Book Review 

Matthew Lipman 

Thinking in Education. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003. 
316 pp., ISBN: 0521012252 (hc) $60US 

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"Critical thinking" has become an educational buzzword with many diverse and 
sometimes conflicting definitions and teaching approaches. Though the critical 
thinking movement in education seemed very promising at the beginning of the 
1980s, it is not fulfilling all its promises for a number of reasons. For example, 
teachers are inadequately trained; the teaching of critical thinking is not sufficiently 
based on the social sciences and philosophy; and the critical, creative, and caring 
dimensions ofthinking are not properly connected in the teaching and the curriculum. 
Given the current situation, and the obvious importance of improving our students' 
reasoning abilities and measuring their improvement, educators need to understand 
definitions of "critical thinking" that clearly indicate just what critical thinking is, 
what a significant improvement of thinking is, how its improvement can be made 
operational, and how critical thinking can be effectively taught. Mathew Lipman's 
second edition of Thinking in Education proposes constructive and creative 
guidance without pretending to be the final definitive word on this complex and 
challenging matter. 

Matthew Lipman is not an armchair educational philosopher, but one who has 
been in the "trenches" for many years. He began over thirty years ago at Montclair 
State University the Philosophy for Children program, which is now an international 
movement. The readings and pedagogy in this program are quite unlike academic 
philosophy studied in college. The kernel of this program consists of two 
components. First, students read out loud fictional stories of children of about 
their own age who genuinely explore among themselves various philosophical 
issues naturally arising from their everyday activities. The issues inquired into are, 
however, quite standard: personal identity, right actions, truth, reality, beauty,justice, 
God, love, friendship, thinking, dreams, etc. Lipman wrote these books in such a 
way that the main characters in them are children who model critical, creative, and 
caring thinking. Second, a properly trained instructor carefully guides each student 
to raise questions about what s/he considers important in what has just been read; 
guides the group to choose democratically the questions they wish to answer; and 
coaches them to explore and evaluate collaboratively their answers. This 
"community of inquiry" is proposed as a social context within which to teach 
critical thinking. It encourages exploration, curiosity, and organization, and gives 
back to students some of the natural incentives to venture they experienced after 



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their own birth and began exploring and figuring out their world. Thinking in 
Education is a theoretical work, sprinkled with some practical suggestions, partly 
based on his experience and research in this program, and on his reflections on 
thinking in general. 

In the first chapter Lipman begins to explore how we are to educate for 
reasonableness, which he defines as rationality tempered by judgment. He 
proposes-without blaming teachers-a tentative explanation of children's early 
loss of curiosity and inquisitiveness once in school: schooling provides few natural 
incentives to thinking in the way that the home environment does during the first 
five exploratory and inquiring years of a child's life. The tYpical educational practice 
consists predominantly in the transmission of knowledge rather than inquiry. He 
then attempts to come to grips with core concepts (e.g., inquiry, community, 
rationality,judgment, creativity, and autonomy) that contribute to reflective education 
in the classroom. 

The first half of the second chapter sketches the recent sources of the critical 
thinking movement from Dewey to the present in the U.S. and Britain, but it is done 
in a way that is consistent with the central goal of the book. He then proposes other 
approaches to help students to guide their behavior by good reasons; addresses 
some of the challenges of teaching for transfer; and discusses different definitions 
of "critical thinking". 

Chapter three addresses some disagreements over the nature of thinking, the 
proper psychological approach to teaching, the role of philosophy, and preferred 
educational approaches to improving students' thinking. Lipman then discusses 
six significant misconceptions regarding the teaching for critical thinking that have 
hindered students' learning: teaching for thinking is equivalent to teaching for 
critical thinking; reflective teaching will necessarily result in reflective learning; 
teaching about critical thinking is equivalent to teaching for critical thinking; 
teaching for critical thinking requires drill in thinking skills; teaching for logical 
thinking is equivalent to teaching for critical thinking; teaching for learning is as 
effective as teaching for critical thinking. 

The fourth chapter is an important one because it explores some of the theory 
and pedagogy underlying the community-of-inquiry-approach to teaching critical 
thinking. Over thirty years ago this approach applied a pedagogical belief that has 
only recently become popularized: learning is a social activity to which a child 
brings hislher experience. The fmal goal of each session of a community of inquiry 
is a tentative judgment, arrived at by means of reasonable argumentation in an open 
and respectful dialogue in which students learn from each other. The inquiry has 
procedural rules that are logical and ethical in nature. This chapter elaborates on 
the logic and art of conversational discourse, and the role of the community of 
inquiry in education. The pedagogy ofthe Philosophy for Children program preceded 
the popularization of collaborative or cooperative learning. However, they differ in 
an important respect: collaborative learning stresses noncompetitive discussion 
while the community of inquiry stresses shared collaborative inquiry (119). The 
ease of teachers accustomed to collaborative or cooperative learning in incorporating 
the community of inquiry approach, as practiced in the Philosophy for Children 



Book Reviews / Compes Rendus 107 

program, will depend on how well grounded they are in inquiring approaches. 

The fifth chapter applies the community of inquiry approach to an important 
issue in contemporary education: violence reduction. If students are to learn to 
apply methods of conflict resolution in their daily lives, they must first learn to 
question together, reason together, and make judgments together in an exploratory 
dialogue in which the other sides are fairly considered. "Students can acquire 
significant practice in mediating with one another and in arriving at settlements, 
only ifthey are first confronted with problems that speak to them directly and are 
genuinely unsettling"(106). Since philosophy is so persistently contestable, it can 
be quite useful when suitably reconstructed for schoolchildren to help them perform 
at their level of linguistic, logical, and conceptual competencies. If violence has 
been experienced or observed, it can become an opportunity for reasonable dialogue 
about the context in which it occurred, and evaluation of the reasons for and 
against the violence. This approach helps students critically examine what is normally 
taken for granted in moral discourse. This chapter offers a wealth of suggestions on 
educating for values and meaning through the community of inquiry. 

The sixth chapter explores the role that emotions play in thinking and education, 
an unfortunately neglected topic in the teaching of critical thinking. The common 
and inadequate view in our culture is that emotions blur and distort thinking, and 
that we have no control over them: they just happen to us. Such thinking overlooks 
the cognitive, behavioral, and physiological basis of emotions, over all three of 
which we do have some varying degree of control. We thus indirectly do have some 
control over emotions. Given our common faulty beliefs about emotions, a better 
understanding of them from childhood onwards would not only contribute to our 
emotional health, but also to our ethical growth, for our flawed views make us use 
emotions as excuses for various behaviors. A proper education about emotions 
would make us realize how responsible we are for our emotions, which will not be an 
easy task in a culture in which we still commonly believe, "I feel angry (sad, worried, 
etc.) because you did _". Emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate according 
to the circumstances in which they are expressed, and according to the cognitions 
upon which they are based. To educate children about emotions, we have to begin 
by teaching them the words used to identify emotions, the connections between 
different emotions (e.g., despair and desperation, love and being in love); helping 
them to identify and evaluate the judgments underlying their emotions; and 
providing them with a suitable sounding board for their ideas, such as a community 
of inquiry. 

The seventh chapter helps us to explore, deepen, and broaden our theory of 
mental acts. In order to improve students' reasoning, they must learn to reflect on 
their thinking, for it is only from an awareness of their own thinking that they will 
properly orchestrate their thinking, and correctly apply the appropriate standards 
of reasoning to their own thinking for self-correction. Our ability to guide such 
thinking about thinking will depend on our own theory of mental acts, such as 
deciding, selecting, gathering, postulating, etc. Just as with emotions, we need to 
teach children the terms of various mental acts and mental states, and to use literature 
and the community of inquiry to give them a context to explore and discuss them. 



108 

This chapter offers a wealth of information, interspersed with pedagogical 
suggestions. It needs to be reread a number of times, not because of any ponderous 
obscurity, but rather because of the wealth of ideas it offers to help us become 
aware of our own thinking, and to reflect on our tacit theory of thinking and its 
appropriate application in the classroom. 

The eighth chapter continues to develop the author's theory of thinking on 
another educational buzzword: "thinking skills". He describes some of the skills 
and dispositions encouraged and developed in the community of inquiry; 
distinguishes between inquiry skills, reasoning skills, and information-organizing 
skills, and expounds on the orchestration of skills. The latter is particularly important, 
for too often thinking skills are taught in a fragmented way, disconnected from each 
other, thereby making it difficult for students to apply all the skills relevant to 
accomplish a task in an organized way. The acquisition of inquiry and reasoning 
skills is not enough: it is necessary to know how, when, and where to apply them. 
Just as children learn their first language readily when a family calls forth that 
learning, they readily learn to reason well when schools immerse them in a community 
of inquiry where they will taught from the very beginning to evaluate what they 
read, hear, and say, and to argue for their interpretations. 

From thinking skills we next move to the dimensions of thinking: critical thinking, 
which emphasizes standards or reasoning; creative thinking, which focuses on 
inventiveness; and caring thinking, which stresses ethical values and emotions. 
This multidimensional thinking is intended to strike a "balance between the cognitive 
and the affective, between the perceptual and the conceptual, between the physical 
[body] and the mental"(l99-200). Western civilization has traditionally emphasized 
the cognitive over affective and creative aspects of our thinking, but Lipman 
proposes an egalitarian and interdependent approach to critical, creative, and caring 
thinking. The next three chapters focus on each dimension. 

The ninth chapter is on the education of critical thinking and begins by showing 
that what we call "critical thinking" is just a recent version of long-standing 
intellectual concerns that accompanied the birth and development of our civilization. 
He then identifies judgment as the outcome of critical thinking; explains the concept 
of judgment; expounds on the notion of criteria, and its the relation to critical 
thinking and judgment; discusses the self-corrective nature and the sensitivity to 
context of critical thinking; presents specific criteria of good reasoning (e.g., 
relevance, sufficiency), and discusses various fallacies. 

The tenth chapter is on the education of creative thinking and touches another 
neglected topic in the teaching of critical thinking. "Creative thinking (as contrasted 
with the psychological disposition to creativity per se) is that minimal element of 
idiosyncratic judgment in every artist's work. Like all judgment, it is expressive of 
the person making the judgment and appraisive of that person's world" (249). 
Lipman uses a concrete example of a museum director who is planning an exhibit of 
paintings to list and describe twelve creativity criteria. He then discusses different 
kinds of thinking (ampliative, exemplified by inductive reasoning and the use of 
analogies and metaphors; rule/criterion defiant thinking; maieutic thinking, illustrated 
whenever we think caringly about the creative thinking of our students) and relates 



Book Reviews I Com pes Rendus 109 

them to creativity. The author examines the relationships between creative thinking 
and both caring and critical thinking. He touches on creativity in the dialogues of a 
community of inquiry, and how creativity relates to thinking for ourselves. Lipman 
suggests that an individual's creative thinking resembles the dialogue between 
good teachers and their students, and that to acquire an art is to enter into a 
dialogue, whether actual or mental, with the practitioners of that art, and to build on, 
reject, or modify various aspects of the others' thinking, until one acquires one's 
own creative outlook. All this is further reason for instructors to use the critical, 
creative, and caring vocabularies and criteria correctly as often as possible to help 
our students internalize reasonable personal dialogues to guide their thinking, 
emotions, and actions. 

The eleventh chapter examines the third dimension of thinking: caring thinking. 
To care for someone or something is to think about, feel and act toward himlher or 
it in an appreciative and respectful way. It is a judgment that it matters. Lipman then 
describes appreciative, affective, active, normative, and empathic thinking. The 
latter is particularly important in making us understand a common cause of 
breakdowns of understanding: we attend only to the words and thoughts involved 
in an exchange, and fail to put ourselves in the other's situation and to experience 
hislher emotions as if they were our own. Caring is important in improving thinking 
because it is the dimension that brings in values. If we think about something 
without any valuation, we will approach it apathetically and indifferently, which 
inescapably affects the quality of our inquiry. 

Just as the product of critical, creative, and caring thinking is judgment, the 
twelfth and final chapter synthesizes the book by describing theoretical issues 
pertaining to strengthening the power of judgment. Poor judgment is sometimes a 
reflection of weaknesses of character, and such defects have been traditionally 
attributed to poor family upbringing. However, schools, whether they like it or not, 
have become surrogate homes, and thus share some responsibility in developing 
students' judgment. Lipman continues to defend his case that elementary school 
philosophy is ideal for providing a forum where students can reflect on different 
kinds of judgments. He examines twenty kinds of judgments, e.g., value judgments, 
causal judgments, inferential judgments, factual judgments, etc., all of which are 
central to the appreciation and deep understanding of a discipline. Strengthening 
these judgments involves an explicit consideration of the principles and standards 
underlying them, and their applications to issues that interest students. This requires 
less emphasis on the mere acquisition of information (which I sometimes less 
respectfully name, "mind stuffmg"). A curriculum should balance both content and 
1teexplicit teaching of critical, creative, and caring jUdgment. Unfortunately, current 
teaching practices generally just encourage differences of opinion, open discussions 
and debate, without giving students tools of inquiry, criteria for judgments, the 
methods and principles of reasoning, practice in conceptual analysis, etc. 

I have often observed very well-intentioned instructors-at all levels-misfire 
in their attempts to infuse critical thinking into their teaching for a number of reasons. 
First, states require teachers to cover too much content, most of which is never 
used beyond the final exam and only serves the purpose of passing an exam. 



110 

Second, protestations to the contrary, "higher" education tends to be simply a 
greater quantity of more complex and intense mind stuffing than what is offered in 
high schools. This is not exactly ideal pedagogical modeling, and students will be 
disposed to teach the way they have been taught, unless they are properly trained 
in faculties of education, or take charge of their own professional development 
once they are in the trenches, and do whatever is reasonably possible in their 
challenging situations to compensate for their inadequate training. Third, faculties 
of education have been improving in various areas, but despite all their public lip 
service to critical thinking, there is still much work to be done in that area. For 
example, the recent emphasis and improvements in the area of literacy are 
unfortunately still disconnected from good thinking. Though Matthew Lipman 
does not give applications of his ideas to specific disciplines, and some might take 
issue with his emphasis on philosophy for children, Thinking in Education provides 
some important theoretical guidance for all levels of education: state departments 
of education, higher education, teacher training, and professional development. 

Claude Gratton 
Antelope Va//eyCo//ege 

cgratton@avc.edu