Chapter 3: Higher Order Thinking and Knowledge: Domain-General and Domain-Specific Trends and Future Directions

In a series of lectures delivered at Wellesley College toward the end of his career, Alfred North Whitehead (1938), renowned philosopher and mathematician, railed against the dominant approaches to teaching formal logic that led to what he regarded as inert knowledge, or “the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace” (p. 174). Rather, he set out to argue for the complexity and multiplicity of human thought. Yet, Whitehead understood that in order to alter current frames of mind regarding the nature of thinking, we must first “shake ourselves free” of the notions and practices we have dutifully acquired (p. 6). Within the pages that follow, we commit ourselves to Whitehead’s mission of rethinking thinking, and set forth to shake ourselves (and perhaps others) free of conceptions of higher order thinking that have dominated educational research and practice for more than 50 years. Our ambitious goal is to replace that prevailing view with an alternative mode of thought that illuminates the intricate relation that exists between higher order thinking and knowledge.