The Role of Questioning in Teaching Philosophy for Children

Abstract

The work is dealing with the role of questioning within the conversational method, used in Philosophy for children lessons. At the beginning, we give emphasis to the question, questioning and philosophy as the origin of all other sciences, then we stress out the advantages of teaching Philosophy for children, focus on a specific conversational method, used in this lessons, stress out the role of questions within the given method and finally describe the Socratic method of questioning as an important factor of the conversational method in Philosophy for children. We find that questions are crucial in acquiring new knowledge. Children use them to actively and individually participate in establishing their own knowledge base and thus gain lasting knowledge as well as learn about the ways of acquiring new information. This is the main advantage of the specific learning way within the subject Philosophy for children, which should also be followed within other school subjects.