Families London SW Mar-Apr 2020

Why thinking
should be a
curriculum
subject
Prep school feature
By Dr Neel Burton, a leading psychiatrist and author of
Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking
Following his defeat at the Battle of Actium
in 31 BCE, Marc Antony heard a rumour
that Cleopatra had committed suicide
and, in consequence, stabbed himself in the
abdomen—only to discover that Cleopatra
herself had been responsible for spreading the
rumour. He later died in her arms.
‘Fake news’ is nothing new, but in our
Internet age, it has spread like a disease,
swinging elections, fomenting social unrest,
undermining institutions, and diverting political
capital away from health, education, and good
government. So how best to guard against it?
As a medical specialist, I have spent well
over twenty years in formal education. With the
possible exception of my one-year degree in
philosophy, the emphasis of my education has
been firmly and squarely on fact accumulation.
Today, I have little use for most of these
facts, and though I am only middle-aged, many
are already out of date, or highly questionable.
But what I do rely on—every day, all the time—
is my faculty for critical thinking. As BF Skinner
once put it: “Education is what survives when
what has been learnt has been forgotten.”
Can critical thinking be taught?
The answer is ‘yes’ or, at least, the beginnings
of it. So why not make more time for it and be
more rigorous and systematic about its
learning? Logic is a good start, but there is
much more to critical thinking than mere logic.
Educationalists often amalgamate thinking with
logic. True, logic is able to provide immediate
certainty and the authority and credibility that
goes with that. But logic is a lot more limited
than many people imagine.
Logic essentially consists of a set of
operations for deriving a statement from other
statements. In a sense, it merely makes explicit
that which was previously implicit. It brings
nothing new to the table. The conclusion flows
from the premises as their inevitable
consequence:
1. All birds have feathers. (Premise 1)
2. Woodpeckers are birds. (Premise 2)
3. Therefore, woodpeckers have feathers.
(Conclusion)
What’s more, logic is not concerned with the
actual truth or falsity of the premises or,
indeed, the merit or relevance of the
conclusion.
Reasoning is a much broader
psychological activity
Reasoning also involves selecting and assessing
evidence, creating and testing hypotheses,
weighing competing arguments, evaluating
means and ends, developing and applying
mental shortcuts, and so on. All this requires
the use of judgement, which is why reason,
unlike logic, cannot be delegated to a
computer, and also why it so often fails to
persuade.
Just as there is more to reason than logic, so
there is more to thinking than reasoning. If
school curricula make very little time for logic
and reasoning, they make even less time for
non-rational forms of cognition such as the
emotions, intuition, and imagination.
To see the significance of non-rational forms
of cognition, let’s hone in on the emotions.
With the decline of religion and traditional
social structures, our emotions have come to
assume an increasingly dominant role in our
lives. It has forever been said that we are ruled
by our emotions, but this today is truer than
ever. Much more than reason or tradition, it is
our emotions that determine our choice of
profession, partner, and politics, and our
relation to money, sex, and religion.
Yet, remarkably, the emotions are utterly
neglected by our system of education, leading
to millions of mis-lived lives. Nothing can
make us feel more alive, or more human, than
our emotions, or hurt us more. To control our
emotions is to control ourselves, and to
control ourselves is to control our destiny.
Our school curriculum needs to make more
time and space for thinking. And we need to
rehabilitate alternative forms of cognition, such
as the emotions, intuition, and imagination,
that can support, supplement, or supplant
reason and return us to wholeness.
Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking,
is out now, £12.99. To find out more,
visit www.neelburton.com
familiesonline.co.uk
FamiliesSWLon
March/April 2020 • Families South West 9