Tolerance is problematic, so I don’t want to teach it blithely. I want children to grapple with its inherent tension of whether you should tolerate an intolerant person.
So I asked a Year 4 class to imagine a place called the Tolerant School on an alien planet, with the motto “Where every opinion is tolerated”. One day a green alien called Zed says: “Red aliens aren’t as clever as other ones. They shouldn’t be allowed here.”
I asked my learners, “Should the teacher stop Zed from saying this?”
It’s not an easy task. If she stops Zed, she isn’t upholding the school motto, but if she lets Zed continue, then she is allowing intolerance in the school.
Some pupils said they would rather go to the Nice School, with the motto “You are only allowed to say nice things”. I asked the class if they thought this was a good idea.
“You’d never learn anything in the Nice School,” one child said. “The teacher wouldn’t be able to tell you when you’d spelled something wrong.”
The Imaginary Disagreer
As you can see, they had moved beyond a superficial grasp of tolerance to a closer examination of values. This can be embedded in the classroom culture.
My colleagues and I at the Philosophy Foundation have a teaching strategy called the Imaginary Disagreer. The child gives an opinion, eg, “It’s wrong to stop Zed.” The teacher then tasks the child with imagining what someone who disagrees with them might say, eg, “It’s OK to stop Zed.”
I would then ask the child: “Is there a good reason why they would think that?”
This encourages children to become comfortable with ideas that conflict with their own. Tolerance is about accepting difference, not pretending it doesn’t exist or that people are never in tension with each other.
Children have to accept the value of tolerance. As shown in the story of Zed, I want to give children the responsibility to apply their own tolerance or intolerance, as and when, in a particular situation.
Tools like the Imaginary Disagreer provide the conditions that allow children to become more tolerant, should they see tolerance as a fit value.
Andy West is a senior specialist and training officer for the Philosophy Foundation. He works across South London, special schools, Great Ormond Street Hospital and in prison education. He tweets @AndyWPhilosophy
