The Philosophy Foundation is an Educational Charity
The Philosophy Foundation is an innovative, dynamic and unique educational charity whose aim is to bring philosophy to schools and the wider community. Through doing philosophy in the classroom our primary concern is to improve educational opportunities for the disadvantaged: our work develops speaking and listening skills vital for literacy and emotional development, helps children who find it difficult to access other classes, and encourages critical and creative thinking essential in the 21st Century.
The Philosophy Foundation is the only charity in the world that trains philosophy graduates to do philosophy in schools in order to develop children's autonomous learning, higher-order thinking skills, divergent and convergent thinking. Philosophy develops the art of learning to learn and encourages more thoughtful and reflective children enabling them to participate in society more independently.
One of our core purposes is to encourage, support and sponsor non-privileged children into studying philosophy at University. Test scores in the US show that philosophy graduates come out top in verbal reasoning and analytical writing skills and in the top 15 for quantitative reasoning. The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies has produced a document on employability which shows the skills developed through doing philosophy, and the diverse workplace opportunities that are available to philosophy graduates.
We also work with teachers to support the development of good pedagogic practice, and to make our work more sustainable.
The Philosophy Foundation also aims to reach out to the community by running family and community philosophy groups, philosophy for children in care, and those who are not in education, employment or training.
