Philosophy for Kindergartens
p4k
by
Per Jespersen and Haleh Rezaei
Prologue
Around the world you can find initiatives concerning making p4k with children. But what is the background for doing that? Is there something in philosophy that counts for all cultures whatever the political and religious backgrounds? The answer is yes, but we have never seen a profound explanation: why is it so important, and how does p4k influence children from kindergarten age till they are twenty. The essays you can find all over the world have some hints and non-transparent explanations. Thus, students and teachers, who want to do p4k, have no basic texts to stick to.
In older times some wise men wandered around their country, and when they arrived at the village, they were surrounded by children and maybe adults, because they wanted to hear, what they had heard. They listened to their story telling and were fascinated by the stories they could tell, and they went home happier and wiser than before, and they could only look forward to the wise man’s next visit.
These men were born story tellers, but why were their impact so big? What did they really do? They did something, which television, radio and other modern devices cannot do. There story telling created images in children’s minds and these images stayed in their minds forever.
The reason is to be found in the way our mind is built up. From the very birth we have a subconscious, which will stay in our mind all our life. But there is an unconscious part, too – and there is a conscious part as well. When the wise man told his stories, the heart of the story went directly into the subconscious part of the mind, and from here there is a constant dialogue with the unconscious part and the conscious part. So the good story gave consciousness and unconsciousness a broader and deeper perspective.
Thus, when you tell your children in class a good story, the children listen in deep concentration, and the subconscious is deeply influenced. Maybe you remember that from your own childhood: what you will never forget dwells in your subconscious and will forever influence you and your inner I.
This is what p4k does! As soon as you discuss philosophical topics with the children, the issues go directly into their subconscious and will forever influence their way of thinking. No other subject in school does that – thus, it is so crucial to do p4c from the kindergarten. The connection between the unconscious part and the conscious part goes through the subconscious part, and there you will find philosophy,
and the spiritual life and the emotional life as well. Every little philosophical talk gives more perspective to the conscious and unconscious part of our mind and forms the possibility for learning.
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Here you have the seven columns of p4k:
I Every single child is unique.
II The uniqueness has to be respected.
III The pedagogy circles around this uniqueness.
IV The teacher has to see the golden stone in each child.
V The golden stone is the basis of education. The more golden the stone is, the better you can learn.
VI The teacher is the mediator of the development of the golden stone.
VII In p4k the teacher is not a person who knows everything, but the one who brings wisdom from child to child.
Chapter One
Being a child
When you are born and take your first breath, you do not know that you are there. You scream when you are hungry or when something hurts – but everything is still unconscious. Even when you start to imitate words, you do not know what you are doing.
But one day, when you move your hands, you wonder whose hands it is: something is now growing into consciousness. You can even do it with your feet! I am here!!
And when you see the sky with clouds, you wonder: What is that? And later on: Do they come from me? No! So there must be something else besides me. I wonder what that can be.
You learn more and more words, you can feel the warmth from your mom, and you can even long for her. You grow more and more conscious. And when your mom comes up to you and gives you some toys to play with, she smiles, and you feel love and smiles back. There is a connection between you and the surroundings. How strange? This is where wondering starts, and as you learn more and more words, you learn to put questions and to receive answers: There is a big, big world around you. How strange!
As your language grows and you know more and more words, you have a thousands questions, because curiosity has until now dwelled in your subconscious, but now it is blossoming and cannot wait for the answers. The deepest layer of your subconscious is the word WHY. It is there all the time, and no science or subject can satisfy this WHY.
And one day you are taken to a kindergarten and you see how many other children there are. And they all have the WHY in their subconscious. You do not know that at all. How could you? How could you know how other children think and feel? In a way you feel a little lonely, because you are the only one with a WHY. You might even believe that you are the only one with a WHY.
And then a new question could pop up: Is there more to other children, than I can see? I cannot see the WHY on them – perhaps it is not there at all.
Here p4k comes in as a necessity.
Chapter Two
The Teachers of p4k
As soon as you are in the kindergarten, you see a lot of children, and they are all different. You really wonder, but they are wonderful to play with, and you have a good time.
Now we switch to the teacher of the kindergarten. She receives a lot of children, and they are all different. Her work is to prepare the children for growing up and learning. How does one do that, and where does p4k come in?
First the children must learn to be together in playing and in learning. These two concepts can be mixed in such a way, that the children feel, they play all the time. But the only way to do something important for the children is to try to touch the subconscious. Make a cosy corner, where you can spend some minutes talking about the story you have told the children or something that certainly pops up in the plays. Suddenly a child can, in the middle of the play, ask: “Why am I here?”, or “Who am I?”
Stop the playing and go to the cosy corner and have a talk about that. Do not push the children to a certain opinion, but listen to their statements and make the discussion run from there. Your role as a teacher is to make the children stay on the track. This can be done for a few minutes or sometimes longer, but you have in common touched their subconscious, and this will influence them forever. You cannot follow a manual line by line, because you never know, what their statements will be. It is up to you, and you have to see yourself as a mediator of this subconscious talk.
The talk you have had in the cosy corner will go directly into the children’s subconscious, which means that the dialogue in their minds will run from the subconscious to unconsciousness and consciousness. Try to make the children make some drawings of what the talk was about and make them tell stories of their own and so on. You are the one, who listens. Never ever correct them in this creative phase, because if you do that, you can spoil their subconscious and make them feel there, that they are not good enough. This must never happen.
In this way being together is a wonderful thing, because the children communicate subconsciously without knowing it. The best teaching is the subconscious teaching, and it can never be measured. In this way the teacher tries to help the children find themselves: You help them finding out what kind of personality they are, and this is the only way to grow up in harmony with oneself.
Chapter Three
Some Exercises for p4k
Thus, the key of making a mixture of experience, playing, and learning is the subconscious. There are many ways of impacting the subconscious. Let me give some examples:
Telling or reading stories
Every single child in this world loves to listen to good stories, and especially in the kindergarten stories are crucial, because listening carefully means to make the heart of the story flow into the subconscious. Some texts have a good story telling, some have not, and the children know the difference subconsciously. But you have to see, that all stories have philosophical strokes, and these strokes roll from the subconscious through unconsciousness to the conscious part of the child’s mind, which makes them come up with a question or a remark. Do let them, and send the remarks back to class with the question “Why do you see it like that” or “Does any of you know this experience.” Now it can be time for the cosy corner. But not always – sometimes it’s only “small talk”, which is important, too. But as soon you as a teacher feel, that there could be something philosophical here, you try to follow that track.
Let me give an example. You have read a story about a duck in the lake, which is hungry and therefore tries to make the people give it some bread. An old man does throw pieces of bread into the lake, and the duck rushes to get it. In the same moment you hear a shot, and the duck dies.
A non-philosophical remark could be: “My dad goes hunting sometimes, and he likes ducks.”
Do take a dialogue about hunting, about feeding animals, about lakes etc. Children can talk about these issues for a long time.
Suddenly you hear a question: “Where do all the lakes come from, and where do the ducks come from?”
Your choice is now to hand the question over to the class or to tell them about lakes, and how important water is for all of us. It is a question of intuition, what you choose.
But if the next question is: “Why should we feed ducks?” philosophy is there. Do we have a responsibility for Nature? Can Nature exist without us? Can we exist without Nature?
Now is the time for the cosy corner.
Listening to music
You can sing a song or you can listen to some music. And after that make the children make a drawing, which show what they feel, when they hear that music.
After that you can discuss the drawings and perhaps try to make the children explain, how they see the drawings. Maybe some of them can even make up a story from the drawing.
Try to make the dialogue run, and be careful to see, when it changes from “small talk” into philosophy. It can happen in a split of a second.
Example: “Fatma is so good when she draws.”
“Yes, because her father is so good.”
“My father cannot draw, but he can repair his house.”
“And my father can drive a car so fast.”
And then suddenly there is a remark: “I wonder if our dreams are like drawing. I mean, it’s all fantasy.”
There you go. The cosy corner again! The place where you go deep into the children’s subconscious. (Remember the first 4 columns of p4k)
Watching famous paintings
Take some prints of some famous paintings from your culture. Tell the children about the artist: Once upon a time there was a man, who lived in a poor village. Everybody laughed at him, because he could do nothing but paint. And so on : Tell about the painter’s exciting life and show the children some of his pictures and ask them: What do you think? What do you feel? What does it make you think of?
Do listen to the answers even if it starts with a “small talk”.
“You cannot live from painting.”
“No, it’s better to build houses and clean the streets.”
“My dad does that.”
And all of a sudden: “Why can some people paint and others not? What is fantasy after all?”
There you go: The cosy corner again!
This will improve the small children’s language: to try to make philosophical statements and express one’s own wondering, and discovering that we all wonder about something, and that we do not know everything. In all countries investigations have shown, that children, who have had these philosophical talks in the kindergarten and school, will be better readers, and they will forever think in a more profound way for the rest of their lives.
But we are not in the kindergarten to educate philosophers – we are there to use philosophy as a tool for the development of our dear children. The children should not be told the exact facts about certain philosophers, until they are 15. If we tell them too early, they will automatically think: Oh, this man spent a lot of years to think this through, so I do not have to do it. I am not clever enough.
See it this way: Every single child is his/her own philosopher and ends up at his/her own conclusions.
Allow me to bring a short text from John Dewey’s MY PEDAGOGICAL CREED. (This is the only philosopher I will refer to, as very few people have gone so deep into p4k as we do here).
I believe that
- all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feeling and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.
I believe that
- the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands, he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses, which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value, which they have, is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings, the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language, and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.
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Your role as a teacher in the kindergarten is so crucial, because you meet the children at a very early stage, and because your impact on their subconscious is so basic.
See it as an honour to be together with your children!
Chapter Four
Understanding
Understanding is not only understanding. Understanding can be intuitive and subconscious. Understanding can also be very conscious, because you want to understand things, which you are curious about. The younger the children are, the more subconscious their understanding is. Sometimes they do not even know that they learn things, because most of their lives is subconscious.
The kindergarten teacher impacts the children in many different ways. Emotions are involved, and they dwell in the subconscious, waiting for being awakened. When a teacher tells a good story, the children see images in their minds, very often not the images the writer of the story saw. We all have our own way of imagining things: it is a very subjective thing.
This means that if you have twenty children in the kindergarten, you have twenty different ways of emotional understanding, and as this emotional understand is a presupposition for the later logical understanding, the kindergarten teacher’s way of doing things in a philosophical way is crucial for the basis of the children’s future lives.
When you tell your children about certain facts, being it about a poet, who is important for your culture or being it some historical fact they have to know in your culture, you can try to do it the narrative way. This means, that you tell the children these facts as if it was a story. There will be a common understanding in class, and this common understanding penetrates to each single child’s subconscious, and in the moment you start talking about it, the golden stone of understanding runs in each child from its subconscious through the unconsciousness, until it reaches the consciousness. You call it learning without knowing that you do it. You could also call it instinctive learning.
The presupposition for doing this is that the teacher knows the children very well, and that she always is ready to listen to the children’s statements, and as soon as they are philosophical, you go into the cosy corner.
It can be difficult for some children to see what are real facts and what is fantasy or fiction. But p4k helps them to see the difference. If you do not have books written for p4c in your culture, you should find people who can write these: a good story with weak philosophical strokes. If you have such a book and remember the seven columns of p4k, you can be able to do so much for the youngest generation, that it could change the world for them.
I have met young people, who were told such stories when they were in kindergarten, and now, as they are twenty years old, they still remember. It is just so wonderful!
So do find that kind of stories or make somebody write them especially for kindergartens.
Chapter Five
The Golden Stone
The fourth column of p4k says, ”The teacher has to see the golden stone in each child.” And this golden stone has to be found and unveiled in the kindergarten, because, as the fifth column says, it is the foundation of the education, which every child will be confronted with. If the golden stone is not found and kept golden, learning will be tough for the child, tougher than it should be.
The golden stone in a child is a mixture of individuality, reasoning, and spirituality. These three elements have to be nourished through kindergarten, and it is very important, that the teachers are aware of this heavy task, which does not mean, that you as a teacher have to be an expert of all philosophers of the world, but that you use the positive side of yourself, which can be found in one’s own spirituality and individuality. Some of the remarks you hear from your children will make you experience, that you in the minutes of the conversation, be it “small talk” or a philosophical talk, recognize yourself as a child. You are not the adult person, who have answers to everything (column 7 for p4k), but you are a human being, who tries
to unfold things, which seem to be incomprehensible, but which are unveiled through dialogue.
The most profound part of the golden stone is spirituality, which dwells in every child in a subconscious way. The children do not consciously know that they have a spirit who is waiting to unfold itself, but the dialogues can show them. Spirituality has the power to create feelings like belonging, love, empathy, and friendship. Without spirituality these emotions could not occur.
But spirituality grows when it is allowed to grow in a group in which dialogue and empathetic listening is the key. It sounds difficult, but let me give an example:
The children have heard a story about flowers in a forest. These flowers talk together and wonder about how they came and where they are going after blossoming.
“Small talk”:
“My mom loves flowers. She picks them and puts them in a vase.”
“So does my mom.”
“And my grandma dries them and uses them as bookmarks, as she loves to read.”
“But I can’t understand that a seed can grow into a beautiful flower.”
There you go: Into the cosy corner – because this is spirituality. Have a good time in the cosy corner, listen to the statements of the children, and build up your questions on these. In this way you ripen the golden stone of spirituality, and you are the mediator of this crucial development in the children.
Individuality is part of the spirituality. For a small child life is like a dream or a fairy tale. It can be difficult to find one’s own subjectivity in this age. But again: Make the children draw each other and compare the drawings. The running question is: Is that the way you see me – or is that the way I see myself? Make the children make small stories about their drawings. Tell the little girl: Imagine that you are a princess in the land of beauty. One day a prince comes up to you, asking for bread, as he has lost his money.
“Small talk”:
“I would like to be a princess just for one day.”
“And I wouldn’t give you any bread.”
“I would give you money instead.”
“I dreamt that I was a princess of this country.”
“Who gave you that dream?”
There you go: it’s time for the cosy corner again. Maybe dreams are parts of our individuality, maybe our spirituality. Children love to tell about their dreams. Do listen to them, try to come in with some small questions like “Where do dreams go, when we wake up?” “Do they jump into another person?” “Are the dreams more me, than when I’m awake?” “Can you decide what to dream during the next night?”
Do take their statements seriously, as you are right now unveiling the golden stone of childhood and the golden stone of the subconscious and spiritual glow, which can now make its way into the unconscious part of the mind and its way to consciousness. This is the way to grow up spiritually and individually.
Reasoning is an important part of our society, but I think it is not the right interpretation, as logics occurred when mankind thought, that everything in this world is measurable. I do not think it is like that – most of the concepts of human life cannot be measured. That is the reason why p4c cannot be measured. You cannot make a test to see, what the child has learnt, how subconscious it is, or how philosophical it is.
But the teachers of the kindergarten know, because it is a thing you can feel intuitively. Children very often say: “What a lovely day we had yesterday!” That was the day we had such a good conversation in the cosy corner. Or they could say: “What a good story!” Or: “It was just so lovely to make these drawings!”
Then you know that you and your children have “polished” the golden stone.
And the golden stone will shine forever in the children’s lives!
Chapter Six
Culture, History, and Philosophy: The Ancient Treasure
When you start in the kindergarten as a small child, you have some upbringing from your parents, but you do not know, what kind of culture you are living in, i.e. you do not know what the background for exactly your culture is. Hence the curiosity and the thousands of questions, which children naturally have.
It is a heavy task for the teacher in kindergarten to sort out which questions are the most profound bearers of the culture. What is tradition, what is history, and what is just an accidental habit?
Again: here philosophy can help, because is the basis of all cultures in the world. Philosophy goes way back in history and was the first “science”. Out of philosophy grew a lot of sciences, a lot of traditions, a lot of habits and a lot of cultures. It is rather complicated for children, so as a teacher you should simplify things. P4k is not there to complicate things, but to enlighten them.
Thus, you can still use stories, and it might be a good idea to find writers in your culture to write small and easy texts dealing with the history of your culture. These texts should have a story telling beside the historic elements. It is not at all easy, and only a few writers can do it. The reason is that the texts should help the children to put the right questions in the right age. So in a way, p4k is also learning to come up with the right questions. You as a teacher should teach the children to question about the world, they are living in, and slowly you move with them into the heart of your culture.
Example: Such a text could tell a story about some children playing in the playground. One of the children has a habit of always bringing paper and pencils, and they start their play with drawing some of the buildings near the playground and then trying to invent a new game. Suddenly an old man appears on the playground. He is a story teller, and he tells the children about the buildings, which talk together every night, when the children have gone home. The children like the man so much that they invite him to play with them, and in the moment he starts playing, he turns into a small boy, and they all have a happy day.
“Small talk”:
“I would like to meet this man.”
“My uncle is a little bit like that.”
“And my uncle builds new houses, because he loves the beauty of the building.”
Now is the time for the cosy corner, because we are close to something historical and something philosophical: Beauty as such, and history of buildings.
Take a talk about some buildings in your town or city and ask the children, which one they find extremely beautiful and ask them why.
Perhaps one child says, “I love this building, because I know it is very old and so many people have passed it before I was born.”
This is the time to tell the children about this building, its history, and its beauty. Then make the children make a drawing of this building, and do praise the drawings, and teach the children the name of the building, and let them write it on the drawing. Then show them the word “beauty” and make them write that on the drawing, too. Then hang up all the drawings in class and you will have a lot to talk about the following days.
Key questions:
What is beauty?
What is age?
What is history?
Do we like our country because of its beauty? Or?
Can you imagine, how our culture was a thousand years ago?
Let them discuss this – and then tell them what you know and what you wonder about.
This is one of the ways to make the golden stone in the children glow and simultaneously tell them small bits of history. This is why p4k is there!!
Chapter Seven
Importance of p4k
Science has shown us, that only 20% of the brain is fully developed, when we are born. The rest of the brain will develop during the next 10-12 years. This can only mean that a child’s future is dependent on, what happens to it during the first ten years. Thus, p4k is so crucial, that it is a riddle that nobody thought about it since ancient
The reason could be that logics took the power in ancient philosophy, and ethics, metaphysics were forgotten, mostly because these concepts are immeasurable. Modern society is only focused on what can be measured, and this does so much harm to children, that it is a scandal. There have been so many pedagogues during the times, but never ever did they see the importance of p4k. Unbelievable!
And especially in kindergarten p4k should be there all the time. And now society grows more and more digital which could end up with, that we forget to talk with one another, and that all schooling runs over the internet.
Thus, if you are a kindergarten teacher, you have the key to your children’s future – a golden key to the golden stone of childhood. Therefore, it is also your task to tell the parents of the children, why you do p4k with them. Tell them why it is so important to show the children how to put questions about the most crucial issues of Life. Tell them that the divine light of childhood can make wonders when interpreted through p4k. Tell them that only through comprehending of one’s own spirituality you can reach empathy, on which all human life is built. Tell the parents about the statements you have heard from your children, and do tell them how crucial it is to help the children put questions to the heart of Life. Tell them that if you took out the most profound thoughts of every pedagogue in the world and took away the superfluous words, we would land at the golden lines: Children are the bearers of the future of their culture, and this task has to have a philosophical perspective.
Try to read some of the stories you have read for the children and ask the parents for statements about the philosophical issues. Tell that p4k can collect the experience of all former generations in one little stone of childhood if handled in the right way. Help the parents to have small p4k conversations with their children, maybe by giving them this very text.
First there was the wondering.
Then came the questioning.
Then came common understanding and individual understanding.
Then came the consciousness of spirituality and comprehension of one’s own culture.
Then came the empathy, which takes its power from the golden stone that dwells in all children.
Then you can grow mature with a p4k perspective.
I think this is so important that p4k should be introduced in teachers’ education as a main subject. In this way mankind can grow mature in the children, who are able to make the thoughts from the subconscious run through unconsciousness to consciousness: they know who they are, what they are here for, and what the divine life is meant to be.
Epilogue
Seven Philosophical Golden Columns for The Maturity of Small Children
In the first time of mankind, you see a man standing at the beach, looking at the setting sun. In his mind rolls the stream of thinking: Why is the sun there, and where is it, when the darkness comes? He is the only man in his tribe to think exactly this thought, because not far from him you find another man, wondering about a palm tree, close to thinking: who put it here or how can it grow bigger?
Column One: Every child is unique.
None of us is completely alike. Mankind has the same diversity as Nature, and the very thinking is unique for each of us. Thus, every single child is a new child, who has never been on Earth before and will never be.
The man at the beach meets the man at the palm tree, and they exchange their thinking. Both of them wonder about these thoughts, take each other’s hand, expressing their recognition of their common thoughts.
Column Two: The uniqueness has to be respected.
Even our deepest thinking is unique, and we cannot build up a culture without respecting the different ways of thinking. There can never be a kindergarten or class in schools without this common respect.
A wise man from the tribe comes up to the two men, listening to their wondering, and slowly he tries to find other strange things in the first mankind: Where is the moon at the daytime, where do the stars come from, what is the difference between sand and rocks? The two men ask the wise man for an explanation, but he answers back: What about birds: Why can they fly, when we cannot?
Column Three: The pedagogy circles around this uniqueness.
The basis of doing pedagogy with even small children is this very uniqueness. Without recognition of it you can not teach profoundly, but only show children how to learn by heart without any understanding. The wonder has gone.
The wise man tells the two men a story about a diamond, which was placed upon a trunk of a tree. And the three men draw this diamond in the sand, take each other’s hand and dance around the image. And the wise man says: No diamonds are alike – each of us has his own diamond. This is the very reason for Life.
Column Four: The teacher has to see the golden stone in each child.
The golden stone is the subconscious spirituality in each child. There can be no childhood without this stone, and the teacher should make it shine, beaming from the subconscious through the unconscious to the conscious. In this way you can build an atmosphere in class, which is a presupposition for having a culture and a society.
One day the whole tribe comes to the wise man. They start dancing around the image of the diamond, and they ask the wise man to tell them a lot of stories, filled up with flowering words and wondering concepts.
Column Five: This golden stone bears the education.
Modern teaching can only succeed, if it starts in the child’s subconscious. Otherwise it would be “heartless” teaching and “empty education”, on which a rich culture cannot be built.
After some time the tribe meet every day with the wise man, and they have drawn hundreds of images in the sand of lots of different diamonds. And the wise man steps from image to image, telling new stories, and the two men simultaneously whisper in joy, “Our diamond has grown. We feel it, we love it, we live!
Column Six: The teacher is the mediator of the development of the golden stone.
In kindergarten children can intuitively feel their subconscious beaming through unconsciousness to consciousness. It is a wonderful feeling, and there are no words for it. This makes the children say different things like “I love our teacher”, “I love to be in kindergarten”, “I like the stories we are told and the drawings we make”, “My dreams change and I like that.”
And one day the tribe asks the wise man; “You are so wise, so please tell us where the sun is when it is night?” And he smiles and answers, “The sun is where you think it is. But you know that it will come again the day after. This is the happiness we share.” And they discuss in the tribe, dance around the images of the diamonds, and start singing a tune they have never known before.
Column Seven: In p4k the teacher is not a person who knows everything, but the one who brings wisdom from child to child.
If you do p4k as shown in these chapters you can feel sure, that you have done something precious for your children.
And this preciousness will last forever and stay in the children forever, and they will never forget you.
WHY I AM THE ONE I AM
by Per Jespersen
When I was a small boy, my parents were never there. I was alone most of the time, except for my beloved Grandma, who looked after me, washed my clothes and told me to behave properly.
And so I did. But I spent many hours with some adult neighbours, who lived in the same street. There was a man, who knew everything about butterflies, and I loved to be with him in the forests to see these divine creatures. And there was a man, who cut holy pictures in wood, and he taught me to do the same. And there was a nice small girl, whose parents were my neighbours, and we played in her garden and loved one another.
So my mind was full of thoughts, which I could not cope with alone. Therefore, I talked with Grandma about it, and we had long, severe, and profound dialogues, and I felt it was a pleasure to share my circling thoughts with a grandma, I loved. She was a firm believer – she had her own opinions – and she was very steadfast. But she was always ready to listen to my points of view, and she always gave me answers, which my young mind could cope with.
When I came to school later, I met a teacher, who was a little like my Grandma: He had his own opinions, but he was always ready to listen to his students’ statements. He never gave us any homework, but he was the man, who really taught me a lot in his own indirect way. Never ever will I forget him!
I finished school when I was nineteen. It was happy day – but it was a sad day, too: I would never see my beloved teacher again. I started my new education as a forester and loved to live in the forests of my country, wondering about Nature and its divinity.
After four years I decided to go to a Teachers’ High School, and it happened again: I met the most gorgeous teacher in literature, I had ever met. He apparently knew everything about literature, and he taught us how to write good stories. Oh, we were all sure, that we were going to be famous writers one day.
I started as a teacher on a small school and had the same children from first till seventh grade. I was not a teacher, but a friend of them, and they were my most sincere friends. It is a long time ago, but we still see each other, and they have told me, that they will never forget the stories, I wrote for them. These stories were philosophical, and we had a philosophical dialogue every single day. And they still remember! These small texts were the first p4c-texts to be published in my country, and they are still very much used all over the country and on “The Reading Line”, which is my consultation for illiterate children
All this could happen only because I met these splendid people. The philosophy came from a theologian, whom I met in our capital. Again: he had his own steadfast opinions, but he was always ready to listen to his students. Through him I got my Ph.D. in theology.
I would never be the one I am without having met these people. I have just been so lucky. Imagine: I have published 110 books in many countries, and I have lectured on p4c in all continents.
And it should happen again: I met Haleh Rezaei, and this meeting grew into the book about p4k you have read now. We both hope, that you enjoyed it, and we do hope, that it will turn out for the good of children.
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MY VIEW
by
Haleh Rezaei
I have always loved to be together with children, maybe because we are all children inside. All my thoughts have been dedicated to children. As I see it, children cannot live their lives without our love and our recognizing the thinking children have.
There have been great men and women in our past, who knew how to teach children to learn. Every period of time has had its own way of teaching, but it had always had the red thread of love and devotion. This counts for the great philosophers of Ancient Greece (Socrates and Plato),
There is a red thread from ancient times till now, and I see the children of to-day as bearers of the future for any culture in the world. This text is launched in humility for the eternity, dwelling in every child. We both hope that this text will help kindergarten teachers of the whole world.
This text will be published in Farsi in
http://p4cp4c.googlepages.com/basictextsforkindergartens
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