遇见简·奥斯汀：孩子到英国游学，究竟看什么
Dropping a student at a half-term club, Dr Zhihao Yan looks up and finds a blue plaque: Jane Austen lived here, 1814–15. London has over a thousand. The criteria are twenty years dead, national or international significance, and a building still standing — and the city keeps its dead on the street rather than moving them into museums. He uses Austen to make a point about observation: she wrote balls, dinners, visits and gossip rather than wars, and people still recognise themselves in her characters two centuries on, because she watched people rather than events, from a position inside her world and slightly at its edge. Then he turns it on study trips. Twenty years ago the aim was Big Ben and a red phone box; now everyone says the word "immersion", but a fortnight of workshops staged for visitors is not the local classroom, and real entry takes long enough to get bored in.
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.
和孩子做哲学：如何让孩子敢问、会问、爱问
On World Philosophy Day a Year 4 girl asked Dr Zhihao Yan, on camera, why am I me — the question that had sent him to a philosophy department and kept him there for seven years. This is his account of what children's philosophy is and is not. It is not a professor visiting a primary school: Matthew Lipman built P4C because he found his Columbia undergraduates rigid and incurious, which means the course was designed to fix children rather than to start from them, an original sin his Chinese colleague Liu Xiaodong names. He separates philosophical thinking from general critical thinking — it is meta, boundary-crossing, and asks after the presuppositions each subject is allowed to leave alone — and he argues children are philosophers without training: lovers of wisdom who do not yet know how to love it steadily. Then a transcript of a class arguing about love, kissing and marriage.
英国中小学怎么“做哲学”：哲学教育仍是私立学校的专利吗
After nine years teaching philosophy to children in Guangzhou and Shanghai, Dr Zhihao Yan went back to being a novice — a PGCE in London and placements in English primaries. He finds philosophy present but hidden: in Narnia and free will during English, in how we know a theory is true during science, in what is right during PSHE. He describes teaching a PSHE lesson on gender stereotypes where pupils had to physically take a side, and notes who held the strongest stereotypes — recently arrived children with English as a second language. Then the other half of the picture. EEF research put philosophy's cost at about £12 per pupil a year for two to three months' progress, yet one in seven English lessons is taught by someone without qualified teacher status, and his own class teacher's two-week absence was covered by an unqualified assistant. Meanwhile Eton, Westminster and a Fulham prep school teach it properly.
哲学教育在英国：没有法国的“硬性四小时”，却无处不在
France has required four hours of philosophy a week in the final school year since 1808 and examines it. England has no equivalent slot. Dr Zhihao Yan, a philosophy PhD now teaching in an English primary school, argues that philosophy is nonetheless everywhere in English classrooms — inside religious education, PSHE, oracy work, English writing and even science — and names the cost of that arrangement: content with no exam output is the first thing squeezed out in SATs and GCSE years. He traces England's philosophy-for-children infrastructure to SAPERE, founded in 1992, whose accredited schools serve an unusually disadvantaged intake: 59% of pupils on free school meals or Pupil Premium in its 2024 impact report. And he follows the evidence where it goes, from the EEF trial that found two months' progress in reading and maths to the £1.2m scaled replication that found no significant attainment effect at all.
世界这么乱，孩子们如何思考未来：为什么哲学能力更重要了
Children growing up now have no settled narrative to inherit: truth is contestable, rules get rewritten, feeling outruns reasoning. Dr Zhihao Yan argues that before languages, coding or financial literacy, what has to be woken is the capacity to ask a question, test an inference, recognise dressed-up authority and stay honest under pressure. He shows how he picks topics — anchored in the news and in the children's own lives, because an abstract question asked cold gets nowhere. The Russia–Ukraine war becomes just wars, and then, scaled down, what you do when a classmate wrongs you. A ghostwriting scandal becomes the line between using AI and copying. He is candid about rating topics like films: a case of assisted death was too much head-on, so he approached it through organ donation instead.
“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.
碎片化时间别玩手机了：如何“聊出”孩子的思辨力
Parents often assume that building a child's reasoning takes a degree, ideally in philosophy. Dr Zhihao Yan argues the assumption rests on a misreading of what reasoning is. Critical thinking is not an advanced or abstract discipline; it is what you are already doing when you doubt a short-video headline, or when you weigh whether a school's teachers are patient and its canteen decent instead of taking a friend's recommendation. In plain Chinese, he writes, it is thinking carefully, not believing on trust, not acting rashly, reflecting before moving. He then sets out three things any household can do — a standing time to talk, real decisions handed to the children, and honest feedback that explores rather than grades — and recommends four books and four films for a holiday, from Donald Palmer's cartoon history of philosophy to Twelve Angry Men and Gattaca.
当小镇孩子与上海北京孩子在一起上哲学课，发生了什么
Debate is one of the few school activities that is not sensitive to family income: the entry cost is a voice and a willingness to be contradicted. Dr Zhihao Yan describes a year of online philosophy classes that deliberately mixed children from Chinese county towns with children in Shanghai and Beijing. He follows two of them. A Beijing ten-year-old whose questions had outrun her family found peers a thousand kilometres away. A class monitor from Huidong, well drilled in prepared public speaking, needed two months to unlearn it — live argument means being interrupted, answering on the spot, and being wrong in front of people. He also notes an effect that surprised him online: the children who rarely speak in a physical classroom often speak most freely on screen. His framework for the work is what he calls the three horses of children's philosophy — original puzzlement, a philosophical text, and a community of enquiry.
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.