INNATE OR ACQUIRED SKILL

Those who insist that thinking is an innate and unalterable ability must suppose the purpose of education to be the provision of knowledge, concepts, values and ideals as material to be worked upon by this innate ability or simply stored. Few educationists or teachers would accept this library function of education. They would claim that education not only provides material but also trains the mind to use it.

Perhaps it would be better to compare thinking to cooking or playing tennis. Both are skills which have an element of natural ability but a larger element of training.

There can be no doubt that thinking is an acquired skill rather than a natural ability. Mathematics is the obvious example of an aid we have developed to allow our thinking to extend far beyond it's natural range. Many areas of human attention fall outside this. For instance, the unaided mind has extreme difficulty in thinking about circular and interactive systems which do not yield to the natural atomistic approach.

The natural ability to think is inadequate when complex situations have to be handled. That is why much of the impetus towards treating thinking as a skill has come from the computer and business worlds where complex situations have to be thought about

Unfortunately, many of the areas that lie outside the range of natural thinking cannot be tackled by mathematical techniques. Creativity is an obvious example. We seem able to do little about creativity by conscious application of natural thinking. But with deliberate techniques it seems possible to improve creativity.