Dialogues with a Little Thinker

In this course I will tell you how to ask children questions that can help the children to think. These are not ordinary questions; they are metaphysical questions, which don’t have single and clear-cut answers.

We cannot answer a metaphysical question by using out past experience or by finding out a suitable formula. Answering this sort of questions requires the application of our natural creative ability.

I asked these questions to children in Russia and the UK and was surprised how thoughtful and interesting the children’s answers could be.

Every lecture in this course can be also used as a practice exercise. Those of you who want to help their children to apply their creative ability can simply ask the children these questions, without caring much about the kids’ answers. All what is important is that the children could hear these questions and ponder over them. This might be enough to awaken the thinker in the child.

Those of you who want to dig more deeply could compare your children’s answers with the answers that my children gave and try to analyze common points and differences.

The course includes an introductory lecture, two sections and fourteen lectures. Section 1 covers dialogues about the world and Section 2 - dialogues about a human being. Lectures include author’s texts, author’s videos, animated graphs and pictures.

I built this course for students in social sciences, specialists in education, psychology, philosophy, writers for children, artists and everyone who is curious to learn more about children’s ability to think and reason