Intuition in Education: Teaching and Learning Without Thinking

Abstract

Albert Einstein once said that intuition is “the only truly valuable thing,” claiming that only “intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience” can apprehend the elementary laws of the universe. He also felt that, even in everyday activities, people should emulate the instincts of animals by being “more intuitive — they should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it.” “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, while the rational mind is only its faithful servant,” he cautioned, “but our society honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” The gift of intuition has been forgotten in education. The time may, however, be ripe for renewed interest in educational intuition. The best jobs in the global economy are going to so-called “knowledge workers” who address ill-structured problems in unpredictable ways by combining real time information flows with available knowledge to generate rapid new intuitive insight. Perhaps as a result, intuition has recently become a hot research topic in psychology. Malcolm Gladwell’s survey of that research in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking has been one of the big best sellers of 2005.