ABSTRACT
The argument of this chapter is that the concept of ‘the thinking curriculum’ is winning long-overdue recognition in education. A ‘thinking curriculum’ is one which involves learners actively in thinking, which abhors ‘inert ideas’ (Whitehead, 1932) and which aims to foster transferable thinking skills:
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth…In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations… Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful…Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dry rot.
(1932:1–2) Can we teach thinking? Should thinking play an important part in school learning? Most teachers (and possibly most psychologists) would be hesitant about the first of these questions, but would give a confident ‘yes’ to the second. In higher education, the recent MacFarlane Report (1992) has reminded us all of the importance of ‘deep learning’, learning which involves a construction of meaning and understanding and the transformation of knowledge, and the limitations of ‘surface learning’ which aims at memorizing and the reproduction of knowledge (Entwistle, Appendix A in the MacFarlane Report, 1992). In primary education, ‘rote learning’ has been a term of criticism ever since the end of Payment by Results in 1890; and the progressive education movement throughout the 20th Century has encouraged pupils’ active involvement in learning. The secondary school examination system since at least the 1920s has striven (with questionable success) to develop modes of assessment which would test understanding and defeat the strategy of learning by heart; and the current drive for ‘flexible learning’ emphasizes a problem-solving approach and pupils taking more responsibility for their own learning (Employment Department, 1992; Tomlinson and Kilner, 1992).