Educational Values and Cognitive Instruction: Implications for Reform

Reuven Feuerstein Ya'acov Rand
Bar Ilan University
Haddasah-Wizo Canada Research Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

Mildred B. Hoffman, Moshe Egozi, and Nilly Ben Shachar-Segev Hadassah-Wizo Canada Research Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

Social services have long been plagued with "creaming up." Creaming up introduces inequities in the access to well-intentioned programs of social intervention due to their methods of helping the needy. This inequity is most clearly reflected in the fact that those individuals and groups who need help less are helped more, whereas those who are most in need of help are either not helped at all or are helped in a very limited and unsatisfactory way.

The creaming-up phenomenon, initially described in social welfare, is strongly paralleled in the field of education, in general, and in the development of programs that aim at the enhancement of intelligence, in particular. A number of programs oriented to various dimensions of thinking (e.g., problem solving, critical thinking, creative thinking) have been developed for generalized use with relatively advantaged students. These students simply need to learn to make better use of the opportunities offered to them within the traditional public school system. Among the better known of these programs are Meeker "Structure of the Intellect" ( 1969); de Bono's CORT ( 1973); Philosophy in the Classroom developed by Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan ( 1980); Whimbey and Lockhead "Problem Solving and Comprehension" ( 1980); Harvard University's Odyssey ( 1983); Marzano and Arrendondo "Tactics of Thinking" ( 1986); and Sternberg ( 1986) program for developing practical intelligence. These programs have been structured in a way that makes their accessibility contingent upon a number of prerequisites: cognitive, emotional, motivational, and functional basic school skills. The absence of these prerequisites in a given individual or group of individuals makes these interven

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