Since its inception in the seventies, philosophy for children (P4C) curricula have been under attack from various sides. As Maughn Gregory points out in his paper dealing with various criticisms, P4C attracted "overlapping and conflicting criticism" from religious and social conservatives to educational psychologists, philosophers, and critical theorists (Gregory 2011, 199). Conservative criticism of P4C often goes against the grain of philosophy and liberal education in general and can probably be seen as an age-old dispute constantly resurfacing against the effort of philosophers, while psychologists' arguments that philosophical thinking is beyond children of certain age are today easily refuted by the work of Kieran Egan (2002) and Alison Gopnik (2009). Critical theorists' critique, however, seems to go deeper than all other criticisms by raising intellectually pertinent problem of philosophy education: that instead of fulfilling its promise of liberating subjects it in fact interpellates them into free market ideology. As Gert Biesta (2011) tries to show, P4C curricula "are supposed to develop a range of skills, including cognitive and thinking skills, moral and social skills, and democratic skills" (Ibid. 310) and thereby instrumentalize philosophy in order to achieve a certain goal, a dubious and alarming undertaking that "can be characterized as ideological" (Ibid. 309). In order for P4C to tackle this problem of instrumentalization of philosophy (raised also in Vansieleghem (2005)) the present paper suggests that P4C curricula should be seen (and in certain cases reformed) as promoting a Socratic dialogue with children, whereby the emphasis lies on listening to a child and giving her a voice, and not on "teaching skills". This paper thus argues that it is precisely through philosophical dialogue that a child can be heard as a child, since such a dialogue intrinsically presupposes recognition of the conversational partner as an equal interlocutor. P4C curricula can thus be regarded as an important part of emerging field of "Pedagogy of Listening" (cf. Rinaldi 2001).
