"Teaching philosophy to younger students was not primarily about simplifying philosophy, but about creating a space where they could discover that even ordinary claims could be questioned."
In 2025, I designed and taught a philosophy lesson on Aristotelian syllogisms and the nature of authority to a group of sixth-grade students in Hainan Province. Rather than asking them to memorize definitions, I asked them to break arguments apart: What is the premise? What is the conclusion? If an argument is logically valid, does that make its conclusion true?
When we turned to authority, I asked a simpler but more unsettling question: when should we trust someone simply because they are an authority? I had expected to teach students how to understand philosophical arguments; instead, I found myself watching them question assumptions they had previously accepted without noticing.
It made me realize that teaching philosophy to younger students was not primarily about simplifying philosophy, but about creating a space where they could discover that even ordinary claims could be questioned—and that disagreement required reasons. That experience became the starting point for Seven Ways Philosophy Enters the World, a seven-part seminar series designed to help students encounter philosophy not only as a body of knowledge, but as a way of questioning the world around them.
