Who are the enemies of higher-order thinking? For a start, there’s Twitter, with its character limit, and before that there was PowerPoint, with its bullet-point format. Not to mention emojis. Digging further back, the indictment includes email and even – let’s show our age – telegrams. Stop.
Complex thinking is inextricably intertwined with writing. Discourage extended writing and you damage deeper thought. This is the premise of the “Writing Revolution”, a teaching programme pioneered by Judith Hochman and subject of an Atlantic magazine article in 2012. Now Hochman has co-authored a book setting out her programme, focusing on exercises that encourage sentence expansion in young writers. Conjunctions and dependent clauses enable writers to link, expand on and qualify simple ideas.
Psychologist Donald Olson argued, along similar lines, that writing is more than a tool for thinking – it actually creates the conditions for higher-order thinking. It is through reading and writing that we master the ability to link and qualify concepts, and apply the “rules” of logical argument.