For Thammasat University Associate Professor Sittichai Wichaidit, science and philosophy once seemed like opposites: one dealt in molecules, forces and weights that could be measured; the other asked questions with no final answers.
Two days at a workshop in Bangkok collapsed the distinction. ‘As a science teacher, I want my students to question even the most basic assumptions that scientific knowledge rests on. Philosophical enquiry gives me a way to do that,’ Wichaidit said.
On 6–7 June, Wichaidit and 33 other educators worked through the same exercises their students will one day face: generating questions, reasoning together as a group, and taking positions on friendship, trust and wealth — including, in one activity, lining up to declare whether they could be friends with a robot. The workshop, organized by the UNESCO Regional Office in Bangkok with Thammasat Secondary School (TSS) and the Federation of Asia-Pacific Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA), with support from Newington College in Australia, marked the second phase of an effort that began in March 2025, when UNESCO piloted Philosophy with Children and Youth in Thailand with a group of TSS students debating fairness through the folk tale of a boy and a tiger. That pilot mapped existing practices and tested the approach in Thai classrooms; this one prepares the people who will carry it further.
Building on the workshop, UNESCO and TSS plan to explore the development of a certified training-of-trainers pathway for teachers from demonstration schools and the TSS network, in partnership with FAPSA and with the support of Thai Philosophy for Children (P4C) practitioners. The model would train a first group of teachers to lead the approach in their own schools and to coach colleagues in turn, so the method spreads without an outside facilitator in every classroom.
‘Young people are growing up amid rapid technological change, at a time when even basic assumptions about what it means to be human are being challenged,’ said Phinith Chanthalangsy, UNESCO Regional Advisor for Social and Human Sciences in Asia and the Pacific. ‘Developing their ability to question and reason about those assumptions takes intentional pedagogy, and philosophical enquiry gives teachers hands-on methods to do exactly that.’
The workshop modelled two ways of bringing that pedagogy into schools. The first embeds critical thinking across ordinary subjects — languages, sciences, mathematics, social studies — so that questioning assumptions becomes part of how any lesson is taught. The second is the ‘community of inquiry’: a structured group discussion in which students reason a question through together, listening and building on one another’s arguments rather than waiting for a teacher to supply the answer.
The potential pilot would test how Thai schools can adopt both, and partners will develop ways to measure the effect on learning outcomes: evidence they hope will persuade more schools to take up the approach.
That evidence base is already growing internationally. Philosophy for Children is now practised in more than 60 countries, and meta-analyses cited in a 2020 UNESCO International Bureau of Education report found gains in students’ cognitive skills, academic performance and socio-emotional development, with one UK study of 48 schools showing the largest improvements among disadvantaged students.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/thai-teachers-take-their-students-seats-unescos-philosophy-children-pilot-enters-its-next-phase?hub=701
