From the foregoing discussions it must not be deduced that because of
the specific nature and the difficulty of thinking that the power is
given only to adults. On the contrary, the power is rooted in the
original equipment of the human race and develops gradually, just as all
other original capacities do. Children under three years of age manifest
it. True, the situations calling it out are very simple, and to the
adult seem often trivial, as they most often occur in connection with
the child's play, but they none the less call for the adjustment of
means to end, which is thinking. A lost toy, the absence of a playmate,
the breaking of a cup, a thunderstorm, these and hundreds of other
events of daily life are occasions which may arouse thinking on the part
of a little child. It is not the type of situation, nor its dignity,
that is the important thing in thinking, but the way in which it is
dealt with. The incorrectness of a child's data, their incompleteness
and lack of organization, often result in incorrect conclusions, and
still his thinking may be absolutely sound. The difference between the
child and the adult in this power is a difference in degree--both
possess the power. As Dewey says, "Only by making the most of the
thought-factor, already active in the experience of childhood, is there
any promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at
adolescence, or at any later period."[7]
Thinking, then, is involved in any response which comes as a result of
the conscious adaptation of means to end in a problematic situation.
Many of the processes of mental activity which have been given other
names may involve this process. Habit formation--when the learner
analyzes his progress or failure, when he tries to find a short cut, or
when he seeks for an incentive to insure greater improvement--may serve
as a situation calling for thinking. The process of apperceiving or of
assimilation may involve it. Studying and trying to remember may involve
it. Constructive imagination often calls for it. Reasoning, always
requires it. In the older psychology reasoning and thinking were often
used as synonyms, but more recently it has been accepted by most
psychologists that reasoning is simply one type of thinking, the most
advanced type, and the most demanding type, but not the only one.
Thinking may go on (as in the other processes just mentioned) without
reasoning, but all reasoning must involve thinking. It is this lack of
differentiation between reasoning and thinking, the attempt to make of
all thinking, reasoning, that has limited teachers in their attempts to
develop thinking upon the part of their pupils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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