ABSTRACT
In a book about productive educational dialogues it is appropriate to reflect upon the relationship between dialogue and thinking. The concept of education, as opposed to say indoctrination or vocational training, implies more than just the acquisition of knowledge, it also implies some growth in the intellectual freedom of the learner (Biesta 2006). For me the ideal of teaching thinking or of teaching for thinking in education implies a central concern with expanding the degrees of intellectual freedom of the learner: this means the freedom to be able to question what is taught and the freedom to participate in the creation of new knowledge. Therefore, it could be argued that dialogues that do not promote the development of thinking should not be called educational at all. Of course teaching for knowledge content and teaching for thinking do not need to be mutually exclusive goals, but there are often choices about how teaching is done that may influence the extent to which what is learnt will liberate or enslave. I want to claim that the most educationally productive dialogues are those that teach thinking in the sense of liberating students to be able to think for themselves, regardless of what else they may also learn.
