Learning about the world: developing higher order thinking in music education

Abstract

Innovative thinking is an innate human capacity geared towards adaptation and survival. Theories of education accordingly aim at developing teaching-learning strategies that promote creative, problem-solving reasoning referred to as higher order thinking. This essay briefly explains some of the assumptions underlying this concept, and then suggests how they may be reconfigured in a strategy suitable for education in and through music. The strategy involves a basic process of analysis, evaluation and creativity related to actual social experience. Higher order thinking therefore aims to equip learners with the capacity to synthesise relationships in and beyond particular fields of study so that their thinking may expand into the concreteness of the world.