Why is it necessary to develop the ability to think in school?
We live in a period characterized by a constant renewal of knowledge. Some authors have even claimed that accumulated knowledge is doubling every twelve years today, and that 80 percent of the scientists in human history would be alive today. If this were true, it would mean that in the two million years of human life we have lived, as much knowledge has been created as will be created between the years 2000 and 2012! Under these conditions, it is absurd to expect schools to continue to focus on specific learning, as they have since time immemorial. More than specific knowledge, the priority is the ability to understand and interpret it, to work with it. In contrast to a school focused on learning specific information, the contemporary world demands the development of individuals with a greater capacity to think, interpret, and argue.
There are now enough national and international studies showing that, as schools stand, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and argue is not developed, simply because it is not exercised in school. And it is not exercised because it is not required for the specific learning that dominates global education today. However, individuals are increasingly confronted primarily with symbols, and their dominant activity increasingly consists of analyzing, interpreting, and drawing inferences from them.
The capacity for abstraction is the true essence of symbolic analysis. Reality presents itself as confusing data that requires inventory, as a disordered mix of sounds, shapes, colors, and smells, devoid of meaning. It is thanks to the capacity for abstraction that this reality acquires meaning and relevance.
And not only has the production of knowledge accelerated. Today, the ability to store these things in external memory is becoming practically unlimited, as demonstrated by the emergence of filing cabinets, computers, floppy disks, CDs, MP3 players, memory sticks, and the Internet, among others.
Even so, the development of thinking processes would not suffice as a cognitive objective of education. In addition to the development of intellectual operations, knowledge tools specific to each of the sciences are required. Students must possess clear, differentiated, organized, and stable tools that allow them to adequately and organizedly represent the world.
Thinking requires both tools and intellectual operations, and therefore, schools must address both tools and intellectual operations or conceptual networks and the inferences that can be drawn from them, as other theories would affirm (Carretero, 1989). For conceptual pedagogy,2 thinking involves both tools of knowledge and intellectual operations. Instruments are what we think with, and operations are what guarantee processing, the action on the instruments.
This means that it is not enough to teach students to think. It is also necessary to provide them with cognitive tools or conceptual networks on which to exercise this inferential capacity. These instruments of knowledge are a necessary condition for gaining an understanding of any science.
The heritage of a species that has been on Earth for two million years cannot be taught in its entirety to students. Neither time nor the laziness it would arouse in them would allow it. The question of what content to teach is, to this extent, fundamental, since only then can we determine which essential aspects of the entire cultural heritage should be part of a curriculum.
As should have been more evident—and isn't—many fewer things need to be taught, but these should be the essential ones, and greater levels of depth and mastery should be achieved. This is a fundamental pedagogical principle for understanding the curricular work of highly successful institutions in Colombia and around the world.