Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC)

Founded in 1974 by Matthew Lipman (1929-2010) and Ann Margaret Sharp (1942-2010), the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) is the world’s oldest organization devoted to young people’s philosophical practice. Our three-fold mission includes education (offering curriculum, teaching resources and professional development workshops in Philosophy for Children), advocacy of children’s philosophy, and research. The IAPC has affiliate centers in nearly forty countries and our curriculum has been translated and culturally adapted in sixteen languages. IAPC faculty fellows work with several constituencies, including professional and pre-professional educators, educational administrators and policy-makers, parent and cultural organizations, and faculty and students of education, philosophy and related disciplines. However, the primary constituency we aim to serve is children—from preschoolers to high schoolers. We share Lipman and Sharp’s conviction that philosophy is a matter of wrestling and playing with, ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical and other perplexities common to human experience at every age, that children are fully-fledged human beings for whom the impulse to philosophize is natural, and that children’s philosophical practice is an important resource for the reconstruction of philosophy, education, and democratic society.