There are few areas of public policy as riddled with nostalgia as education. Good schooling, however, is not about restoring an idealised past. It is about preparing children to thrive in the thinking landscape of the future. One of America's most influential psychologists, Robert Sternberg, boils down the dilemma to four key thinking styles, respectively based on memorisation, questioning, intelligence and wisdom. The first, rote learning, still dominates worldwide. It is traditional, easy and cheap to implement and, in religious or politically inflexible contexts, it combines the seemingly incongruous qualities of a sleeping potion and a battering ram. However, in societies characterised by high competition and rapid change, the 'walking encyclopedia' has fallen out of fashion. The well-educated mind is stocked with facts, of course. It is just that they need to be set into a densely connected web of previous knowledge, and be easily accessible using a variety of different retrieval cues. For example, having in mind the chief events of a particular period in history adds relevance and meaning to any additional knowledge connected to that time. Multiplication tables largely earn their keep: they free up working memory space for more worthwhile tasks. Well-selected memorisation, in other words, is a limited but invaluable mental resource. One step up the educational food chain is the critical thinker, who has learned how to analyse, evaluate and interpret information from an independent perspective. This is trickier to teach because awakening a student's scepticism represents a challenge to the classroom setting itself. But methods include sensitising students to common cognitive fallacies. However, the critical thinker is but an intellectual plodder compared to what Dr Sternberg calls the successful intelligent thinker. Such thinkers go beyond questioning other people's ideas and come up with their own, accurately assess and implement them, and convince other people of their merit. Respective attitudes to this sort of highly flexible, individualistic thinking are often regarded as critical to the distinction between eastern and western traditions of education. For some, this thinking style is necessary equipment for any nation which aspires to retain or acquire any sort of competitive edge in a world dominated by US models of discourse and business practices. How can this be taught? By giving children as much choice as possible in their projects at school and monitoring and mentoring them through the ups and downs of the inevitably patchy results. Crucially, failures should be framed in terms of opportunities to learn how to recognise one's own strengths and weaknesses and as a chance to practise redefining problems and salvaging a situation. Citing recent immoral behaviour in the upper echelons of corporate American, Dr Sternberg recommends teaching wise thinking as a way to instil a sense of moral accountability. However, the inculcation of a set of values is not traditionally seen as an explicit learning goal at school, and even assuming that wisdom can be taught in a school setting, how could it be tested? Theoretically, each thinking style builds on the preceding one. Memory stocks the mind, a critical regard sifts through information, and a synthesis of creativity and practicality stimulates new ideas and successful action, guided, ideally, by wisdom. These are the four thinking styles that one influential America theorist sees as central to America's education policy decisions. It is a vision perhaps worth considering with respect to Hong Kong's conversation with itself on the topic. Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation