Should we take the friendships of children seriously?

Abstract

The concept of friendship has had a great deal of attention within recent years from philosophers. However, this attention restricts itself to friendship between adults and rarely considers the issue of friendship between children. The issue of friendship and how we socialise with others ought to be an important concept for education, yet schools rarely take the forming, nurturing and nourishing of friendship beyond helping to deal with disputes between friends when they disrupt school life. I wish to argue that whilst friendship is critical to the development of character and can properly be seen as part of ‘an invitation to the moral life’, it also has value in and of itself as part of the flourishing life.