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In these days of information explosion, the knowledge acquired in school gets out of date very quickly. The obvious question is what must be taught to prepare pupils intellectually and psychologically for such rapid change in their future working life.
If every detail is explained to pupils they are deprived of the opportunity to find the truth themselves. In this case they develop so-called reproductive thinking. Most curricula are aimed, on the whole, at inward digesting of a certain scope of knowledge, i.e. pupils are nourished with “prepared” ideas and notions. As a consequence they miss the creative, independent approach to studying.
Leading scholars and teachers assert that it is considerably more important to teach how to study and to develop in the pupil a so-called productive thinking rather than to simply cram into the students mind the required scope of knowledge and facts. It has been found that the productive thinking develops when a pupil is assigned non-standard tasks, when the pupil searches for new approaches to standard problems, and when the student masters the surrounding world independently.
It is well known that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for logical thinking and the right hemisphere is responsible for the creative thinking. The main features of thinking while activating the left hemisphere are consistency, linearity, logic and analytics. On the other hand, the features of thinking while activating the right hemisphere are globality, integrity, synchronism, non-linearity and intuition (insight).
It is not a secret that schooling component is oriented, on the whole, to development of the left hemisphere. For balanced development of personality integration of the hemispheres is necessary. Taking this into account the author who is mathematician and psychologist proposes a course on logic and heuristic thinking which is developed on the border of logic, mathematics and psychology. This is an attempt to form thinking of pupils based on the principle of integration.
The program takes into account the development of basic aspects of thinking both on verbal and non-verbal levels. The proposed course is responsible for forming the aptitude for analysis and synthesis, abstracting and specification, the ability to think associative and search for non-standard approaches to problem’ solving.
This course is being implemented as an experimental subject in a number of Lviv schools during the last eight years. Comparative testing of level of mental development of pupils witnessed the considerable progress of mental abilities: the indexes of logical thinking were higher than standard one almost twice; indexes of creative thinking increased fivefold.
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