Philosophy - introduction. It is said that James I set out to discover the fundamental ability of the human mind: That he seized a newborn baby and had it reared without any exposure to human language, in order to show that the natural human language was Hebrew. This was of course a simplistic approach. The human brain has some natural abilities, but human behaviour is very dependent on culture. If the only education provided is of the most primitive kind, then behaviour will be primitive.
If Mozart had been exposed to only elementary percussion music for the first 10 years of his life, he would never have written a symphony. Failure of humankind to grasp certain facts and logical techniques held back further progress until either the fact was discovered or the new technique was developed. It is said that the progress of science was retarded for hundreds of years after Aristotle until the method of seeking truth through revealed knowledge was finally discarded in favour of the empirical method.
WITS home page. State University - Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children - Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children. Philosophy for Change ...the place of philosophical enquiry in education for sustainable living. Teaching Children Philosophy. Philosophy For Kids. Welcome to Dialogue Works. Childrenthinking.co.uk.