The Parent is Always Wrong
Thomas Wartenberg, A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children's Literature
Wiley-Blackwell, 176pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780470656832
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
The guiding idea of Sneetch is that philosophy is connected to childhood via children’s ‘innate inquisitiveness’, their ‘Why? Why? Why?’ questioning. And that picture books – like Dr Seuss’ The Sneetches – capture philosophical issues and can be used by parents to cultivate philosophical questioning. It’s an idea in the tradition of Gareth Matthews’ seminal 1980 book Philosophy and the Young Child. Matthews presented evidence that young children ask questions that are recognisably philosophical like ‘how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’ Connecting philosophy to children’s natural philosophising has produced educational organisations dedicated to teaching philosophy to children, such as the Philosophy Foundation in the UK. And this book holds the advantage that Wartenberg writes as a practitioner too.
The book is divided into 16 chapters each dedicated to a picture book that introduces a philosophical issue, from metaphysics (via Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon) to existentialism (via The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater). These are examined in a broadly analytical manner, but with references introduced to relevant historical schools and figures linked to a glossary (and with more detailed reference material in text boxes). Each chapter ends with two or three sentences subtitled ‘Discussing with children’ suggesting some initial questions that might instigate a philosophical discussion. So for ethics, Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allord is used to introduce the philosophical problem of ends justifying means; and the parent-reader is then introduced to Kant and deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Hegel and Hobbes. The section on ethics ends with suggestions about how to start discussing the morality of deception with children. So a parent can ask whether it’s ever right to deceive someone, in the way Miss Nelson in the picture book deceives her class to get them to behave.
Wartenberg’s approach differs then from Jostein Gaarder's 1994 bestseller Sophie's World, where the parent-child philosophical relation is essentially one between teacher and student, and more fundamentally the education is in the history of philosophy. Sneetch seeks to cultivate philosophical reflection itself. This attempt to encourage thinking is laudable in terms John Stuart Mill famously expressed reflecting on his ‘hothouse’ childhood. Mill noted that cramming – the simple accumulation of other people’s thoughts – left him ‘generally slack in matters of daily life’, so that he was trained to know but not to do, and that was a source of regret. By contrast, ‘aids and appliances of thought’ – broadly philosophical logic – had helped him in later life to dissect bad arguments and to use language clearly.
Mill’s experiences support a philosophical education during childhood in ‘precise thinking’. Sneetch certainly intends to be such an ‘aid and appliance’ but the book’s format tends to the idea still that a parent needs to ‘know some philosophy’ – along the lines of a conventional undergraduate introduction to philosophy course – before they can start doing philosophy with their children. It makes us think that the work of ‘discussing philosophy’ needs careful attention and skill, perhaps uniquely that of professionals in the field if it’s not to drift into some version of cramming the history of Western philosophy. Or can thinking be cultivated without the history of philosophy creeping in? Mill’s experiences suggest that perhaps only one of Wartenberg’s 16 chapters will support an education in thinking – in B. Wiseman’s Morris the Moose we’re introduced to reasoning as a subject of philosophical logic through the mistakes Morris makes in falsely concluding that a cow is a moose because it has four legs, a tail and horns.
So a nagging doubt remains about the true nature of children’s questioning and more particularly about how parents, all of us, should cultivate it. Alice’s curiosity leads her down the rabbit-hole and into Wonderland. But when the Ugly Duchess keeps repeating ‘and the moral of that is…’ Alice ventures that perhaps there isn’t always one and, finally exasperated and worried by the Duchess’ threat to say even more, states ‘I’ve a right to think’. Is introducing philosophy to young children (rather than teenagers say) via picture books like the uncomfortable jab of the Duchess’ pointy chin into Alice – perhaps not crudely moralistic but still something too close for comfort, a 21st century analogue? The Bohemians would think so: parents should ‘eschew good intentions’ concluded the artist Gwen Raverat reflecting on her late Victorian-Edwardian Cambridge childhood, a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin subject to theories about her best upbringing. And why? Because ‘the parent is always wrong’: always, in any true wonderland.
The book is divided into 16 chapters each dedicated to a picture book that introduces a philosophical issue, from metaphysics (via Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon) to existentialism (via The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater). These are examined in a broadly analytical manner, but with references introduced to relevant historical schools and figures linked to a glossary (and with more detailed reference material in text boxes). Each chapter ends with two or three sentences subtitled ‘Discussing with children’ suggesting some initial questions that might instigate a philosophical discussion. So for ethics, Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allord is used to introduce the philosophical problem of ends justifying means; and the parent-reader is then introduced to Kant and deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Hegel and Hobbes. The section on ethics ends with suggestions about how to start discussing the morality of deception with children. So a parent can ask whether it’s ever right to deceive someone, in the way Miss Nelson in the picture book deceives her class to get them to behave.
Wartenberg’s approach differs then from Jostein Gaarder's 1994 bestseller Sophie's World, where the parent-child philosophical relation is essentially one between teacher and student, and more fundamentally the education is in the history of philosophy. Sneetch seeks to cultivate philosophical reflection itself. This attempt to encourage thinking is laudable in terms John Stuart Mill famously expressed reflecting on his ‘hothouse’ childhood. Mill noted that cramming – the simple accumulation of other people’s thoughts – left him ‘generally slack in matters of daily life’, so that he was trained to know but not to do, and that was a source of regret. By contrast, ‘aids and appliances of thought’ – broadly philosophical logic – had helped him in later life to dissect bad arguments and to use language clearly.
Mill’s experiences support a philosophical education during childhood in ‘precise thinking’. Sneetch certainly intends to be such an ‘aid and appliance’ but the book’s format tends to the idea still that a parent needs to ‘know some philosophy’ – along the lines of a conventional undergraduate introduction to philosophy course – before they can start doing philosophy with their children. It makes us think that the work of ‘discussing philosophy’ needs careful attention and skill, perhaps uniquely that of professionals in the field if it’s not to drift into some version of cramming the history of Western philosophy. Or can thinking be cultivated without the history of philosophy creeping in? Mill’s experiences suggest that perhaps only one of Wartenberg’s 16 chapters will support an education in thinking – in B. Wiseman’s Morris the Moose we’re introduced to reasoning as a subject of philosophical logic through the mistakes Morris makes in falsely concluding that a cow is a moose because it has four legs, a tail and horns.
So a nagging doubt remains about the true nature of children’s questioning and more particularly about how parents, all of us, should cultivate it. Alice’s curiosity leads her down the rabbit-hole and into Wonderland. But when the Ugly Duchess keeps repeating ‘and the moral of that is…’ Alice ventures that perhaps there isn’t always one and, finally exasperated and worried by the Duchess’ threat to say even more, states ‘I’ve a right to think’. Is introducing philosophy to young children (rather than teenagers say) via picture books like the uncomfortable jab of the Duchess’ pointy chin into Alice – perhaps not crudely moralistic but still something too close for comfort, a 21st century analogue? The Bohemians would think so: parents should ‘eschew good intentions’ concluded the artist Gwen Raverat reflecting on her late Victorian-Edwardian Cambridge childhood, a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin subject to theories about her best upbringing. And why? Because ‘the parent is always wrong’: always, in any true wonderland.