TITLE : TEACHING THINKING.

I should like this to be a gentle book that makes a few definite and practical points, upsets no one and gives help and encouragement to those who have always felt that thinking could be taught directly as a skill. But the book will not, I fear, be taken as such. It will be seen to be arrogant and dogmatic. It will be seen to ignore the work of everyone else. It will be seen unnecessarily to attack cows that have earned their right to be sacred. Although I can foresee all this I cannot avoid it without diluting the purpose of the book.

The book is not a treatise on thinking or on teaching. My main aim is to avoid confusion. For that reason the easements and qualifications that could have surrounded many points have been left out, with the result that the point must seem arrogant and dogmatic. The subject of thinking is surrounded by misconceptions and concepts fossilized by increments of hallowed tadition. To hee some of the concepts it may sometimes be necessary to chip away with harsh force. Yet the intention is mild. For instance I may appear to attack logic, that mainstay of our thinking culture. And yet I shall not be attacking logic at all. I shall be attacking the exclusivity of logic, in order to bring forward the importance of the perception stage of thinking. I stand with everyone else in my acknowledgement of the vital importance of logic for the processing stage of tninking. I am aware that a lot of people have done good work in this field of 'thinking'. Nevertheless this book is not consciously derived from their work although I am sure there must be much parallelism and overlap. Nor is it intended as a passive library review of work in the field.

The book is intended to deal in a practical and personal manner with the teaching of thinking. It is not philosophical speculation, but is based on what may well be the largest programme anywhere in the world for the direct teaching of thinking as a skill and, quite apart from this, on considerable experience in the teaching of thinking to somewhat demanding pupils. Above all I should like the book to be of use to teachers who want to teach thinking directly as a skill. We know from experience that the needs of the teacher who is actually going to do something are very different from the needs of a teacher who is just going to talk about doing something. The former is practical and wishes not to be confused. The latter prefers the subject to be handled with enough subtlety and comparison and enrichment to provide talking-points.

Thinking is a most awkward subject to handle. It always involves resentment. It is felt that you are suggesting that the thinking of other people is not as good as it might be - or, worse, that your own thinking is better, Let me declare firmly at this stage that the motor mechanic is not the grand prix driver. Tinkering and fiddling with thinking on the design side are not the same as being an ace performer. The difficult is that thinking is so closely involved with the ego that in all except young children thinking is the ego. Critisize someone's thinking or suggest an inadequacy and you threaten that person's ego in the same manner. Very few people can so detach themselves that they can look at their own thinking on some matter and describe it as feeble Much of the awkwardness arises from the word 'thinking'. This is such an ordinary word that it is as much part of life as seeing hearing, talking, walking and breathing. And no one feels he needs to be taught how to do any of these things. We could call it 'cognitive studies' (or cognetics, as one class called it), but that would be jargon and pompous. Exactly the same problem arose with 'creativity' and 'lateral thinking'. Creativity is a value word and represents a value judgement - no one ever calls creative something new which he dislikes. Creativity also has too many artistic connotations to describe the process of changing concepts and perceptions. Many artists have valuable concepts and perceptions but are not spedally good at changing them. So it was necessary to create the neutral label 1ateral thinking' to describe the change from one way of looking at things to another. We need to do the same with 'thinking' in order to separate what goes on in our heads all the time from the more focused thinking that has a purpose. But a new label would sound too artificial and would cause too much resentment. In spedfic cases the problem usually solves itself. For instance users of the Cognitive Research Trust programme for teaching thinking just refer to it as CoRT Thinking, or even Cort. As will become apparent in this book, we also need a much better word than 'perception' for the-way-we-look-at-things. Perception is too abstract, too psychological and too concerned with visual and other sensory perception to cope with the way the mind looks things. One day I may find the right word for this, but I do not have one yet. A new label for 'thinking' might also avoid the centipede problem. Many people are frightened that if they become too self-concious about their thinking processes they will, like the centipede, lie distracted in the ditch wondering how to perform all that happened naturally before they were made self-conscious about it. In spite of the awkwardness of the subject I have enjoyed teaching thinking in a variety of classrooms. The range extends from a class of nine-year-olds in Australia to a group of men each of whom handled over one billion dollars a year, and who together managed what must be the largest block of capital in the western world. Of course it has been possible to teach thinking only because the pupils have been interested in the subject. The interest has been surprising. In Britain alone I have been asked to speak at eighty per cent of all universities, often to departments as widely separated as metallurgy and psychology. Thinking knows no boundaries. Interest has been shown by artists, architects, surveyors, computer analysts, advertisers, system designers, operations research scientists, business executives, investment managers, bankers, personnel managers, teachers, principals, educationalists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, journalists, lawyers, librarians, prison officers, fire departments, government departments and so on. The only unifying factor is that these people have been 'doers', not 'describers'. They are people who have to use their thinking to bring something about. They are people who have felt a need for generative thinking in addition to the critical thinking with which education had endowed them.

In all I suppose I must have taught thinking directly to about 120,000 people face to face (excluding books and other media) and the most surprising thing is the uniformity of reaction at a basic thinking level across wide ranges of age, ability and interest. From Argentina to Sweden, from Australia to Switzerland, from Japan to Canada the fundamental human thinking operations seem very similar, even though the overlying temperament and behaviour may be different. Perhaps this is not so surprising.

What has surprised me is the huge interest in the idea of treating thinking as a skill that can be improved by attention. I had been led to believe by various stages in the education field that teachers and heads would resent any attempt to treat thinking as a skill, on the grounds that that is what schools were already doing all the time. On the contrary, there has been a very positive response, based on a feeling that thinking skill was not quite the same as accumulation of knowledge or innate intelligence. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the general prindples involved in the teaching of thinking. I attempt to show the need for teaching thinking as a skill, and a conceptual framework is also provided. The comments and ideas in this section are based on my observations both on thinking as a phenomenon and also on the teaching of thinking. Many of the points that I shall be making are not at all new, sensational or exotic. It would be absurd to pretend that only newness had value, Some of the observations may be new, some of the conclusions or concepts may be new, but others will already be part of the thinking of many readers. I see no reason for eschewing those aspects upon which most people are agreed. I hope that the book will serve to reinforce and re-emphasize those well-accepted ideas and show how they contribute to the teaching of thinking as a skill. The aim of the book is to be practical rather than exotic.

The second part of the book is based directly on practical experience. Many books of this nature tend to become interesting discussions on the possibility of teaching thinking as a skill, or reviews of a variety of small-scale attempts at such teaching. The second part of this one is firmly based on the experience acquired from the wide use of a particular programme. Much of that experience relates to the general problems that arise when thinking is treated as a skill. Some of it relates spedfically to the particular nature of the programme used. Some of it relates to what happens when any innovation is introduced into the school curriculum. The programme is a continuing one, so a final analysis of the project is not available. Nevertheless sufficient experience has accumulated to be of value to those who are interested in teaching thinking as a skill. Inevitably it will seem that references to the programme are intended to sell the virtues of this particular programme. I see no way of avoiding this except by these protestations here. It is not possible to talk about something and yet not talk about it. I must leave it to readers to read the comments objectively and to extract general principles. Above all I wanted to avoid the sort of book which might intrigue the reader, only for him or her to say at the end: 'That's all very interesting in theory, but what happens when you are trying to teach thinking to a class of thirty children facing you on a Monday morning?' The comments in the second part of the book are based on that sort of situation.

Finally I should like to urge the reader to take from the book whatever constructive ideas he may find rather than regarding it as a source of philosophical points with which he can enjoy disagreeing.

EDWARD DE BONO Cambrtdge 1975