ABSTRACT
I come to the task of commenting on these seven chapters with two sets of biases. The first is anchored in a quarter-century service as a high school history teacher, a director of staff development, and superintendent of a middle-sized school district. Since 1955, when I began teaching history to eleventh graders, through 1981, when I left the superintendency, I have either taught courses that had within them a large component of what the authors call “informal reasoning” or actually tried to introduce systematic instruction in thinking skills in a school system of 20,000 students (and more than 1,000 teachers).
