ABSTRACT
Formal education has many goals, not all of them universally agreed on, not all of them clear or explicit, not all of them good for the particular individual, not all of them attained. This is not the place to debate, or even to acknowledge, most of them. My concern here is what education might be doing to enhance cognitive development, or facilitate the acquisition of cognitive skills. To do this, I will try to match some of the attributes of successful cognition, of good thinkers, with what we know about possible educational practices. I will also look briefly at some educational programmes intended to teach thinking.
