Against didacticism

Quality thinking and quality teaching are desirable but difficult to achieve. Although lectures are necessary to teach information, one cannot rely on them to promote critical and constructive thinking skills. Nevertheless, didacticism remains the dominant teaching strategy in secondary education and in university, perhaps because it is viewed as the most efficient way of imparting large quantities of information. In this comment, research and theory in psychology are used to argue the case that the development of critical and constructive thinking skills necessarily involves the cultivation of dialectic, flexible attitudes toward thinking and teaching in context.