## EDUCATION AND THINKING

While education continues to restrict itself to the passive aspects of thinking anyone who needs to use active thinking in his life (anyone outside the academic world) is bound to be dissatisfied with what he has learnt about thinking.

Much of the trouble with education arises from its "double pyramid" structure. The academic elite are an important ingredient of society, culture and progress. To produce this elite we train in the academic idiom the broad base of the pyramid so that the most gifted will emerge at the peak of the pyramid as the elite.

But does it make sense to train the broad base of the pyramid in the academic idiom when so few either have the ability or inclination to reach the peak? If we do want to introduce the active and non-academic type of thinking into education we shall have to do so deliberately by creating a new subject of "thinking" rather than by trying to teach academic subjects in a non-academic way.

Any attempt to alter education runs up against the second pyramid in the double pyramid structure. This is made up of teachers, teacher training staff and education committees. Each tier tends to be selected by the tier above all the away up to the academic peak.