It was often claimed that the justification for teaching Latin as a subject was that it trained the mind and developed thinking skill. It could be argued that if content subjects failed to teach thinking because the important of the content obscured the thinking process, then a subject in which the content was irrelevant would teach thinking because attention could be focused only...

'If a person is thinking about something then surely he is learning how to think.'

Unfortunately this is not true. A geography teacher would claim that in learning geography a pupil would ...

There are many different levels of reading – quite apart from the physical speed of our reading. There is ‘defensive’ reading in which we skim through just to check that everything is as we assume it to be, and with the hope that we shall find nothing in what we read that might change our views. We just have to read through the material in case there is something of significance...

Four ways of being right:

Four basic ways of being right are discussed in this chapter.

The human mind uses one or other of these ways to know that its thinking is ‘right’ enough for action or...

Being right is a feeling

In theory you are ’right’ if your idea is an accurate reflection of reality. In practice being ‘right’ is something quite different.

If you think that water put into a pan over a flame will...

Education and being right

Throughout education the need to be right is drummed into one. The whole motivation is based on this need to be right. If you do something right then the teacher approves, praises you and puts a little tick against your work. These ticks for being right are the immediate...