Thinking is the most fundamental of all human skills. The quality of our future will depend directly on the quality of our thinking. It is then not only astonishing but also absurd that thinking is not the core subject in all education and the central subject on any school curriculum? It is not. It is not there at all. There are some schools that teach thinking. Many of them teach critical thinking, which is excellent but totally inadequate. Judgement thinking is important but so is design thinking. We need to create as well as to judge.
David Perkins at Harvard has shown that ninety per cent of errors in thinking are errors of perception. This has also been my experience over the thirty years in which I have been involved in the teaching of thinking. Yet over the ages we have put all the emphasis on logic.

If your perception is faulty, then even excellent logic will give you the wrong answer. Excellent logic will not, itself, provide excellent perception.

If your eyesight is very sharp but you are looking in the wrong direction you will not see what you are looking for.

An explorer is sent to a newly discovered island. The explorer returns and reports on a smoking volcano and a bird that does not fly. The backers of the explorer are not satisfied: "what else was there?"

"That is all that caught my attention," replies the explorer.

So the explorer is sent back again with some "attention-directing" tools. The explorer is asked to "look north and note what you see". Then, "look south and note what you see". Then look east and west in the same way. Also make notes on; flora, fauna, geology, water, etc. This becomes a sort of checklist.

We need "attention-directing tools" for human perception. Many years ago I designed a set of such tools. They are now in use (as the CoRT programme) in thousands of schools around the world. They are also being taught in business through the DATT programme (operated by APTT)

In the Karee platinum mine in South Africa there used to be 210 fights every month between the seven different tribes working there. After the basic attention-directing tools were taught (by Susan Mackie and Donalda Dawson) the fights dropped from 210 to just four.

Jennifer O"Sullivan, in Australia, had two job clubs and every one of her unemployed youngsters was deaf. Teaching these youngsters CoRT thinking gave an employment rate more than double the average for job clubs.

In a pilot project with unemployed youngsters in the U.K, the use of these methods by the Holst Group improved unemployment four-to fivefold.

Attention-directing tools are very powerful. If you are looking in the right direction you see things. Once you have seen something you cannot "unsee" it. Your thinking, choices, decisions are determined by what you have seen.

So code 2 is a very simple set of attention-directing tools. You can instruct yourself to use a particular tool. You can ask someone else to use a particular tool. You can suggest to a group that a particular tool be used.

In a computer you might pull down a menu and then click on an item on that menu. The thinking tools are items on a "thinking menu".