LSTeach

Are “thinking skills” the educational equivalent of “eat healthy"? Carl Bereiter is very good on this. Reading his brilliant book Education And The Mind in The Knowledge Age and his argument is that thinking emerges from knowledge structures, just as digestion emerges from anatomy. You can't train the process without building the substrate. In other words, you optimise liver function through diet, not by teaching it biochemistry. In education we often confuse emergent properties with teachable skills. Thinking isn't a "skill". It’s a byproduct of knowledge, not a substitute for it. However.. I think a good argument against this view is that the liver's architecture is largely fixed while the brain is more plastic and sculpted by use. Both organs respond to inputs and modify their function accordingly, but the modification happens through their own intrinsic mechanisms. So when you build knowledge substrates, you're not bypassing neural plasticity, you're leveraging it through the brain's own emergent processes rather than trying to engineer thinking from the outside as it were. So I think we could say that you can alter how well an organ functions, but not the basic process it uses. Thinking emerges from knowledge structures, just as digestion emerges from anatomy. You can improve how well the brain works by feeding it knowledge, not by “training” thinking in the abstract.