t really think we need conflict, because sometimes it’s good but sometimes it’s bad. It’s sort of in between the same way Martha said, but there’s also another way that’s better than Martha said because in a war people die. And we wouldn’t even have the thirteen colonies if they didn’t win that war, but also if they didn’t fight it, then people wouldn’t have died.

Abraham objects to the idea that conflict is the only way to settle disputes. He uses conditional reasoning to evaluate Martha’s example: there might have been a different outcome without war, but there would still have been an outcome, which might have been as or more acceptable than the one which came about.

David: So we would have had something else but we would have been peaceful.

Abraham: In lots of big wars, lots of people die, so many people must have died in that war, and even though now we have a lot of people on this continent, when that war happened a lot of people died, so. . . .

David: O.K., so I’m trying to figure out what your reasoning is here, Abraham—I think it’s good reasoning. Could somebody . . . You said if there hadn’t been a war, people wouldn’t have died, and there would still be a lot of people here . . . Is that right?

Samuel: There would have been a lot of people here. A hundred thousand or so.

Abraham: Yeah.

David: So it would have been possible. If there had not been a conflict which was the Revolutionary War then the shape of the country might have been different, but people wouldn’t have died. So you’re saying implicitly that it’s more important that people don’t die than that you make something like the United States.

Abraham: It’s a good thing that the United States is here now, but um, still if we didn’t fight that war then it would still be as good as it is now.

Samuel: Well I have an answer to Abraham and Martha—well if we need conflict, then . . . O.K. we don’t need it. But Martha, we didn’t have to do the war. I mean we could just think of a reason to have peace, right?

Martha: Well, the answer to your . . . We would have the smallest . . . like the smallest country . . . the USA wouldn’t own the biggest trees on earth if it hadn’t been in history.

Samuel: But we don’t have the biggest trees.

Martha: I wouldn’t be able to visit my grandma without going out of the state, or any other of my family.

David: O.K., wait a second—a little time out here because I’m not sure how to handle this kind of situation—like we’ve got a specific question—Samuel has actually addressed a question to Martha, and she should be able to respond, but then the problem is, how long should they go on before we go back to the list?

Martha: Three hours. (smiles)

David: Well that’s the problem, we—

Anon: Two minutes?

David: Two minutes is a long time . . (multiple voices) Rather than talking about it in terms of minutes, how about if we talk about how many exchanges there can be?

Samuel: I don’t really get what you’re saying.

David: What I’m saying, Samuel, is that you were on the list, right? And you addressed a question—

Samuel: No, I addressed a . . .

David: Well a disagreement to Martha—actually it was in the form of a question. So, she wasn’t on the list, legally or officially she shouldn’t have answered—we should have just gone to the next person on the list, and she wouldn’t have been able to respond to you. But we let her respond. And then you responded back, and then she responded, and that could go on—

Martha: For three hours, or two hours and two days.

David: For too long for the whole group. So how long do we deal with the particular . . .

Samuel: Two more hours and we’ll be done (Martha laughs)

Peter: Not funny.

David: Does someone have a suggestion? Or do the name recorders have a suggestion?

Hillary: Can you tell us the next person on the list?

Peter: Yeah, uh, Hillary.

Hillary: Well I agree with Samuel that we don’t need conflict, because we could have like made a declaration of peace. . . and tell them that . . . can we please have those like . . . states in common.

David: We could have done it non-violently.

Hillary: Yeah, and we could have told their . . . (she signals to Peter, mouthing the word, “Martha!” meaning Martha has her hand raised. Hillary is the “spotter” of the name recording team today, and is multi-tasking) . . . we could have told the army that—we could have told the British army, I think it was . . . Was it the British army?

David: Yeah, it was the British.

Hillary: Yeah, O.K. That we just have our colonies. And they could just not have made conflict. But they didn’t think—they just went ahead and made conflict . . . So they could have stopped before doing that, like having war, they could have talked it over awhile and then agreed with the US army. But—

Martha: There wasn’t a US army.

David: Let’s not talk out. Is there a response to what Hillary is saying?

Peter: Yeah, Martha’s next on the list anyway.

Martha: Well I want to respond to Hillary and Samuel. If we had that small of a country then we wouldn’t have . . . we would only have to do thirteen states in our state book . . . . And guess what that means?

Hillary: What?

Martha: Then not everyone gets to do a state. Another reason is, don’t you think they tried to do that?

David: Tried to solve it without war?

Martha: Yeah.

David: O.K. let’s . . . you made two points, so let’s stop there and let’s go on. . . a response to it. Who’s next?

Peter: Katrina.

Katrina: Um, well, um, you don’t have to have conflict, like . . . (inaudible)

David: And you’re saying that that’s also the case with the original American Revolution. You’re agreeing with Hillary. But I’m wondering whether even though there’s not a war over it, whether or not it’s not still a conflict . . . I mean all of us had the idea. It was Hillary’s idea and maybe even first Abraham’s idea that we could actually solve it without war. But it’s a conflict even before there’s war, isn’t it? I mean it’s a conflict between the colonies, and—

Abraham: War starts because of conflict. If you don’t have conflict then you don’t have a war.

David: O.K., so the conflict was already here . . . that’s what I’m saying. So there was a conflict about land and there was a conflict about taxes and money, a conflict about who gave who what and how much and who was the boss of who.

Katrina: (inaudible, a pause then, mildly frustrated) I don’t know!

David: (smiles) Keep thinking.

Peter: Samuel.

Samuel: Well if we have an army it wouldn’t really matter if we make a book about the U.S. What really matters . . . . It’s just a book. What really matters is if we have conflict—and if we didn’t have conflict then everyone would just be so nice, and there wouldn’t be like boxing or something, on T.V. And I think we sort of like need conflict a little bit—not all the time but just a little bit—and . . . we don’t need conflicts.

Samuel is arguing conditionally and counterfactually. “Just so nice” indicates a bit of sarcasm. There seems to be the implication that conflict adds necessary interest or dimensionality to an otherwise insipid life, and an implicit revolt against the PC notion that we could do away with conflict altogether. And with his boxing example, perhaps he is making an argument for something like the “moral equivalent of war.”

Peter: Martha. Martha, it’s your turn.

David: Response to Samuel?

Peter: Uh, yeah Pablo.