Philosophy for Children51“What Do You Want to Talk About?” – p4c Lessons in the Family
Tamara Albertini
Philosophy Department, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

I was attending a conference in Los Angeles a few years
ago, and, as is my habit, I called home as soon as I checkedin at the hotel. My son Peter picked up the phone. After asking me what kind of plane I was on and what the time difference was, Peter, quite out of the blue, said “Maman, what doyou want to talk about?” I remember being surprised by thequestion. My son had never asked me before whether there
was a subject that I might be interested in. Typically, hewould shower me with all the things that he had on his mind
and expect me to comment on them. After I had hung up thephone, I thought: “This is the first time my son is inquiring
about something that I would like to share with him.” Thena few months after our telephone conversation, my husband,
who was traveling in Europe, rang us up, and Peter asked
him the same question: “What do you want to talk about?”
From then on that question has become part of our familyroutine whether we travel or just sit around the kitchen tablein our Makïkï apartment. No matter how often I hear it, it
always makes me smile. It isn’t just the question. It’s also thevery earnest face that Peter wears when he puts the question
to us. He has a way of conveying to my husband and I that
he is genuinely interested in what we have to say. He fixes
his eyes on the person he is speaking to and won’t let themoff the hook until he has an answer. Frankly, there have beendays when Peter’s question has helped my husband and I
turn away from our day-to-day worries and think for a moment about subjects we really want to tackle.
It was only last year that we realized where Peter hadlearned to ask, “What do you want to talk about?” Peter was
telling us one day about an exciting P4C session he had at
his Waikïkï School. The subject was whether ghosts exist.
Peter told us what his classmates’ thoughts were: that ghosts
were invented to scare children and therefore were not real;that some were good, others weird; that one needed to makea distinction between ghosts (bad) and spirits (good), thatghosts were different from angels… We got a whole lecture
presented to us about all the things one should consider when

speaking of ghosts. Peter was just about to ask us whether wethought ghosts existed, when we interrupted him. We wanted
to know how he and the other children in his class foundtheir topics. Peter smiled at our silly question and just said,“We ask what we should talk about.” And as he went on totell us how he and his classmates collected subjects, took avote, and how it just never happened that one of his topics
was chosen (sigh!), my husband and I finally understood
where that “What do you want to talk about?” question camefrom. It came straight out of the P4C sessions at Waikïkï
School, and Peter had adapted it to our family conversations!
This year Peter is in a school in Sofia, Bulgaria where
he gets to perfect his Bulgarian and learn much about thehistory and geography of the Balkans. The school climate
is highly competitive. School children challenge each otherwith questions related to Bulgaria. The names of past tsars
and their accomplishments flow easily from their lips. Theyknow the location of the smallest towns and the courses ofall major rivers. Every child plays a musical instrument, andeven English grammar is a required subject. One day whenPeter arrived home from school, there was something about
his expression that made him look as if enveloped by a thick,grey cloud. Something was on his mind. It finally burst
out of him—“You know, I don’t think children talk here.”Children obviously do talk in Peter’s Bulgarian school, andthey are smart and knowledgeable beyond their ten to elevenyears. What Peter had meant to say was that there was notime allocated in school for sharing stories and hearing what
other children thought. Peter could never hear their stories:
how they spent their weekends and what they liked to do intheir free time. There was no way to find out what ideas andopinions they had. You could also say they are never asked‘What do you want to talk about?’

Tamara Albertini (Waikïkï parent and philosopher on sabbaticalwith her family in Sofia, Bulgaria)