THINKING AS A SUBJECT

Even if it were possible to introduce the idioms of active thinking into the various subjects already taught in education this would still be an ineffective way of teaching thinking. Attention can hardly be concentrated on the thinking strategies themselves when it has primarily to be concentrated on the subject matter.

The purpose of the new thinking subject would be to concentrate attention on thinking itself and to collect in one place the different aspects of thinking at present dealt with in different areas or not at all.

A headmaster once told me that although he agreed with the general principle of teaching thinking he wondered whether it was necessary in schools such as his since many of the pupils were going to spend their lives at factory benches and thinking would make them unhappy. The opposite point of view is that learning to think might so enrich their lives that they would be more content at the factory bench.

With increasing mechanization there is going to be either a large permanent pool of unemployed or a much shorter working week. This means that there will be more leisure and the ability to think may be necessary to make that tolerable.

The days are gone when the elite did the thinking and the rest did as they were told. Democracy may not be perfect as regards representation but as regards political power the none elite have more than ever before. People are not going to do anything about pollution, birth control, income stability merely because they are told to but only if they have thought it through for themselves.

If we were honest, we would have to rank thinking as a subject above reading, writing or arithmetic in importance. The amount of time the average person spends writing is tiny - probably not more than 10 minutes a week. Arithmetic of any sort of complexity is restricted to certain professions. Even reading is quite rare apart from the sports page of the newspaper and only 2 per cent of the population ever buy books (library use is probably higher than that).

Yet, on average, a person spends four to five hours a day watching TV. This demands no ability to read, write or do arithmetic but should demand an ability to think.

It would be a bad mistake to regard the subject as of importance only to the elite who are going to end up designers, administrators, problem-solvers, executives and scientists. The elite may be involved in forming ideas but unless everyone else is able to appreciate these ideas they remain useless.

If we first look at the last published figures for the subjects taken at GCE and CSE level we can get some idea of the relative importance of the already established subjects. Taking the GCE entry for English Language (the largest) as 100 per cent we then find mathematics 63 per cent; English literature 59 per cent; geography 45 per cent; French 42 per cent; biology 42 per cent; history 36 per cent; physics 28 per cent; Latin 12 per cent; building and engineering science 0.48 per cent.