This book is written many times
At once.
That is,
A scrupulous reader
Will easily extract
Every idea
Many times
From chaotic dialogues, that
Five wonder kids conducted
And
From deliberations
I have done,
As well.
What do I want?
It’s to remind you
What you know already very well
About life,
And ask
Why don’t we put
Two and two together
?!.
Now a few more notes. This book is neither a strictly scientific investigation nor is it purely fictional nor political nor autobiographical nor… nor… nor… It is what it is. If I wanted very badly to label this book, I would call it the diary of a naive philosopher. A diary of what events, you may ask.
It all started accidentally. One time, I was talking to some of my colleagues and happened to mention an educational experiment I had participated in, in the past. It was one of the series of experiments within the School Of The Dialogue Of Cultures (SDC), the theory of which has been being developed in a cooperative effort between philosophers, scientists, and educators in Ukraine and Russia. One major element of the educational process in that school is dialogue. That translates to at least two aspects of the educational process. Firstly, a subject is presented to the students not as the firm and absolute truth but as a source of questions. Secondly, a t eacher does not teach in the traditional manner but organizes an environment for dialogue and exploration of the subject between the students. These generic ideas may sound pretty casual for the contemporary ear, but the theory and practice of the SDC immediately appeared very unusual, effective, and interesting to my interlocutors when I continued with the details. They were allured and intrigued by stories of the experiments; for instance, the story of first graders enthusiastically debating with Plato. This conversation with my colleagues started a chain of events, which ended up in another experiment, one of a rather small scale. It was conducted with five first graders in the form of an after-school activity in a Bay Area elementary school. The children dreamed to become famous writers, that is why they and their parents enthusiastically agreed to participate. Why? Because of the subject we agreed to work on. That was “exclusive rights.” The experiment, in turn, resulted in this diary, where my thoughts alternate with shorthand records of students’ discussions.
Of course, I had used in my deliberations many ideas of prominent philosophers, psychologists, philologists, artists, poets―Vladimir Bibler, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Josef Brodsky, Osip Mandelshtam, Diego Rivera, Thomas Jefferson, etc., but I barely quoted or cited anyone. That was intentional―I just wrote as I understood the subject matter of the book, and thus, I take all responsibility for it on myself. I also wanted this book to be readable and understandable for people whose school major was not philosophy. I thought it was necessary because it’s nearly impossible to find a person unaffected by copyright or patent-related turmoils nowadays. Nonetheless, if some bits of the book seem too philosophical, you can safely skip them. Remember, every single idea is repeated many times over in the book.
I am compelled to pay a special tribute to the first thinker on my list, Vladimir Bibler, a Russian philosopher of Jewish descent, who felt that ancient Greece was his cultural motherland. I was lucky to communicate with him for years. Vladimir Bibler developed a vision of the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is “The Dialogue Of Cultures.” The Dialogue of Cultures is interrelated with “Dialogics,” the logic of thinking and communication, and “Paradox-logic,” the logic of the transmutation of ideas. A special application of this triad to education gave birth to the concept of the “School Of The Dialogue Of Cultures” mentioned above. Vladimir Bibler passed away in 2002. He left books and articles, written and published in Russian, which are not that easy to understand but are impossible not to accept. I believe Vladimir Bibler is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and of mankind. His ideas were what mostly guided my quest.
And so, on to our dialogues with the first graders!