Philosophical Inquiry with Children: The Development of an Inquiring Society in Australia, Edited by Gilbert Burgh and Simone Thornton. London, UK: Routledge, 2018

When a novel educational method is introduced, it soon travels to other countries. Certain methods fail to fit into some educational systems, administrations, and cultures, but others are welcomed by many educational practitioners and scholars to support existing educational needs and expectations. Philosophy for Children (P4C), originally developed in the U.S., can be located somewhere between these two trends. It has received great attention from scholars and practitioners alike as an innovative educational method to promote students’ critical and creative thinking. However, it has presented contextualized obstacles, which philosophers, teachers, and practitioners have made considerable efforts to deal with when they have attempted to introduce P4C into their own environments. There are some important books describing P4C in specific contexts, but their attention is usually paid to the way in which P4C creates a change in educational method and content and fits into a specific curriculum (e.g., Lewis & Chandley 2012). On the other hand, the book Philosophical Inquiry with Children: The Development of an Inquiring Society in Australia (Gilbert Burgh and Simone Thornton, 2018) describes how P4C has presented both opportunities and challenges for Australian society and how practitioners and researchers have jointly re-designed their own P4C practices. The book is not just a history book. Nor is it a book claiming a success story. Rather, what makes the book pathbreaking is that it shows how P4C has created an educational movement in Australia. Over the past 30 years, Australian P4C advocators have collaboratively dealt with countless educational, institutional, cultural, and political challenges. In doing so they have co-designed various strategies and approaches to innovate and renovate their own P4C style: the so-called Philosophy in Schools. Against this backdrop, this review aims to illustrate how P4C has created an educational movement in the Australian context. Philosophy for Children, widely known as P4C, which was pioneered by Matthew Lipman and a group of philosophers in the 1970s in the U.S., is known as a dialogue-based pedagogical practice in which students sit in a circle with their teacher (or a facilitator) and engage in collaborative inquiry based on open-ended philosophical questions (e.g., What is freedom?). Philosophical inquiry is different from conversation and debate because it focuses on collaborative and cooperative reason−exchange, including presenting reasons, assisting each other in drawing inferences from unsupported opinions and from what has been said, and seeking to identify one another’s assumptions. The overarching theme of the book is the way in which P4C created an educational movement in Australia. To illustrate this, the book is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 of the book (Chapter 1 to 5), “The Development of Philosophy for Children in Australia,” illustrates how P4C arrived in Australia from the U.S., drawing on key contributors’ experiences. Although they faced a series of obstacles (and even objections), their grassroots efforts subsequently enabled researchers, practitioners, philosophers, and teachers to deal with the challenges through collective and collaborative means. Inspired by Lipman, some philosophers, particularly Laurance Splitter and Jennifer Glaser, started to expand the reach of P4C in Australia. Their attempts, which are recalled in Chapter 1, have created the foundation of today’s Philosophy in Schools movement across Australia. Non-profit organisations were established (e.g., the Australian Institute of Philosophy for Children [IAPC]), teacher-trainer workshops were organised, and P4C was introduced into Australian schools and universities. More importantly, Splitter and Glaser discuss some of the problems they faced at the infant stage of Australian P4C. These included, for example, the controversy between P4C advocates and “academic” philosophers on what counts as philosophy (Is this philosophy?); limited support for teachers (Can I practice P4C in my classroom …