Thinking in Education

The second edition of Thinking in Education demonstrates how emotions, mental acts, thinking skills, and informal fallacies can be interconnected and energized and how they can stimulate critical and creative thinking in the classroom. The book makes a major contribution towards teaching for knowledge and for judgment.

The first edition of Thinking in Education made a case for inserting thinking into all levels of education by infusing critical thinking into existing disciplines. Matthew Lipman, a leading education theorist, provided procedures to enable students at all levels of education to become more thoughtful, more reasonable, and more judicious. In the 12 years since the first edition was published, the author has broadened his approach to teaching thinking. While critical thinking is important and highly valuable, it is not sufficient; students must develop creative and caring thinking as well. This edition provides methods for integrating emotive experience, mental acts, thinking skills and informal fallacies into a concerted approach to the improvement of reasoning and judgment. It also shows how the community of inquiry can be utilized for the reduction of violence in the classroom and for the improvement of the education of children at risk.