“We don’t really need going to school,” Ella Wagar, a 10-year-old from Seattle, told her online peers during a recent Zoom session. “What we really do need are friends. If you don’t have friends, it sucks; you play alone, you eat alone.”

The children were exploring the difference between needs and wants in light of the pandemic in a weekly philosophical conversation guided by Jana Mohr Lone, the founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children.