Teaching thinking
01/10/2008

Reseach by David Perkins at Harvard has shown that ninety percent of the errors in thinking are errors of perception. If your perception is wrong then no amount of excellent logic will give you the right answer. It is even worse than that. Goedel's Theorem shows how from within any system you can never logically prove the starting points. These starting points remain arbitrary perceptions. That is why it is so very important to teach perceptual skills. The CoRT programme which is now in use with thousands of schools around the world does just this. Research by the Atkey organisation has shown that teaching this thinking as a separate subject increases performance in every other subject by between thirty and one hundred percent. This thinking is now mandatory in some countries such as Venezuela.