Questão 14 - EMESCAM 2024/1

Read the article abstract and its introduction to answer the question.

 

Abstract

Just as it’s important for you to have a healthy body, it’s also important to have a healthy mind. For a healthy body, you need to eat healthy food and do some exercise. But how do you keep your mind healthy? Perhaps exploring the meaning of things around us and thinking about how we should act in the world might help. That’s called philosophy!

We wanted to know if doing philosophy with children had a positive impact on their mental health. We conducted a 5-week experiment – two elementary school classes took part in philosophy activities for children and we compared the results to another class which didn’t. We found out that philosophy increases kids’ sense of autonomy (the ability to choose things for yourself) and decreases their anxiety. It didn’t make them feel more capable or give them a greater sense of belonging, though.

 

Introduction

Have you ever wondered about the big things in life, like what is happiness? Or what is true friendship? It’s normal for all of us to ask these questions. Usually when you are a kid your parents try to teach you about these kinds of things. In the 1970s, philosophy professor Matthew Lipman developed a series of activities for the classroom which he called Philosophy for Children (P4C). The aim of these activities is to help children think for themselves about things that matter. The series includes different kinds of activities in which kids discuss various topics: social justice, the environment, animal rights, and more. Since kids usually spend more time at school than they do at home, school is a great place for these discussions. The teacher’s role is to encourage the students to talk and express their thoughts and beliefs, not to give them the ‘answers’ – after all, these are the kind of questions to which there are no easy answers!

There is evidence that P4C really does make kids better thinkers and better students. But we thought that the program might also help with the students’ mental health. After all, over the past decade, mental health problems among children have been increasing. So what if schools implemented the P4C program? Would it have a positive impact on their mental health? This is the question we wanted to answer.

Available at: https://www.sciencejournalforkids.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/11/p4c_article.pdf. Accessed on: Aug. 22, 2023.

According to the experiment findings, the P4C program