Is Good Education about Learning to Think?

Based upon perspectives from Biesta about the purpose of education and Ricoeur’s approach to basic human capabilities, this article begins with an exploration of good education. It then moves on to discuss thinking as a collective practice, involving interactions in which interlocutors are engaged in sequences of asking questions and finding answers. This happens, it is argued, when the relationship between the human capacity for imagination and fantasy and its relationship with reality is understood. As Dewey argues in his analysis of reflective thinking, thinking needs time and space. Therefore, good education requires time and space for thinking to develop through the basic human capabilities; speaking, acting, and telling, through which people develop capacities to take responsibility for themselves and others.