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János Gordon Győri: Thinking skills education in singapore The article introduces the present status of thinking skills education in Singapore's elementary and secondary schools. This issue is particularly interesting for many reasons, eg.: a) this is a country (probably the only one in the world) in which thinking skills as a subject is a subject introduced nationwide- in all secondary schools; b) Singapore hasbeen producing reached excellent results in many different international comparative studies for a long time and some authors argue that these results are in connection with thinking skills education programs in Singapore's schools. From the late eighties educators in Singapore tried to introduce explicit (direct) strategies of thinking skills teaching. In schools it was Edward deBono's CoRT program and in others Mathew Lipman's Philosophy for children; but the results were not really convincing. Due to this fact and to a new social program envisioned and announced by prime minister Goh in 1997 (,,Thinking schools learning nation") the Ministry of Education developed a new strategy. A task forse (with more than twenty experts) was organized in the Ministry of Education, which became responsible for developing new strategies and methods in thinking skills education in elementary and secondary education. With their support, subject-specific approaches in thinking skills education (eg. infusion or content based approaches) became preferred in present-day Singapore education. The Thinking Unit of the Ministry of Education developed curricula, books and teachers' manuals for thinking skills education in elementary and secondary schools. The article introduces many important theoretical and practical elements of these programs, and finally the author summarieses the moral of this approach in Singapore from the of cognitivc education in Hungary as well as that of global trends in education in general. MAGYAR PEDAGÓGIA 102. Number 2. 203-229. (2002) Levelezési cím / Address for correspondence: Gordon Győri János, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Radnóti Miklós Gyakorlóiskolája. 1146 Budapest, Cházár A. u. 10. |
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