Effects of Philosophy for Children on Democratic Citizenship Perception: A Mixed-Methods Experimental Study

Contemporary democratic societies face increasing challenges such as polarization and the erosion of public dialogue, underscoring the urgent need to equip young people with democratic citizenship skills. Philosophy for Children (P4C) offers a promising pedagogical framework to meet these challenges; however, empirical evidence of its impact on democratic citizenship remains scarce in non-Western educational contexts. This mixed-methods study examined the effects of a P4C-based education program on seventh-grade students’ perceptions of democratic citizenship in Türkiye. The experimental group participated in a 15-week intervention grounded in Lipman’s 4C model—critical, creative, caring, and collaborative thinking—while the control group followed the conventional Social Studies curriculum. Data were collected through perception scales, classroom observations, reflective journals, and focus group interviews. Findings revealed that P4C practices significantly enhanced students’ democratic understanding, including inquiry, justification, empathy, cooperation, and respect for diverse perspectives. The results suggest that P4C can transform traditional teacher-centered classrooms into democratic communities of inquiry, fostering critical and participatory citizenship. This study contributes to the growing body of research advocating philosophical inquiry in education and provides practical implications for curriculum design, teacher education, and educational policy reform. © The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).