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.
中考作文“高考化”，值得点赞，但还可以更好
Shanghai's 2024 zhongkao asked fifteen-year-olds to write on "I too am a water-drawer", against a prompt comparing the world to a formless pool. Dr Zhihao Yan reads this as real progress: it is harder to pre-package than the narrative titles of the previous decade, and it rewards handling an abstraction. He then names its limit. The prompt fixes the metaphor — why must the world be water rather than a mountain, a fire or an atom, and why must growing up be drawing water rather than digging or climbing? His larger argument is about what the exam teaches teachers to teach. Because high-scoring zhongkao essays reward emotive narrative and ornamental phrasing rather than argument, classroom writing has drifted that way too — leaving pupils underprepared for the reasoning demanded at gaokao, at A-level and in any university.
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.