If a school intends to cultivate thinking among its students, It is important that a thinking culture be allowed to permeate through the whole school. I believe that the cultivation of thinking skills cannot be done in silos. The whole environment where the students participate in, must reek of thinking. They must live and breathe thinking!

Here the key are the words “cultivate” and “culture“. The word “cultivate” comes from the Latin “cultivare” which means “to till” as in what is done in the farm. Now anyone who has some idea what is done in the growing of crops will know that such work cannot be “crammed”. For the crops to grow, time and lots of nurturing is required. Even with the best crops and fertilizers, the time that is required for the crop to grow is pretty long.

The other word that is key here is “culture”. By “culture”, I mean “the system of values, beliefs, and ways of knowing that guide communities of people in their daily lives” (Trumbull, 2005). By ways of knowing, I am referring to how people organize their world cognitively through language and other symbol systems. This includes how they approach learning, how they construct knowledge, and they pass it on (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008). By this definition, a culture exists only when there is a community of people, meaning, the whole school (and beyond), and a school with a thinking culture must be involved in making thinking a priority and goal of the community. The transmission of the correct beliefs and values attached to thinking also becomes a goal. Everyone in the school is involved and not just the students alone. Thinking guides them in whatever that the members of the school do.

Measures to introduce thinking skills only at only the classroom level is doomed to failure if the whole school does not. If it is left to only the classroom level then thinking will become only a mechanical thing. The spirit and the motivation to think will be lost. It becomes then just another “thing” for the students to learn and the teachers to teach. It becomes a drudgery.

Measures to introduce thinking must also be given time to take root and grow. There is no cramming in the cultivation of thinking skills. Teaching thinking skills is not teaching to the examinations. There is no short cut. What is required is time for the skills and beliefs to permeate into the social fabric of the school. The fruits of cultivating a thinking culture is evidenced when the student is able to navigate the complexities of life successfully.

Here perhaps, it is good to be reminded of a quote from Yoda. In the Star Wars movie, the “Empire Strikes Back”, he said to Luke Skywalker who had just failed to raise his Starfighter out of a swamp, “Do or do not. There is no try!” Half-hearted attempts to introduce thinking is bound to fail. Worse is that the failure of half-baked measures will lead to its even more sceptical reception when a future genuine attempt is made to re-introduce thinking into the schools.