ABSTRACT
Helping children to acquire effective habits of thinking and reasoning is one of the prime jobs of a teacher. To what extent do children need to learn to think and to what extent are they born with certain powers of reasoning? The author of this paper presents the view that all such functions must first be learned. In the present paper the author conceives of the acquisition of learning sets as ‘learning to learn’. Elsewhere he also uses the expression ‘learning to think’. Both seem legitimate titles and stress the extremely important advance in adaptive capacity which flows from this kind of learning. The experiments reported and the thesis advanced have been of seminal importance in the development of psychological thinking about the nature of human learning.
