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I start out with a hypothetical.
“Imagine that, about a hundred years into the future, all the scientists of the world decide to perform the biggest experiment ever done. At exactly 12 o’clock midday on the 12th day of the 12th month in the year 2112, all the clocks in the world are to be stopped. The scientists believe that when this happens, time itself will stop.”
The class breaks out into spontaneous laughter. I’m often reminded that even kids by the fifth grade have developed a healthy sense of skepticism. They’re also way more savvy than I was in elementary school. So it doesn’t take long for the hypothetical scientists’ theory of time to be debunked. “Clocks are a human invention,” one student says. “Before clocks, people used to tell time using sundials,” another student adds.
That’s when I ask the question of questions: “So if time isn’t clocks, then what is it?”
What I love about facilitating philosophical discussions, especially with children in public school classrooms, is that — like all of us — they are naturally curious about themselves, about the world around them, about ethical questions of right and wrong, and metaphysical questions like, “What is the nature of time?”
Public schools are the best and the worst places to hold these kinds of discussions. They provide a receptive community, willing to be challenged with hard questions. Expanding on a course I developed at the University of Oregon more than a decade ago, called Teaching Children Philosophy, I spend time each winter in local elementary school classes leading philosophical discussions with students. Over the weeks doing philosophy together, kids learn to challenge each other’s opinions and even change their own minds based on new evidence from peers.
But public schools are also the victim of political and economic pressures: budget shortfalls, standardized assessments, mandated curriculum, overworked and stressed teachers, needy families. It’s been this way forever, it seems.
A fifth grader raises her hand. “Time is rotation.”
“Can you explain that?” I ask.
“Like when the seasons change, you know that happens in time because winter moves into spring and spring into summer. So time is connected to the earth’s rotation around the sun.”
“OK,” I say. “Maybe that’s evidence that time exists. But what is time itself?”
By now the class is becoming aware that my original hypothetical has led them into something truly challenging. How can you explain something so everyday, so intimate, and yet so elusive as time?
Another student raises his hand. “I think time is life. For example, we’re born, then we grow and change, and finally we die. Time is connected to the changes that all living things experience. If we didn’t change, then time wouldn’t exist.”
“Does that mean,” I ask, “that time exists only if there are living things to experience change? Or can time exist outside of living things?”
By now, the class is both excited and bewildered. A girl across from me in the seated circle raises her hand. “Time is the entire universe in motion. As long as planets revolve around suns, and stars drift apart, then time exists.”
Then she raises her own hypothetical. “Imagine that the entire universe simply froze. All motion stopped.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Then time would stop.”
I remember my first years in college, taking undergraduate courses in history, music, political science and P.E. But the courses that affected me the most as a 19- and 20-year-old were in philosophy. We learned to examine the difference between reality and illusion, truth and falsity, and develop our own sense of meaning and ethical judgment. Many of us were away from our families for the first time, living on our own, making new friends and finding answers to deep questions.
Here I am now, my undergraduate days more than a half-century in the past, exploring metaphysical questions with 11-year-olds. And I find little difference between the passion and depth of reasoning coming from children as I remember coming from college students. We enter this world hardwired to examine our life.
I look at the clock. It’s time for our discussion to end. After all, most public school classrooms continue to be organized by daily schedules. This clock on the wall is an ever-present timekeeper. And even though these students know that clocks are not time itself, they do realize that their learning is segmented into subjects during the day, broken up with recess and lunch, and organized into hours and minutes. In this way, schools are a microcosm of society.
A student to my right raises his hand. “Some things have a beginning and an ending,” he says. “But some things are eternal.”
“Can you give an example?” I ask.
“Yes. Actual things have beginnings and endings. But nothingness is eternal.”
We all sit in an eerie silence, taking in his last comment. The discussion is over but comments raised by the children resonate in my head as I walk out of the school to my car.