Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2023
Journal / Book Title
Thinking in Stories: Reviewing Philosophy in Children's Literature
Abstract
Children come upon a bird that has just died. It is still warm. They bury it, sing a song they have made up, and plant flowers. They visit the grave every day to put fresh flowers on it and to sing to the bird, until they forget. Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird is a story about how a new ritual happens, spontaneously, out of a shared experience of grief, expressing a shared reverence for one kind of life. The children are thinking, in a way: they are keeping something in mind for a long time, in a beautiful form. But their thinking is not investigation; it doesn’t make the kind of progress that an argument makes. Matthew Lipman’s starting question for philosophic discussion was always, “What’s worth talking about, here?” The Dead Bird may require more restraint from leaders than other stories, so that children can find their own ways into the realities of meaning-making and grief and poetry and shared experience. Different groups may find very different things worth talking about, in this small and exquisite story.
Book Publisher
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Shea, Peter, "(2023) The Dead Bird (1965/2016) by Margaret Wise Brown" (2023). Collected Papers of Peter Shea. 15.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/iapc_pshea/15