نشریه فلسفه و کودک
پیاپی 3 (پاییز 1392)

Non-formal logic is a part of ancient logic. In this field, emphasis is placed on the matter of reasoning and techniques that a thinker or logician must resort to in order to evaluate the truth of the common claims of normal and chosen people or present a statement in conformity with rules. The present paper intends to show that the teachings of this logic, particularly those related to the discussion of the five-fold techniques (argument, sermon, dialectics, sophism, and poetry), which deal with multiple methods of philosophy, could be very useful in teaching philosophy to children and their familiarity with various forms of thinking and the critical and creative evaluation of other’s views.

The content-based approach to P4C seeks the teaching of the philosophical concepts existing in the history of philosophy to children. In this approach, a kind of content is considered for philosophy which can be found and explored and some aspects of which can be scrutinized. However, philosophical content is incomprehensible not only to children but also to some adults. In order to enable children to understand the content, we can simplify them. Some examples in this regard include Philosophy: The Classics by Nigel Warburton (1960), The Pleasures of Philosophy by Will Durant (1953), The Story of Philosophy by Bryan Magee (1998), A Young Person’s Guide for Philosophy by Jeremy Weate (1998), 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupré (2007), and Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. All these works follow a content-based approach to philosophy for children. Such an approach can also be seen in Qissat al-ghurbat al-gharbiyyah (Hay Ibn Yaqzan). Through benefitting from (sometimes) scattered philosophical thoughts and propounding the existing views in philosophical schools, this approach aims to form a coherent body of knowledge by familiarizing children with philosophers’ thoughts.

In this paper, the writer has tried to provide a semantic analysis of three apparently synonymous and virtually different terms of “philosophy”, “wisdom”, and “reason” in two different paradigms or lifestyles, i.e. Greek-western and Iranian-Islamic paradigms. He has also tried to explore and reveal their hidden angles as much as possible and, at the same time, disclosed the shortcomings of teaching philosophy to children relying on philosophical teachings and methods intended for children. Thinking or the teaching of rationality in the Iranian-Islamic lifestyle is different from that in the Greek-western lifestyle. Accordingly, the dauntless translation of western works in the field of philosophy and children, although necessary in the right place, is not enough. At the end, the writer suggests that, today, instead of using the phrase “philosophy and children”, which is greatly widespread and has a Greek root, it is better to use to more meaningful expression of “wisdom and children”. In fact, we need to develop a new plan for the teaching of wisdom and not philosophy, which has a Greek background, to children and young adolescents.

Game is any activity that leads to joy, entertainment, and pleasure. For children, they are natural tools for “self-expression” and provoke their thoughts, result in new experiences, and make them excited. The Holy Prophet (s) says, “A young child should be naughty and energetic.” Imam Ali (a) also states, “One who is obsessed with playing games will have a happy life in future”. Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi also believes that playing is a means to attaining physical and mental health. Playing games has several advantages for children including physical, social, moral, and therapeutic ones. One of the most important factors underlying children’s moral training is playing. In this way, we can teach many moral concepts and values to them. Although they become familiar with moral values at home and school, their internalization and fixation is reinforced more strongly through playing. Children find out that if they want to be a good person in a game, they need to be honest and fair. A child who becomes a policeman and tries to arrest a thief, in fact, confirms ethical principles. Therefore, unlike what some parents believe, playing is not a waste of time for children. Rather, it helps them to turn into human beings. In this paper, the writer has tried to explore the role of playing in the internalization of ethical values in children.

The purpose of the present research was to examine the effects of teaching learning strategies in eight fields of mental review of basic assignments, mental review of complex assignments, expansion of simple assignment, expansion of complex assignments, organization in simple assignments, organization of complex assignments, supervision of comprehension, and the affective process of motivation on the creative thinking of fifth grade primary school students. To this end, 364 fifth grade female students were chosen through the multilevel cluster sampling procedure from five geographical districts in Tehran in 2011-2012. The design of the research was quasi-experimental with a pretest and a posttest given to two control and experimental groups. The data collection instruments consisted of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), including 60 items measuring the participants’ creativity, and a questionnaire of learning strategies constructed by Basiri in 1996 based on the cognitive theories of Weinstein and Mayer. The questionnaire consisted of 36 items and was given to the participants both before and after the treatment. The members of the experimental group participated in three 60-minute instructional courses on learning strategies. After the treatment period, the two experimental and control groups were compared with each other. The findings indicated that instruction had had a statistically significant effect on improving the creative thinking of the students in the experimental group.

Through placing the rational faculty in the nature of human’s beings, Almighty God has created them in a way to be intrinsically thinking beings. Moreover, He has considered many of the teachings in relation to rationality in His eternal miracle and last descended gift to humanity, the Holy Qur’an. Thought and wisdom are among the basic concepts in Islam, and the Infallible Imams (a), the proofs of Truth on Earth, have also emphasized the necessity of training and nurturing them. By rationality, we mean the collection of principles that are necessary for training human thought. These principles pertain to correct educational methods, the appropriate age for learning, useful and constructive sciences, etc. Rationality is directly related to teaching and training, which is why it plays a key role in the formation of children’s character. They are also among the constructing elements of the family system and have a noteworthy effect on creating a healthy and influential society. Therefore, familiarity with children’s manner of rationality is of prime importance in authentic Islamic sources and is a topic demanding more research.

The present study aims to present a solution for an essential change of sciences and expansion of sciences of an Islamic nature. Accordingly, based on the philosophical principles of the Transcendent Philosophy, the writer provides a definition of the nature of an Islamic science and describes the inconsistency between the scientific trend dominating the world and this view of science. Moreover, he suggests the necessity of programming for teaching the Transcendent Philosophy from childhood as an introduction to Islamicizing sciences. This study, which has been conducted following a library, inferential, and analytic method, clarifies the nature of Islamic sciences and explores the effects of some of the philosophical principles of the Transcendent Philosophy (for example, the theory of copulative existence and individual unity) on the quality of the individuation of the subject of a science, characteristics of its problems, the quality of removing the mask of atheistic nature from the face of sciences, and the appearance of their divine aspects. In this way, the writer concludes that the beginning of teaching the Transcendent Philosophy from childhood provides learners with a good understanding of the most general ontological principles. As a result, when connoting scientific propositions in various sciences, children will emit philosophical behaviors following a divine approach, and their view of the subject of sciences will gradually be corrected. Moreover, they will consider each of the issues and studies explored in different sciences as a research on the appearance of the Truth and one of His Acts. In this way, all sciences, such as empirical, human, and technical ones, will develop a religious and Islamic nature.