Thinking in Education

Assembling insights from a variety of disciplines, Lipman provides a systematic overall theory of the role of higher-order complex thinking in education. He also sets standards to measure whether strategies designed to induce better thinking are efficient.

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In our increasingly complex world, the teaching of thinking has become imperative. Yet evidence shows that our children are not learning how to think. Matthew Lipman, a leading educational theorist, gets to the heart of our educational problems, in Thinking in Education and makes profound and workable suggestions for solving those problems. Thinking in Education describes procedures that must be put in place if students at all levels of education are to become more thoughtful, more reasonable, and more judicious. It recommends that the classroom be converted into a community of inquiry and that the discipline of philosophy be redesigned so as to provide the concepts and values now missing from the curriculum. These recommendations have now been carried out; the community of inquiry is a recognized pedagogical strategy, and traditional academic philosophy has been transformed into a discipline that offers a model of higher-order thinking and an image of what all education can be.