One of the aims of philosophy with children is to make the children more tolerant - at least that was one of our aims in the Swedish project. The methods of doing philosophy with children are deliberately formed to make the children more open to new solutions, to see problems from different angles, to respect their classmates and to appreciate the points of their views.

This might easily lead the children to accept the idea that philosophical questions have no true answers that each opinion is of equal value. And this worries me, because I do not believe that it is true.

It seems to me as if the children involved in our project initially were trying to conceive philosophy according to the patterns of other school disciplines: there must be ordinary things to learn. Questions could be answered by referring to facts. As time went by they found that this was not the case and they tried to delimit philosophical questions by a tolerance criterion. Philosophical questions are such that they have no given answers. The step from this to the idea that there are no true answers to philosophical questions or that the truth is relative to person is not so long.

But if they take this step the kids have gained in tolerance but lost in critical thinking. It is true that they might be able to criticize false authorities and look through pretentious claims to have found the truth. But at the same time they may loose their curiosity: why ask questions which have no true answers (or at least you cannot come to know the true answers)? If several answers are equally good, why bother about the answers? You can just keep to your own prejudices, since each opinion is as good as every other.

Finding tendencies of this kind in our material bothered us. But we soon found that these kinds of ideas were flourishing also in classes, which had not had any philosophy on their schedule. When presented with a philosophical problem - personal identity, moral questions, the possibility of travelling in time or some such problem - they tended to be at least as tolerant and relativistic as "our" children.

So it seems as if some kind of programmatic tolerance is part of the modern culture. It would be very interesting to know if this is typical of the modern world or if it is a feature only of some Northern European countries, perhaps peculiar to Sweden?

And some utterances of the philosophically trained children give us some hope that at least some of them are able to distinguish between tolerance and relativism:

"She may say what she wants, but if you are to tell the truth, you cannot say like she does", said a girl in grade 3. As it happened this same girl in the first grade said things like "I thought that the girls were supposed to keep together!" when another girl had questioned something she had said. And another pupil argued vigorously and stringently for one particular conclusion to a philosophical question in the 6th grade. And he seems quite clear about the fact that if his idea is correct then the opposite cannot be true.

Nonetheless it seems to me that there is an inherent problem in philosophy with children: how to combine tolerance toward other persons with a respect for truth?

Of course there is no logical connection between tolerance, relativism, and skepticism.

'Tolerance' as I use the word refers to attitudes towards people. A tolerant person does not try to force anyone to accept some truths and do not despise people who accept opinions or beliefs different from her own. This does not mean, however, that the tolerant person believes that these different ideas are correct: a tolerant Muslim for example accepts as true that there is just one God, Allah, but does not chase those who believe that there are other gods or that there are no gods at all. The non-tolerant fundamentalist on the other hand tries to force others to accept the truths he himself accepts, and if arguments fail he is even prepared to use force or threat of force to get others convinced of the same things as he himself is convinced. So far, so good. Of course there is no necessary connection between tolerance and relativism and skepticism.

But let me sketch a map that may explain how you could get from respect and tolerance to skepticism. Once we have the distinctions clear, we might be able to point out to our pupils the difference between these standpoints and so make them more aware of the differences and problems in this field.

When a child comes to know that no one knows for sure the answer to a certain problem, she might come to doubt that there is an answer. Or if several answers are accepted as possible, she might think that these answers are true relative to some persons, to some conceptual framework, to some evaluations or suchlike, that is, she might become a relativist of a kind. Or if no one knows the answer, how can we be sure that there is one? That is she might become a skeptic.

As a matter of fact, I myself have been playing with the same thoughts. Working with philosophy with children for ten years I have observed that almost any proposed standpoint to a classical philosophical problem is represented in a normal class of 25 children. If the community of philosophers does not tend towards consensus on fundamental questions, and there is no trace of development of the kind Piaget sought in philosophical thinking - that is no philosophical standpoint is per se more mature than another, is there any hope of progress in philosophy?

If philosophy with children makes not only the young participants but the adult ones relativists or skeptics, is this something to worry about? After all this might be the truth. In other words is it justified to talk about the dangers of philosophy with children when considering this kind of effects? First I must once more underline that the data on which I base my worries are very uncertain - we have discussed philosophical question with 150 children or thereabout. And as I said: not only the children who were trained in philosophy regularly for three years show the tendency towards relativism, but also children from the reference groups. Nonetheless these latter children were presented with some philosophical problems and then said things that seem easy to interpret as signs of relativistic standpoints as far as such problems are concerned. In other words just to introduce children to philosophical problems and discussing them might make them prone to think that such questions lack objectively justifiable answers.

But if so, is this something to worry about? Yes, I think so. I have three arguments for this:

1. First, it seems to me that there are inherent problems with relativism which make me think that relativism cannot be true. It is possible that these problems can be solved. But as yet I have not been convinced that it is possible. Therefore: if discussing philosophical questions make children more prone to accept a false theory, this is a danger.

I am not equally worried about skepticism. If discussing philosophical questions with children makes them skeptical, that is they come to believe that we cannot know the truth of fundamental philosophical questions, that might be the correct position. I am not as convinced that skepticism is false as I am that relativism is. But yet it worries me, because of my next argument.

2. If I become convinced either that relativism or skepticism is true, then it seems to me probable that this would decrease my curiosity. Why bother about an answer which either is not objectively true or is not possible to reach. As a mature philosopher I can always be interested in further questions: why is it so that some questions only have answers which are true relative to some background or why is it so that some questions are not possible to answer? (It might for example be the case that some questions have no answer because they are wrongly formulated. If so I would have learnt something important from my desperate attempts so solve some philosophical puzzle.)

But it seems to me that a child, convinced of the futility of further research, would rather give up the project of trying to find answers to philosophical questions. Or in the worst case would end up with stubbornly sticking to her own prejudices: since all truth is relativistic (or impossible to reach), the best I can do is to keep to my favorite ideas. Anyhow: no one can show that I am wrong. And irrespective of how much I try, I will never be able to justify my beliefs rationally. So why bother?

3. The third danger is that if the children come to believe that just any answer to a philosophical question is a good answer, their critical capacity has decreased. What we would like to give them is both a sense that philosophical questions are important and that it is possible to answer them in a satisfactory way. I know that this is one of the most important goals of philosophy for children and that Matthew Lipman emphasizes the rationality of philosophy. What worries me am the fact that it seems so difficult in practice to respect each child and her opinion and at the same time make the group aware of the importance of finding the true answers to the philosophical questions we discuss.

This is especially hard since I do not know which answer is the correct one, and therefore I cannot show the children the difference between the true and the false answer. The best we can do is to stress the difference between good ways to argue for some answer and bad ways to do it. And even then we have to be very careful not to discourage some of the kids.