Big Ideas for children: Educational Philosophies and much more

Aone night I put my five-year-old son to bed and he turned to me and said, "Dad, how did the first human get here?" She asked. Surprised by his question, I asked Jake to explain what surprised him. "Well," he said, "you and my mother are my parents, and grandma and grandpa [names of their paternal grandparents] are your parents. And they also had parents. What about the first humans? How did you come here? " Surprised by his interest in this philosophical subject, I began to discuss with him the various theories that were being thrown at him. When we finished, he was willing, if not content, to drop the question, at least for the time being, and go to sleep lay.

For those familiar with the history of western philosophy,

Parent, my son is confused by a confusing issuephilosophers at least 2500 years old: how could human life have started? Jake could understand that it consisted of my wife and I and that we were both the same parents. Our parents in turn had parents and so on. But at some point you are faced with a seemingly unsolvable dilemma: what if the series goes on forever - but how could that be, because then there are already an infinite number of people? Or there is a point where there are two people who have no parents and who founded all of humanity.

Race - but then where did they come from? How did they appear?

Of course, this is a point many choose to refer to God for, one reason for naming a superior being is precisely because he has the ability to create things from nothing, including humans. But my son has a scientific approach to the world, and I knew he would refuse to bring God into play to explain the origin of human life. Discussing the theory of evolution with him - that humans descended from apes by mutation - held him off for a while, but eventually restated his concerns about how living beings might emerge from an inanimate universe.

Jake's questions showed me that he was bitten by a virus called "philosophy" when he was only five years old, and that surprised me. My astonishment had various reasons. First, I'm really surprised that Jake was caught off guard by this problem without warning.from me. As a college teacher, I'm used to struggling to get students to see the meaning of metaphysical puzzles. Could a five-year-old-even a precocious kid like Jake-actually have more intuitive philosophical problems than my own college students?

I'm also surprised at how diligently Jake thought about it. After our nightly conversation, he would not let go of the subject. Not only did he keep asking more and more questions about human generation, but he also started asking questions about related subjects like the infinity of time and space. Once again, I was surprised to find that even a five-year-old could see that there are a number of related metaphysical problems related to infinite sequences. I've been wondering if it's possible that little boys like Jake are actually protophilosophers.

To answer this question we need to think about what philosophy itself is.is is. At its most basic level, philosophy seeks to solve fundamental mysteries about our lives and the world we find ourselves in. The question that plagues Jake about how human life can exist is a philosophical one. Ultimately, while scientific discoveries are relevant to our thinking about this question, it is the philosophers who help us think about this abstract subject, even if they haven't found a definitive solution yet. In pursuing such matters, philosophical The thing that makes my little boy angry he tried to understand the world he was in.