Once more about critical thinking or How not to kill the philosopher in a child

Abstract

The article is a review of the book “Sophie’s World: A novel about the history of philosophy” by Jostein Gaarder (translated from the Norwegian by Natalia Ivanychuk. Lviv: Litopys, 2020. 576 p.). The world remains something fantastic and even mysterious and mystical for a child and for a philosopher. Children are natural philosophers. This methodological instruction is relevant because it guides the educational process towards the disclosure of the child’s individual nature taking into account his or her opportunities, abilities and needs.

It is important to understand learning as an active process of constructing new knowledge and stimulating reflection on the methods and techniques of cognitive activity of subjects of education. Achieving the goal in knowledge is possible on the condition that a person is open to the world he or she knows.

The correspondence and dialogues of the mysterious philosopher and Sophie present the problems of relations between children and parents, issues of inequality in the world, causes and sources of poverty, factors of gender inequality and ways to overcome it, concerns on the development of tolerance and the value system, determine the peculiarities of the human worldview, problems of ecology and protection environment etc. The search for answers to modern problems should be based not only on the facts of the present, but also on the reasoning of the thinkers of the past.

Jostein Gaarder presents a new perspective on the social purpose of education, which consists in understanding education as a practice of freedom, a means of human emancipation through the formation of critical thinking and becoming a citizen who is able to realize his or her place in the world and further contribute to the creation of a society based on democratic principles. Accordingly, the innovative character of education is determined by what new it can offer to society and human, as much as it shows the ability to work ahead of time. This sphere is designed to create a space for the development of thoughts, and not to act exclusively as a consumer of its results. The task of education is not so much to teach how to think about things as they are, but to focus attention on how they can change and what features they can acquire in the future. The determining factor in the educational process is focusing attention not on the common, identical, regular, but rather on the distinctive, unique, and singular. Implementing the reform of thinking in educational activities is possible under the condition of eliminating the authority of generally accepted rules, prescriptions, and standards.