Introduction
This book is about
thinking. But it is not about any thinking. It is about those kinds of thinking that take
conscious effort, and which can be done well or badly. Most of our thinking
takes little or no conscious effort. We just do it. You could almost say that
we think without thinking! If I am asked whether I would like coffee or tea, I
don’t have to exercise skill to reply
appropriately. Similarly, if I am asked a factual question, and I know the
answer, it takes no skill to give it. Expressing a preference or stating a fact
are not in themselves thinking skills. There are language and
communication skills involved, of course, and these are very considerable
skills in their own right. But they are contributory skills to the activities
which we are calling ‘thinking’.
This distinction is
often made by assigning some skills a ‘higher order’ than others. Much work has
been done by psychologists, educationalists, philosophers and others to
classify and even rank different kinds of thinking. Most would agree that
activities
such as analysis,
evaluation, problem solving and decision making present a higher order of challenge
than simply knowing or recalling or understanding facts. What distinguishes
higher orders of thinking is that they apply knowledge and adapt it to
different purposes.
They require initiative
and independence on the part of the thinker. It is skills of this order that
form the content of this book. Skills are acquired, improved, and judged by
performance. In judging any skill, there are two key criteria: (1) the expertise
with which a task is carried out; (2) the difficulty of the task. We
are very familiar with this in the case of physical skills. There are basic
skills like walking and running and jumping; and there are advanced skills like
gymnastics or woodwork or piano playing. It doesn’t make much sense to talk
about jumping ‘well’ unless you mean jumping a significant
distance, or clearing a
high bar, or somersaulting in mid-air and landing on your feet. There has to be
a degree of challenge in the task. But even when the challenge is met,
there is still more to be said about the quality of the performance. One gymnast
may look clumsy and untidy, another perfectly controlled and balanced.
Both have performed the
somersault, but one has done it better than the other: with more economy
of effort, and more skilfully. The first of these two criteria also applies to thinking.
Once we have learned to count and add, tell the time, read and understand a
text, recognise shapes, and so on, we do these things without further thought,
and we don’t really regard them as skilled. You don’t have to think
‘hard’ unless there is a hard problem to solve, a decision to make, or a
difficult concept to understand. So, as with physical performance, we judge
thinking partly by the degree of challenge posed by the task. If a student can
solve a difficult problem, within a set time, that is usually judged as a sign
of greater skill than solving an easier one.
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