圣诞老人会给我送礼物吗：一节关于“相信什么”的儿童哲学课
A Christmas-week online class, Dr Zhihao Yan in a London sitting room and the children in Shanghai, where the decorations this year are everywhere. He does not start with Father Christmas but with Ultraman, whom every child dismisses at once as an actor in a suit, then the earth god, ghosts and aliens, where the hands go up unevenly. Then dinosaurs, which every child is certain about — and nobody has seen. Pressed on what counts as evidence, they produce fossils, palaeontologists, museum specimens, until one child suggests the fossils might be an oddly shaped rock and dinosaurs the biggest hoax in the history of science. From there: inference from frequent experience, inference from habit, and inference that is only a wish. A boy who would give his ten yuan to the Jade Emperor because he outranks the others reinvents Pascal's wager, and says why in three characters: it doesn't lose.
警惕教育中的偏见：什么样的老师还在教室里制造刻板印象
The last week of Dr Zhihao Yan's first placement carried no teaching target, only a TED talk to watch and write up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story. He takes her point past the obvious one. Adichie was not only the object of a single story — an American roommate pitying her for Africa, asking about her tribal music, receiving a Mariah Carey tape — she was also its author, knowing Mexico only through coverage of drugs and migration. He applies that to teachers, who shape how children see themselves and each other, sometimes more than families do, and then to his own upbringing in Chaoshan and the assumptions about gender and household roles he had to examine. The rest is what an English state primary does about it: Black History Month across subjects, shared reading chosen for who appears in it, and picture books with animal protagonists for the youngest.
课间十分钟，没有的：英国小学生的一天
Chinese parents picture the English primary school as relaxed. Dr Zhihao Yan, on placement in a south London state school where nearly 70% of pupils are on free school meals and under 20% were born in Britain, reports a day that is tightly packed: one fifteen-minute break between 8:40 and noon, an afternoon that runs from one o'clock to 3:10 with nothing in between, and almost no homework before Year 3. The lightness is real but it is on the other side of the school gate — the work has been compressed into the lesson rather than sent home. Break and lunch, by contrast, are untouchable: teachers may not take them, and a child made to wait a minute in the lunch queue cried. And reading is deliberately not framed as homework. It is framed as a reward, and set daily from Year 1.
“学校是用来发呆的”：孩子们为什么要上学
On the first day of term Dr Zhihao Yan watched a father drag a crying child through a metro barrier by the ear, and took the scene into his philosophy classroom — not to talk anyone out of refusing school, but to ask what school is for. The children give the adult answers first: a good job, then knowledge. One boy builds a valid syllogism on two false premises, which nobody attacks; they change the ground instead. Then a girl says the best thing about school is that you are allowed to help, because at home her parents do everything for her. Later the class dismantles every other reason — good teachers, friends, facilities — showing each can be bought outside school. The last hand up before the bell belongs to a child who says school is where you can stare into space. He spends the rest of the piece working out what that child meant.
孩子们的生活，不只有作业与苟且，还有诗与恐龙
Dr Zhihao Yan asks a class of primary children where they would go if they had one trip in a time machine. The answers map what each child has been allowed to be curious about. One girl goes to Tang-dynasty Dunhuang to find out how the library cave was sealed; a boy to the Cretaceous to see a triceratops, and to the Cambrian, and to bring something back as a pet; another to Stonehenge, because of the rumour about aliens. A boy whose parents are migrant workers, and whom the project funds, chooses the extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of human beings. One girl chooses the first day of a school term, because she once failed to hand in her holiday homework. He sets this beside a boy in 2018 who said he wanted to become a tiger — and, after half a minute of silence, that it was because tigers eat people, and people set homework.
如何与孩子谈论死亡
Adults avoid the subject of death; children ask about it anyway, and Qingming — the Chinese grave-sweeping festival — is when they ask. Dr Zhihao Yan describes three points at which death enters a children's philosophy classroom without being staged. A picture book about a leaf through four seasons lets seven-year-olds work out mortality from something they can see outside the window, with role-play and a walk under a real tree to anchor it. A lesson on superpowers turns into an argument about whether immortality is worth having, and a child answers that it is not: you would run out of things to try and be unable to stop. A third lesson, built around a dead toy dog, moves from abductive reasoning to whether it is ever right to eat one. His argument throughout: introduce this early rather than late, and never dismiss the feelings children attach to an animal.
圣诞老人真的存在吗？
In 1897 the New York Sun told eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon that yes, Father Christmas exists. A century later a New Jersey teacher who told first-graders the opposite reportedly lost her job. Dr Zhihao Yan uses the contrast to open a question he has actually put to his own primary classes: does Father Christmas exist, and how would you argue it? About one child in ten says yes, and their reasons turn out to reconstruct Pascal's wager almost exactly — believing costs nothing and might pay. The majority say no, and one group builds a proof by contradiction listing the seven superpowers he would need. What the exercise shows, he argues, is that children are not confused by make-believe: they move in and out of it deliberately, and asked to defend a position they step outside the story and reason about it in the third person.