Avoiding Battle at Curriculum Gulch: Teaching Thinking AND Content.

Abstract

A recent re port from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1987) is a major challenge to the teaching of thinking. Historian Lynne Cheney, author of the report and chair of the National Endowment, suggests that the movement to improve students' cognitive and metacognitive performance is a misguided, processdominated approach to schooling that aims to teach children how to think without providing anything worth thinking about. Before we go to battle over process and content in the cur riculum, let's make sure the combat ants clearly understand the issues in volved in the war. The goals of the movement to teach thinking are relatively clear. In a soci ety engulfed in information, the ability to reason is essential to make the decisions and solve the problems we each face daily (Costa 1985). Further, the individual's powers of understand ing and reflection particularly as a basis for action appear to be both modifiable and susceptible to instruc tion (Feuerstein et al. 1985). Skeptics such as Cheney are asking