a journal of the international council of
philosophical inquiry with children
The Mendham
Experience: Transformation and Return
Jason J. Howard
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on an event
that makes us re-think our most important practices: a workshop in a retreat
established in
KEY-WORDS
Philosophy for children –
Mendham – Teacher education
I imagine that few events in
life seriously challenge us enough to re-think our most important practices. I
want to turn my attention to an event that accomplished just this feat in terms
of how I envision the practice of philosophy. The event I am speaking of is the
August session of Mendham, which —as many of you may know— is a retreat
established in Mendham, New Jersey, under the direction of the IAPC (Institute
for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children) of Montclair University to
facilitate the pedagogical goals of Philosophy for Children (PFC). The introductory ‘session’ runs every August
for ten days from August 17th to the 27th. I want to clarify and reconfigure my
experience of what happened during those ten days because I have the sense that
something extremely significant took place that touches on the nature of
pedagogy, and the fate of philosophy.
Since departing from Mendham on
that rainy Sunday afternoon I have tried to formulate for myself what actually
transpired there. Even now, some weeks later, finding the proper word to
describe my experience of Mendham escapes me: serendipitous, felicitous,
inspiring, romantic, disarming. All
these adjectives work but none of them are a precise fit. I also have the
distinct impression that I am not alone in my difficulty of defining the
Mendham experience, but that almost all of the participants, and even many of
the IAPC facilitators, have found themselves similarly overwhelmed by an
experience that occurred at so many different levels it resists any easy
classification. What does this shared
experience of ‘over-determination’ mean?
Does the sort of wonder and bewilderment our group collectively
experienced at this August’s Mendham happen every year? Is cultivating this
type of multivalent experience even the goal of Mendham? Whether or not there is a definitive answer
to any of these questions, I am convinced that the learning experience Mendham
offers, both on a personal and inter-subjective, as well as philosophical and
pedagogical level, is truly exceptional in terms of positive transformative
potential. In what follows I want to
indicate where within the Mendham experience this transformative potential
roosts, discerning the living indices that allowed it to appear, as if from
nowhere, and seduce us into becoming better people.
The first thing to note about
Mendham is that even from a logistical point of view it is unique. For someone
like me, who is married with children, ten days away from home without the
family is already an extremely rare experience.
Bracketing that much time out of my daily schedule is certainly asking a
lot (just ask my wife). Moreover, the
fact that the session takes place at an actual retreat house that sits across
from an Episcopal Nun’s convent, isolated miles from town with no television,
radio, local newspapers or e-mail access, also adds an element of uniqueness to
the event. Given these facts aside, I
must confess that I did not pay much attention to my upcoming Mendham
experience. It was certainly on the
radar the moment I was awarded a 3M grant that would finance the trip, but it
would be false to say it occupied my thoughts.
In fact, the event really sprang up on me, having almost forgotten about
it by early August.
I assumed Mendham would be an
extended conference or an intensive training program. It turned out to be both
of these and neither one. If the
logistics of Mendham was surprising, the make up of the participants was even
more so. I assumed everyone would be
going to Mendham for the same reason: to learn how to teach children to
appreciate philosophical reasoning. Of
course, in a sense this is the reason why people came to Mendham, yet it
meant something different for almost every participant there. First off, other than the facilitators who
organized Mendham and me, no one was, for lack of a better designation, a
“professional academic philosopher.” Some people had years of experience
effectively using Philosophy for Children (PFC) as a pedagogical methodology
without any comprehensive knowledge of philosophy, and simply sought
accreditation. There were Europeans,
some of them implementing PFC in the classroom, while others just testing the
possibilities that PFC might have on the practice of philosophical counseling.
There were master and doctoral students writing on PFC, and a high school
teacher from
What is interesting to me in
hindsight is that although I expected that all of the participants would be
university professors similar to myself, seeing Mendham as an intriguing way to
broaden the scope of philosophy, I was not terribly disappointed to discover
the lack of academics. To be sure, I
felt it rather exciting that so many people should take an interest in philosophy
who were not academic philosophers. In
that sense we were all new to PFC, just in different ways. I came with a reasonably decent knowledge of
philosophy but knew virtually nothing of how to instruct it to children,
whereas others knew a lot about the pedagogy behind PFC but almost nothing of
traditional philosophy, while some knew nothing of PFC or philosophy. I imagine that such a motley population is
actually typical of Mendham, as an educational venue that finds itself, in the
words of one Mendham facilitator, stuck with the difficult task of being all
things to all people. I think this
conglomeration of different abilities, talents and motives is one of the first
places that the potential I indicated above came to roost. To my knowledge, there was never any sense of
competition between us from the very beginning.
In the end we all tried to show what we knew, but no one appeared to do
so out of any motive than sincere interest in the topics we discussed. That so many participants of such different
histories should bring such a common openness to the same experience I think is
very rare. This was something, like so
many aspects of Mendham, that was out of anyone’s immediate control. From this shared spirit of adventure and
openness the experience of Mendham took root.
The routine at Mendham is easy
to follow and very transparent. The day
is taken up with philosophical discussions from 9:00 AM until 1:30 PM, which
continues in the evening from 7:45 until 9:00 PM. Although the topics change the daily schedule
rarely does. The debates were heavy:
the nature of time, the ambiguity of evil, the purpose of education, the role
of authority, form and function in human beings, the limits of language, and
the features of aesthetic experience, just to name a few. What was amazing to
me is that no one had any idea which questions would be pursued beforehand,
since all the questions were generated on the spot in reference to short texts
read aloud in class. No famous
philosophers were directly appealed to during the discussions, which would only
have alienated many of the participants, but rather a concerted effort was made
to explore the various angles of the problem in a reasonable and feasible
manner, using the approach of PFC as our guide.
The method of the Mendham IAPC
is completely hands on: the best way to learn about the PFC pedagogy and its
distinctive approach is to engage repeatedly in PFC, continually re-creating
the community of inquiry that is PFC’s most enduring feature. The ingenious thing about this approach is
that one ends up doing philosophy rather than just learning about it. As far as I can tell, the entire approach
behind establishing a community of inquiry is to empower people in such a way
they can discern the transforming potential of discourse in its full
rationality. It is the happening of
speech and disclosure in the irreal space of meaning and truth. This, as my astute peer pointed out in her thick
Italian accent, is philosophy pure and simple.
As she went on to say, quoting Hegel, philosophy is always about the
beginning, about returning again and again to negotiate the possible guises of
the true, which in the language of PFC are called “contestable concepts.” These contestable concepts are the
traditional concerns of the philosophy canon, such as, justice, love,
knowledge, selfhood, and so on, yet the students discover these concepts for
themselves through formulating specific questions in response to the issues
raised in the readings. The result is that students learn to discern
philosophical themes and discuss them critically, rather than memorize specific
philosophical theories. At its best PFC
educates us to the multiple interpretations and qualifications through which
ideas emerge in discussion, and how these ideas are transformed and indexed as
the moves of articulate thought. The
wonder which Aristotle spoke of that gave rise to philosophy is re-enacted as
the energy of communicative dialectic, whose motivating power only awaits the
vigilance of sustained inquiry to awaken it.
It was undoubtedly here, in the
spontaneity of philosophical discourse that the transforming potential of
Mendham was most powerfully at play.
What none of us could have predicted, however, is the life this creative
tension and spontaneity would take on after the discussion sessions had ended.
Somehow the intensity and transparency that emerged in the repeated community
of inquiries we shared refused to go away, and it circulated in a sufficient
number of us to bring the entire experience of Mendham to other more visceral
and intimate levels. No doubt the late
nights and red wine also helped break down some barriers, but the many
conversations that continued past the witching hour drew their true energy from
the invigoration of disclosure more than anything else. Reflecting on our experience at Mendham, my
friend said that she felt as if she had experienced the entire course of a
lifelong friendship in just ten days. I
agreed with her. In discovering the
various ways in which we were interested in philosophy, it seems we discovered
aspects of ourselves. This discovery was
not always pleasant and at times it was disconcerting and even alienating, yet
it always had the unexpected outcome of bringing us closer together.
And if the power of
philosophical discourse were not enough, the Mendham retreat house itself lures
participants in through its own multiple identities. Long hallways lead off to narrow corridors
that contain the sleeping quarters, which are flanked by winding staircases
that flow into rooms of different purpose and portent, with the entire
structure enclosed by forests and silence.
Originally the retreat house was an orphanage at the turn of the century
and there are ghost stories still told of the young orphan boy who continues to
wander the east wing at night in search of something. This atmosphere of nostalgia and mystery, of
hospitality and penance, cannot help but get under your skin and arouse your
imagination. As the presence of the
retreat house grew, we were also inevitably drawn into the biorhythms of the
other participants. One eats and drinks
with the same group of people, sleeps across the hallway from them, hears them
get up in the middle of the night, and inevitably becomes spectator to their
most intimate routines. In such close
quarters we come to inhabit the lives of others whether we want to or not and
so being a stranger makes less and less sense.
Eventually one comes to the point where it is almost easier to give in
and embrace the silent invitation these others extend by way of their intimate
habits than deny the invitation of community their routines create.
The crowning festivities came on
the last Saturday evening where different groups were given the chance to put
on a ‘pixie’ play for the other participants, as well as for some old alumni of
Mendhams past. We were given an evening
and two afternoons to prepare and our only instructions were to use the
different ‘creation stories’ outlined in Pixie, a philosophical novel by Mathew
Lipman, as our guide. As someone who was never involved much in theatre, the
last time I performed a play was in elementary school. The humor and camaraderie to come out of the
preparation and performance of those pixie plays was really inspiring and was
an ingenious way to cement the ties that had formed between so many of us.
Mendham is an initiation. It is
an initiation to the novelty of communal philosophical inquiry. It is a place whose meditative atmosphere
encourages all manner of introspection, yet it is an introspection that is not
primarily confined to oneself, but engages the lives of the other participants
as well. In this way Mendham allows one
to gain familiarity both with the details of communicative inquiry as well as
the values and assumptions of the other members. By the end of the ten days one has come to
know not only the mundane details of the other participant’s lives, whether
they take a shower in the morning or the evening, and whether they prefer coffer
or tea, but also what the source of those pregnant pauses might be that
occasionally arise in the middle of philosophical discussions. It is because of the multiple levels of
discovery offered at Mendham that I feel David Kennedy, a longtime proponent and
leading author on PFC, is fundamentally correct when he equates Mendham and the
experience of PFC as a return to the sources of childhood. Like childhood, Mendham is an experiment in
the novelty of discovery. The combination
of patient dialogue and concerted introspection, enacted through the effort of
complete strangers, put us in contact with the malleability of our own desires,
where logos and eros became inseparable in everything but name. It was in the living fragility of this
balance, where strangers respected one another long enough to speak truly about
the issues rather than just themselves, that the transformative potential of
Mendham revealed the wondrous spontaneity of the child. And so if a name can be given to the
experience I shared with thirteen others at Mendham, I can think of no less a
word than spontaneity to describe it; or rather the hospitality of spontaneity
that only the genuine promise of new beginnings could hazard with such
ease.
Flying out of
What PFC does is to gradually
initiate students into the complexity of reasoned dialogue, where the
conceptual moves of clarification that one engages in through philosophical
debate are explicitly specified and perfected, so that one becomes attuned to
what one is doing when one engages in conceptual inquiry, whether giving examples, providing analogies,
supplying counter-arguments, addressing assumptions, re-clarifying positions,
and so forth. In taking this approach
the ‘dialectic’ of inquiry is mapped out in such a way that its practitioners
can re-claim the rationale of communal inquiry for themselves, seeing this
inquiry as not just one simple activity of reasoning but as an array of
possible conceptual moves and options.
As I see it, the concern of PFC
will always be philosophical, and not just generic critical thinking, since the
pedagogical orientation is deeper than answering questions well, but seeks to
cultivate a host of capacities such as a sensitivity to the subtlety of language,
an attunement to the complexity of experience, a respect for other
participants, and an appreciation for precise conceptual analysis, to name just
a few. What’s more, the underlying
orientation of these capacities for communal inquiry cannot be separated off from
the traditional ethical and conceptual concerns of philosophy without the risk
of losing direction and authenticity. If
learning a language is learning a form of life, as Wittgenstein suggests, then
learning how to philosophize as a community holds the potential of radically
transforming the way we engage both ‘I’ and ‘world’. By introducing students to
the living speech of philosophy first through practicing its forms of articulation
with others, the appeal and scope of philosophy as a discipline will be that
much greater: the knowledge of philosophy as a tradition of master thinkers
will be that much more appealing if it grows out of an actual disposition to
philosophize. In this way the almost
endless resources of the tradition can take root in the language of everyday
discourse, anchored in the speech acts of children and adolescents.
I was lucky enough to talk with
Mathew Lipman, the founder of Philosophy for Children, while I was at
Mendham. His story was one of incredible
leaps forward and unexpected set backs and stalemates. The eventual fate of PFC lies well outside of
any one person’s hands. Whatever that
fate may be I will always be grateful for the time I spent at Mendham. I, like the other participants there, took
its promise seriously. Perhaps this, more than anything else, was the deciding
factor in its enduring impact on us. I certainly am no expert on PFC and whether
every August Mendham meets with the same success as we experienced is difficult
to say. For my part, I left with the
sense that PFC could very well be the future of philosophy and its final metamorphosis,
in which the promise of what philosophy could be takes up its rightful task
where it has always been needed most—liberating the true potential of childhood
from the weight of those authorities whose purpose is to pillage it. At least then philosophy could finally return
to its native soil and face its true detractors, those who charge it with
corrupting the youth.