Raising Thinkers: Dr. Jana Mohr Lone on Helping Children Explore Life’s Big Questions

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my pleasure to speak with Dr. Jana Mohr Lone, who is the executive director of the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization.

Jana Mohr Lone: PLATO for short.

Lisa Belisle: PLATO for short. Perfect. Well welcome. Thanks for coming in today.

Jana Mohr Lone: Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I'm really intrigued by this topic because it's one that I think we don't hear very often. Certainly we don't hear enough, but it has to do with amplifying the voices of children, fostering critical inquiry, creating dialogue around philosophy, but also intergenerational conversations. And it's so absolutely needed, and you may be the first person I've actually ever talked to who's focusing on this. So let's start with how did this become something you wanted to spend your time on?

Jana Mohr Lone: Yeah, and you're right. When I tell people that I do philosophy with children, for the most part I get very quizzical responses like, philosophy and children, those don't seem to go together. But when I was a graduate student in philosophy, I was working on my PhD. I have three sons and my oldest son was around four, and he was starting to ask the questions that four year olds ask. Why is there hate in the world? Can dogs think? And these are philosophical questions. It got me thinking about children's questions and how philosophical they often are, although they're not generally recognized as such. So I convinced his pre-K teacher to let me come into his class and read a story, because often these conversations emerged from stories. I think picture book authors and children's authors in general are way more aware of children's philosophical capacities than the rest of us often.

So I went into his class and I read a Frog and Toad story. Frog and Toad stories by Lobel are about my favorites. They're very philosophically interesting, and it was a story about bravery. These four and five year olds and I had a lively 20 minute conversation about questions. Can you be brave and afraid at the same time? What does it mean to be brave? Is it important to be brave? If you're brave, do you have to always be brave? And I saw that it wasn't just my child, but actually many children were really thinking about big questions like this. So before I'd done my graduate work, I was a lawyer and I worked a lot with women and children, with families facing difficult situations. One of the reasons I ended up leaving the law is I was very disenchanted with how profoundly disempowering the law was for children in particular. Their voices were so, for the most part, it's gotten a little bit better, not a lot, a little.

Their voices for the most part were really silent and invisible. And I started to think about whether doing philosophy with kids could actually be a way of giving kids the tools that they needed to state what they needed and wanted, to take control over the circumstances of their lives. Because the interesting thing about philosophy, as opposed to many if not most other subjects, is that it doesn't deal with questions that have settled answers. So kids have a lot of room to think imaginatively and creatively and critically about questions where there are lots of possible good answers. We don't want them to come away thinking any answer's okay. We want them to be able to learn how to give good reasons and think well, but we also want them to see that everything isn't binary. You might see friendship, for example, as involving someone you have a lot in common with and do the same kinds of things. I might see it as involving trust and the ability to share experiences. That doesn't mean one of us is wrong and one of us is right. There are just a number of ways of seeing it. And most philosophical questions are like that.

Lisa Belisle: I can relate to what you're saying about being with children and really understanding the depth of their experience. I was speaking with someone the other day about this idea of tabula rasa, this idea of the blank slate, that children come into the world, they're blank, we program them a certain way and then they end up being the way they are. But that's, first of all, I'm pretty sure it's not true. So we're going to just go with that, disproven, I believe. But also it's extremely oversimplified. Children come in with a context. They're actually born out of a context, and even from their earliest years, they're experiencing things that they may or may not have language around, but it doesn't mean that they're not wondering inside their minds what's actually happening out there. And I love that you, as a result of your work with the law and then your work as a parent, said, yeah, this is important. This is something that I'd like to focus on, and that you brought it to a place of how do we act, what are some of the things that we can do. And that story became important because it is such a powerful thing.

Jana Mohr Lone: Exactly. And when you start with a story or sometimes a game or an activity, it isn't pushing the children to focus on what do you think about this. It's giving them a lot of room to think about, what does this make you wonder about? What are the questions that come to your mind? And often you can start with the characters, and so then you're less on the spot. You're less saying this is what I think, but you're pointing out, well, this is why the characters might be doing what they're doing. And then that can lead you into a deeper conversation about what the children themselves think. The thing about kids is that, you're right, they don't have the conceptual sophistication, they don't have the language yet, but they are wondering about these bigger questions, and they're wondering about them with a freshness of perspective that adults are challenged to maintain. Because we start to think there's so many things we already know. Children aren't burdened by that. They know that there's a lot they don't know. And so they see things and they're very open to what it might be without being laden with a bunch of expectations for what it actually is. And that gives them a lot of philosophical strength, because these big questions that we're talking about, they require some imagination and they require being open to possibility. And children are really good at that.

Lisa Belisle: And you're raising something for me that I think was both extremely interesting and fun and also extremely intimidating in raising my own children, which is that children are very good at asking questions. And then as parents, if we don't have the tools ourselves to respond to those questions, or at the very least an engaging conversation, then sometimes the easiest path may be, well, I'm just going to shut this down.

Jana Mohr Lone: That is such a good question, because that's exactly right. I do a lot of workshops for parents, and I wrote a book called The Philosophical Child for parents and grandparents and family members about how to engage with these questions with your children. And I think often, because adults are used to being the answer centers in many ways, children have questions, we think we should have the answers. In these cases, we don't have the answers. Why do people have to die is a big one, for example. A lot of children worry about this question, and often adults are really stymied by how to respond, because I think we want to respond with either an answer or something comforting, and maybe that's what the child's looking for, but often it isn't. They're just looking to have a conversation. And so this actually allows you to be a co-inquirer, as I call it, with the child.

So you're more on an equal footing in this particular context, because as I say, they bring this freshness of perspective, this openness to possibility, and you bring a lot of experience and language sophistication. And so it can really lend to these rich conversations. My sons will tell you that having those conversations growing up really gave them a sense that they could ask about anything and that there would be an openness to engaging, and that their questions had value, that what they were thinking and wondering actually was not only important, but other people wondered about it too. And that's one of the things that's really powerful in a classroom. So usually I bring in a prompt, like a story, and then I ask the students, what questions does this make you wonder about? And then they choose which question they want to discuss, and often children will say, I didn't know anyone else who thought about this. And that's a very powerful experience, to realize that you're not alone in some of the questions that concern you, that actually a lot of people think about the same questions, but often they're just not voiced.

Lisa Belisle: So you mentioned bringing story into a classroom, and you mentioned the work that you do to provide tools for people who are working with children. What are some of the questions that come up often from parents or from teachers or from others who are not children, who work with children?

Jana Mohr Lone: Yeah, I'd say different kinds of questions from parents than from teachers. The question I've heard the most from parents is the question about death. How do I respond? My child is really thinking a lot about death. I don't know how to engage with this. Questions like that. Or during the pandemic, we put out some materials about anxiety and fear and loneliness, because these were coming up a lot and parents were needing some tools to be able to have these kinds of conversations with their children, which isn't so much about how a child is feeling, although that may come into play, but thinking about the concept. Why do we get lonely? Is loneliness the same? Can you be lonely with other people? Are you always lonely when you're alone? And thinking about these questions together can really be itself a sort of comfort to the child, as well as a way of learning how to think well, which in my opinion is one of the most important things we can give to kids. Not only the skills to think well, but the confidence to know that they do, and that what they think and what questions they have actually have value, and they can articulate them well. That's a really powerful experience for a kid.

From teachers, the kinds of questions I tend to get, there's a range of them obviously, and it depends on where the teacher is, because I work with teachers around the world. But I think one of the things that comes up often is what a departure this way of engaging with students is from the educational system in general. If you're a teacher and you're used to being a content deliverer, you have a list of things the kids are supposed to take away from this lesson, whatever it is. This is very different than that. It's not that there aren't goals for what we're doing. As I say, we want them to learn to reason well, we want them to learn to be able to give a counterexample, we want them to learn to anticipate. If I feel really strongly about X, why would someone disagree with me? What's the best reason someone could have for disagreeing with me? These kinds of skills. But we also want them to be able to engage with the questions that matter to them. So I don't come into a classroom and think, okay, we're going to talk about free will today. I come in with a story. I might think it's going to lead to a conversation about free will, but it may lead to a conversation about something completely different from that, and I just go with it. Because I'm there to help them deepen their philosophical abilities and to think more clearly and to listen to each other and to engage with each other's thinking, but I'm not there to teach them what free will is, because that's a very complicated, difficult subject. And there's a lot of views on all sides of free will. So I'm not there to make a case for anything in particular, other than the importance of listening, reasoning, et cetera.

Lisa Belisle: So as I'm hearing what you're offering to parents and teachers and this idea of co-creation, I'm relating it back to the work that I do in medicine, where it has traditionally been physicians show up in the room, and now it's broadened out to healthcare practitioners of all sorts, but show up in the room. It's a similar sage on a stage. I have the information, you're going to take the information, you're going to go do what I say. And we've all seen how that's worked out. And I know that working even with adults, we have a long way to go to that place of, and we're getting better, so this is not me being in any way accusatory towards current people in healthcare, but we have a long way to go as we continue to change out of that model. But I think about the children who have actually come to see me and be in conversation with me as a physician, and how oftentimes the voice that I'm getting is really the parent's voice that is supplanting the child's voice. And having the ability to interface with children is so important and would be so empowering even in a healthcare setting, even if you're not talking about larger philosophical questions, but even at just engaging with them. It's a very different experience than what most children get when they enter a doctor's office. Are there lessons that we should be trying to gently move out into the world with regard to interacting with children in that space?

Jana Mohr Lone: Yeah, that's interesting. One of the things I've been thinking and writing about a lot lately is listening, because I think we can probably all agree that as a culture, we're not doing the best job of listening to each other. We tend to listen often only or mostly to people who we think agree with us. And when we are supposedly listening to people who don't, we're really not listening. We're marshaling our arguments. And so I think one of the skills that's really important to cultivate for all of us is being able to really listen, to give your wholehearted attention to the child who's speaking, and not to try and help them to articulate it better or to finish their thoughts for them or to think about what you might say in response, but really to focus on them. One of the things I do when I'm in a classroom is we have this rule that you can't raise your hand when anyone else is speaking.

So there's always the one voice at a time rule, but the idea of not raising your hand means you're really listening. You're not just thinking about what you're going to say next. And in a fourth grade class that I'm working with this year, at one of the first classes when we talked about this, one of the kids said, yeah, and when people are raising their hands when you're speaking, it makes you feel like you should rush, because other people are waiting to say something. And so it really makes it hard for you to think as clearly about what you want to say. And I thought, I hadn't thought about it quite like that before, but I think that's part of it too, because often children get a lot of messages about how important listening is, but it's generally not how important it is for people to listen to them. It's generally about how important it is for them to listen primarily to adults, which of course is really important, but it's also important that there's some reciprocity in that.

Lisa Belisle: You actually have written about being seen and not heard. Seen and Not Heard: Why Children's Voices Matter is one of your publications, and you are saying it is actually important. There are things that children bring into conversation that are just as valid, and we aren't there just as a way to construct their worlds for them or to answer their questions. This idea of co-creation could have a lot of impact. Talk to me about this.

Jana Mohr Lone: Exactly. Because often we think, oh, we're going to listen to children to make them feel heard, but actually we can learn from children. I rarely leave a philosophy class with kids where I haven't thought about something in a new way. So I'll give you one example. I write about a lot of these examples in Seen and Not Heard, but one example that just comes to mind now is, we're having this conversation, I think it was also a fourth grade class, it could have been a third grade class, but one of the kids raised the question about whether you have a moral obligation to attend your friend's birthday party, your best friend's birthday party. And it led to this great conversation, and in the conversation one of the kids said something like, well, you show up for your friends. I can't remember how exactly she said it, but it was, you show up, it's important for you to do that. And I thought to myself, yeah, that's kind of how I think. I think it's really important to attend your friends' parties. And then another student said something like, well, but if you have a friend who isn't comfortable at parties, isn't comfortable in social situations, and you want them to attend your party because it's something good for you, that's important to you, if you are a good friend, shouldn't you want what they want? Should you really be thinking, well, I only want my friends who really like parties to come to my party, otherwise I'm not being a very good friend? Which I just thought was such an interesting way, especially for me, because I always think, no, you show up.

And I thought, well, yeah, but I like parties, so that's easy for me. But I have lots of friends who don't, and I can see how for them, it's a chore and they probably dread it and they'd just as soon not. And maybe they do that for me when I throw a party, but it makes me think I should always be saying, it's fine, there's no obligation here. So things like that. Because I think children think about friendship a lot, especially elementary and middle school, because that's such a big part of life. All of us can remember the times in our lives as we were kids when we had so much time to spend with our friends, and friendship occupied a lot of our thinking and really our lives. And so they have lots of insights about friendship, because they think about popularity, they think about isolation, they really think about these questions, and as I say, in a way that doesn't predetermine the conclusion, because they haven't gotten there. So they're just thinking about it all, which is very freeing really, for me as well as for the students.

Lisa Belisle: I like the idea that you are opening up these conversations with children, because if the conversations aren't opened up, then we really don't know how they're showing up in the world, and they might show up in the world the way that they have learned from their parents, because nothing intentional has happened around these types of subjects. And then you just end up with this perpetuation, whether you want to or not, of whatever patterns have occurred, sometimes going back for generations. We talk about intergenerational trauma, but even if there's not a specific trauma or a specific adverse childhood experience, you still can just have intergenerational patterning of communications, of thinking, and that doesn't always serve the current day well.

Jana Mohr Lone: Yeah, that's interesting. I think that's true. I think we can't avoid it to some extent, but I do think part of this is about self-definition. Who are you in the world? And that's actually one of the questions, when I ask students at the beginning of the year, what are the big questions you wonder about? Why am I here? Aside from why do people have to die, why am I here? What's the purpose of it all? These are questions that repeatedly come up. So even kids as young as seven, eight years old are asking these questions. So part of it is giving them a little bit of a framework to think about those questions in a more thoughtful, systematic way that isn't so defined by assumptions about what they're supposed to do, which is of course very challenging.

But I think the more tools we can give kids to think for themselves, and I guess the other piece of that, especially in the world we're living in today with the growing use of technology and AI in schools, is the interaction with other students. Learning how to listen, how to speak, how to respond, how to engage is an important part of what we're doing in education. I think among the most important. That and thinking well are the two most important things we can give to kids, because they're going to be able now to look up facts. It's not that content is unimportant. Obviously we want them to learn about their history and about all of the scientific and cultural and literary worlds that have preceded them, but those are going to be very accessible to them. What we want them to be able to do is to read these things and study these things with some skills, with the ability to analyze information, to evaluate how powerful a reason is or isn't, and to be able to communicate with others, to be able to do what is uniquely human, to be able to engage in imaginative and independent and creative thought with other people. Machines can't do that. We can do that.

Lisa Belisle: It is interesting to me, having been part of multiple generations of the ways that we interface with technology. When I came in as a physician, a lot of what we were still doing, because it was early internet, early email, early technology, a lot of what we were still doing is, we are the gatekeepers, we have the information, you don't have the information, here's the information. We did our job as the gatekeeper. Now almost everybody has access to information, and what we've needed people to do is to have more perspective. And that has happened, but that has largely happened on an individual level.

The next iteration, I think, of this is exactly what you've just described, which is content and context and the evolving context, so that you don't just say, well, I know this is my frame, this is the other person's frame, this is always how I act if I'm with this other person. It's also, how do I read this other person? How do I understand where they're coming from, and how do I understand myself and the way that I show up in the world and how that impacts how other people show up in the world. So the example that you gave earlier around, I know where I'm coming from, but what about where this other person is coming from, and paying attention to that, so you're not just, you have your own cognitive bias and you just keep showing up with your own bias in the world. And I really think that is the next iteration of this sort of knowledge and technology gain. And I don't think we've lost anything exactly, but I do think that back in the day there was probably a little bit more paying attention to context. That was largely what we had.

Jana Mohr Lone: Yes, although I agree, I think technology has made that harder, but I also think that people often still approached each other with a lot of assumptions and expectations about who the other person was and what they were going to say and why they were going to say it. And so I think that the ability to try to hold all those thoughts in your own head, all those assumptions, all those expectations, in abeyance while you just are listening to someone, and maybe also starting from the place where you assume people are approaching whatever topic it is with goodwill, that we all actually would like the world to be a better place. And we have very different ideas often about how to get there, but we are all starting from that place, not all, but 99.9% of us. And so if you can start there, then you can listen to someone with a little bit more openness to, okay, so why do they think this is the right way to think about this? Because it's so different from how I think.

And instead of that being threatening or angering, you can approach it with curiosity. This is really interesting. And it's one of the things kids of course have in spades. They are curious and they're very open, especially the younger they are, they're very openly curious. They don't have a lot of fear about expressing their questions or what they're thinking about. And we can really learn from that, because they do tend to be very curious about other people and not really threatened by someone saying something that they think is really different from how they think, in part because, as I've said, they don't approach the world with a sense that they already have all the answers, or even any of the answers.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I find interesting is that you had a whole other doctorate and you had a whole other career as an attorney. And I know that working within the law, it's a lot about thinking, it's a lot about reasoning and researching and interacting with facts and people. Getting a philosophical doctorate, because I have a medical doctorate and I have a PhD, very different ways of approaching thinking and reasoning and research and writing and that sort of thing. Not mutually exclusive, but certainly very, very different. So what was your moment that you said, okay, I'm going to go from this over here to this over here, one which at the end of the day, you're going to need to have some answers for the people that you're in front of, whether it's the plaintiff or the defendant or whatever it is, that over here to over here where the outcomes are very different and maybe not as easily defined. And your journey, what was the moment where you said, okay, I'm sitting between these two worlds and I think I'm going to head toward that one?

Jana Mohr Lone: So what's interesting for me is it was much more fluid than that. I fell in love with philosophy when I was in high school. I went to a big public high school in New York, and our history teacher my senior year taught a philosophy class for the first time. And I'd never heard of philosophy before, and I took this class and I thought, oh, people actually do this for a living. I've been doing this my whole life. This is amazing. Completely fell in love with it, majored in philosophy in college, but always knew I wanted to be a lawyer, wanted to work to help people to obtain justice. That was sort of my very lofty goal when I was 18. And so I went to law school, and law school was great, and I liked being a lawyer, and there are a lot of very transferable skills between law and philosophy, because as you say, a lot of it is about language and analysis and reasoning.

So it didn't feel like a stretch. While I was a lawyer, I was working on my master's in philosophy, so I kind of went back and forth between the two. When I was in law school, I took a philosophy class at the university where I was in law school. So I've gone back and forth. And even now as the director of a nonprofit, I use my law background all the time. So the two aren't as mutually exclusive for me, but I think that what I discovered was there was too much conflict in law for my taste. I didn't want to spend as much of my time as I was spending dealing with conflict, at least not in the way that the law deals with conflict, which is to resolve it by means of a process that leads to a particular conclusion. Not always. Sometimes people do mediation and there are alternative forms, but in general it's a pretty combative process. I was doing litigation, and litigation is combative by definition, so that's one part of it. I'm drawn to uncertainty. I like the uncertainty of philosophy. It's not always comfortable, but it's how my mind works. I think about all the things we don't know. And I like the mystery of human existence. I find it just really exhilarating. And so the questions of philosophy for me have a power and a joy that's a different quality than the law was for me.

Lisa Belisle: It's interesting, because just as you were talking about this idea of certainty, I think there's a parallel in medicine, where at the end of the day it actually is fairly conflictual, whether we want it to be or not, because people almost always are coming to us, I have a problem and we need to fix this problem. So you're starting right out of the gate with conflict, even if it's not something that I as the doctor put on this person. They're still in struggles with their health, with their family, with whatever it is that's causing them issues. And there is a level of certainty. Maybe the certainty is that you're going to listen to them, at the end of the conversation they're going to feel validated, but a lot of times the certainty is, you're going to make them feel better. Can you fix this, please? So this idea of dealing with the uncertainties, it really sits outside of both medicine and law to some extent, and yet it's woven into the very fabric of our existence.

Jana Mohr Lone: Absolutely. And I think that the other part of it is, particularly now in the society in which we're living, we like answers. And I think it's part of the reason things are so divisive at the moment, is because people hold on very tightly to their answers. And if you can live in the questions instead, and accept that we're all trying out various ways of answering the questions we have or coming to terms with them, if we can live in the questions rather than always needing the answers, I think that would open up way more room for us to have conversations that wouldn't be quite as mean-spirited as at least our public dialogues these days often seem to be.

Lisa Belisle: Over and over again, as you've been talking, I've been thinking about this concept, if you know better, you'll do better. And I guess the question is, what is it that we know? Because I feel like we've gotten to this place where what some people define knowledge as is facts. If you know the facts, you'll do what the facts dictate. That's not always true, but that is kind of where we think that we are. But really, sometimes what you know is that you don't know, and sometimes what you know, especially in this very global time that we live in where we have access to looking into other people's lives but not living them from the inside, is that they're just really different from us. And so a lot of times, as you're trying to come to a place of agreement, you have to even agree on language, you have to agree on concept, you have to agree on the starting place. So knowing better the facts is not going to get you to do better. It's really knowing the people.

Jana Mohr Lone: Being able to articulate why you think what you think, right? Because that often is what doesn't happen. And kids will say to me, because that's one of the things we talk about in class, they'll often say things like, it's a lot easier to say what you think than why you think it. And it's really true, right? Because if you ask yourself, why do I believe that, usually we'll have an answer, but then that answer will lead to another question, well, why do I think that? And then you start to unravel your own assumptions a little bit, which doesn't mean that some of your convictions won't hold, but you'll either be able to question them a little bit, or you'll have a better understanding for why you think those convictions are correct. So often we hold on to beliefs for reasons other than that we have really thought them through.

And we all do that. I think it's inevitable, but I think the more that we can be open to the possibility that we might be mistaken and that someone else might have something to teach us, the better off we all are going to be. And I think that in some ways, having confidence in your own views and your own questions can give you that kind of openness, because it's not threatening then for someone to question you. It's an engagement, right? It's an invitation to a dialogue. And that's what I see kids as really often better able to do than adults. I often joke that a group of second graders can have a way more civil conversation than many adults I know. So I think we have something to learn from the fact that when we're young, we seem to be less threatened by other points of view than we seem to become as we get older.

Lisa Belisle: So Jana, your organization, the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization, PLATO, is based in Camden with you?

Jana Mohr Lone: Well, not really. Our official legal headquarters are actually in Washington state. That's where we're incorporated. We have affiliations with the University of Washington. We also have affiliations with about 50 university partners around the country. And our staff is all remote. So we are in varying places, in many parts of the country. We have a board of directors that's also made up of people who are in different parts of the country. So I'm based in Camden, and we have a philosopher in residence program that was started about 12 years ago. That's expanded in the last few years to now six states, including Maine. And so in addition to me in Midcoast, we have a philosopher in residence. And so we're really trying to build a philosophy and ethics program in the schools, starting in Midcoast and then reaching out from there.

I've been working with the University of Maine. I also have an affiliation with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maine, and we are working to build an ethics program for middle school students. So we do these ethics bowls, which is a program that started at universities and had moved down to high school and now to middle school and elementary school as well, where students get together and they're in teams and they have a dialogue about particular ethics cases. So there's all kinds of ethics cases that we have on our website that can raise questions anywhere from, what if you have plans with one friend but a group of friends invites you to do something that you really want to do, what should you do, to, was it acceptable for Brazil to spend all this money on the World Cup when there are people there who are starving?

So quite a range of questions, and it's really a powerful program, because students learn how to not approach the case with the intuitive response, which is, oh, this is what I think, and let me find the reasons why now, but what questions should I ask? How do I approach this? What are the things we'd want to know? And it's always really inspiring to watch teams of kids. So there's a New England Middle School Ethics Bowl at Harvard, and we're hoping to take some middle school teams from Maine this year down there in the spring to compete at the New England program. So we're starting to build this in Maine. We also have philosopher in residence programs in Massachusetts and in Connecticut and Texas and Washington and California and other places as well. And we're really starting to try to build this around the country.

Lisa Belisle: So you are in Camden, your organization is nationwide it sounds like, right? Worldwide?

Jana Mohr Lone: Well, we do a lot of work with people internationally. So we run an online professional development program for teachers to learn how to bring this into their classrooms, and we get educators from all over the world who are part of that. And then I will frequently work with a group of educators. So yesterday I met with someone from Vietnam who are trying to build a program, and we're going to help them do that. We do that frequently with lots of other countries. And it's wonderful to see, because when I started this, which next year will be our 30th anniversary, so when I started this almost 30 years ago, there was much less work going on in the world and very little going on in the United States. And it's been so gratifying to see the field grow in the way it has and continue to grow. And I really think that we're at a moment where there's a growing recognition that education really needs to be teaching our kids how to think well, how to be able to listen to different points of view, how to be able to have civil dialogues about difficult questions. These are things that matter more and more. And so I'm hoping that the work we do will really help in that regard.

Lisa Belisle: Could we bring art into this conversation?

Jana Mohr Lone: Yeah, absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: Obviously, as our program is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery, and I have a significant interest in visual art, because obviously stories are their own version of art, but can you see there being a place where art could be used as a tool?

Jana Mohr Lone: Oh, we use art, absolutely. So first, picture books, of course, are contained visual art. A lot of the messages of picture books are not in the words but in the art, in the visual images. But we also use pieces of music, visual art itself. So there's one exercise, for example, I do with students where I give them two pieces of paper and I ask them to create something on one of them that they would be able to say, look at the art I've created, and to create something on the other in which they would say, this is not art. And then they do that, and then we share them when we talk about it. And it obviously raises the question, what makes something art? Because someone will bring up a blank piece of paper, for example, and say, well, I did nothing. And so I might say, well, what if you called it silence? Would that make it art? Well, no, because I didn't do anything. Maybe if I'd done something to the paper, then okay. So does art have to be created by people? You get the idea. So we do these kinds of aesthetics activities with kids all the time.

I also use art a lot as a kind of closure activity for a philosophy session, because one of the things about philosophy, of course, is you don't end up with, okay, we learned about free will today. You end up with more questions. And so giving kids a closure to that can be helpful. It can be as simple as, here's where we started in this conversation and this is what we talked about, and these are the kinds of things we made progress on, and that led us to thinking about this. Or sometimes I'll say, do you want to draw? So we might have a conversation about friendship, so will you draw something that represents friendship to you, and that's how we'll end it. Or with older kids, we'll use philosophy journals, so there's a lot of writing, or we'll create a group poem. There's lots of different art activities that we use. There's also a lot of work being done in the field, although I haven't done it, with art museums, because there are a lot of programs that art museums have for kids and classes of students, but they don't often tend to engage in aesthetics and actually thinking about the bigger questions, what makes something beautiful, does art have to be beautiful. So kind of creating some support for people in museums to do that kind of work. Because one of the things that I love about visual art is it's a way of experiencing someone else's way of seeing the world. And so you're allowed a glimpse into almost inside another person, the way they see. And so that raises all kinds of really interesting questions about art itself, how it can do that in a way that's very different from language. So yeah, I love art and use art a lot in my work. And there are a lot of people in the field who also use both visual art, music, et cetera.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things I often enjoy is, I obviously love looking at the art that's created by the artists, but I actually also love going into people's houses and seeing what art they have on their walls. Because sometimes you look at a piece that somebody has, you're like, wow, I wonder what's going on inside there, other than just how it matches my kitchen countertop, which could be the case, nothing wrong with that. Maybe sometimes it's an investment piece, I don't really know, but all valid. But I think it's so true that you can look at somebody and make assumptions about them, for whatever reason, their age, their gender, whatever it is that you bring to the table, when you look at art and you're like, oh, I would love to learn more about that.

Jana Mohr Lone: And it's also a way of opening up how differently we all think. So you look at a painting with someone, and this is the experience I'm having, and it's very different from the experience you're having. And so it makes you first think about how much we assume we are all seeing the same thing, but we're not. But also about the way art has a unique ability, because it's not telling us anything in words except through this visual communication.

Lisa Belisle: I've really enjoyed our conversation today.

Jana Mohr Lone: Me too. Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: Words and thoughts and conversation, communication, I think is very important. I believe for myself it's very important. So it makes me happy to know that your organization has been doing this for 30 years, and you've been doing it, it sounds like, probably most of your life. So it's wonderful, and I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me about it today. Well, thank you very much. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast that is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland. I've been speaking with Dr. Jana Mohr Lone, who is the executive director of the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization, PLATO, which has a Maine connection, not based in Maine, but you can find out more about that on their website. And I really encourage people to reach out to Jana, because we're in a great time right now of openness. We know what doesn't work, so let's move towards what does work and see if just having a conversation might be part of that. So I appreciate all you're doing in this area. Thank you.