Abstract
What Learning about the society should be provided in the lower elementary grades? In this study, the author explores the possibility of young students learning about how we can create society as a relation through collaborative effort. To do so, the author analyzes an activity book used with kindergarten and first-grade students in Hawaii. The activity book, "Getting Started in Philosophy: A Start-Up Kit for K-1," includes 35 student activities organized around the typical ways of doing philosophy and according to the two stages of developing relationship among a group of children. In the first stage, activities are structured so that children are encouraged to reflect on their uses of language by listening to the voice of others, and then children generate questions related to their own understanding. In the second stage, these activities direct children to ask various questions to each other in order to connect to each question with their process of inquiry, and then generate questions together. Through these processes, children discover the complexities of "our" world and generate "our" questions as a group. In other words, they learn the meaning to form a network of each inquiry. The most important parts of "getting started in philosophy" are that it enables children to see questioning as a collaborative process and feel that "I and you" can change each other. This is a departure from the approaches toward learning about the society as an object. In this study, at least theoretically, the possibility of a new way of learning about the nature of democratic society is demonstrated, as members of the society co-operate with each other voluntarily. Understanding the society as a relation can help children increase their concern and ownership for the society in which they live.
