Secondary School Curriculum

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  1. Suki (novel)

  Matthew Lipman

  Suki, a young adolescent, loves poetry and its world of metaphor. Her friend Harry hates literature class and the idea of writing poetry frightens him. Their worldviews begin to converge as the two come to see logic and poetry as two ways of finding meaning in life experience, though not before they have confronted a number of problems of language, knowledge and aesthetics. As Suki, Harry and their classmates work through the obstacles they encounter in creative writing, they construct new understandings of concepts like friendship, freedom, integrity, originality, harmony, form, balance, personhood and meaning.

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  2. WRITING: HOW AND WHY (Instructional Manual to Accompany Suki

  Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp

  The aim of this program is to engage students in philosophical inquiry into aesthetics and related philosophical issues. The instructional manual includes short, accessible explanations of the philosophical concepts found in SUKI, the novel, as well as hundreds of exercises and discussion plans to prompt and assist the student's inquiry. As poetry is the primary aesthetic genre taken up in the novel, the explanations and activities in this manual offer numerous additional poems as objects of aesthetic inquiry. The manual also includes numerous activities that invite students to transform their thinking and dialogue into essays, poems and short stories, so that their philosophical inquiry and their creative production may inform one another.

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  3. Sources and References for Suki

  Matthew Lipman

  This sequential bibliography matches the 1978 edition of Suki page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel, references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore the novels’ philosophical themes, and brief commentary on them by Lipman.

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  4. Mark (novel)

  Matthew Lipman

  The high school has been vandalized, and Mark is arrested at the scene of the crime. He claims he is a “victim of society.” But what is society? What forces hold it together or work to pull it apart? These are questions to which Mark and his classmates address themselves. What they seek are ways of evaluating social institutions, rules and values, so as to determine how well society is able to live up to the ideals which, at one time or another, have been set for it. They pay particular attention to the nature of law and crime, tradition, bureaucracy, and to the problems of authority, responsibility and force. But the most important considerations they take up have to do with democracy, freedom and justice.

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  5. Social Inquiry: Instructional Manual to Accompany 'Mark'

  Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp

  The task of social studies as a discipline is to focus students’ already developed thinking skills upon the conceptual foundation of the social sciences. Students will think about these underlying concepts if they can talk about them, and they will talk about what they perceive as controversial or problematic. This, then, is what Mark and Social Inquiry aim to do: to identify selected root issues in the social sciences and expose to students the conflicting concepts at the heart of each issue.

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  6. Mark: Sources and References

  Matthew Lipman

  This sequential bibliography matches the 1980 edition of Mark page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel—and references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore the novels’ philosophical themes.