'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 be forced to think. A history teacher and a science teacher would make the same claim. All would be right. The question is whether thinking about something develops any transferable skill in thinking. In 'content' subjects, the momentum of the subject is usually such that little attention can be paid to the actual process. Exhortations to 'think about it' or to consider 'what these things imply' merely ask the pupil to delve more deeply into his knowledge and find the right answer. In a content subject you cannot really think ahead of the content, because your speculation must always be very inferior to the actual facts. There is comparatively little scope for thinking except of the hindsight variety: 'Now you can see that this happened because of that and that…' When teachers appear to lead the thinking of their pupils towards a new insight the pupils' responses are usually so tightly shaped that it is more a matter of guessing what the teacher wants said next than of thinking the matter through. This is no fault of the teacher. It is in the nature of content subjects that is at fault. Content is much more interesting than the thinking process. A pupil knows that with a little knowledge and a lot of thinking he will not do as well as the pupil who has a lot of knowledge and only a little thinking.

The other limitation of content subjects as a method of teaching thinking is that the thinking skills, even if they are learned, are rather limited. Classification, chains of explanation, the putting together of facts to reach a conclusion are all important in thinking, but they are only a small part of the total skill of thinking, which includes such things as decision, priorities, other people's views, problem-solving, conflict, guessing, emotional bias, prejudice and so on. We cannot pretend that situations consist only of pure information and the way it is handled in the mind.

It is probably true that a teacher who had a definite process framework could use a content subject for the teaching of thinking. But he would have to make a deliberate effort to focus attention on the processes. It would be futile to hope that adequate discussion of the content would eventually crystallize itself into transferable thinking skills.