Creative Teaching and Learning, vol. 4.4
Professor Reuven Feuerstein and Professor Bob Burden, who were both very instrumental in establishing this journal and who had a huge impact on children’s education and welfare across the world, have sadly died in the past weeks.
Bob Burden is probably the better known to English teachers – something he would have found a little ironic. He considered Feuerstein the greatest of all contributors to education in the recent period and he constantly railed against his lack of recognition as lesser figures built their powerful learning empires on his unacknowledged ideas.
Bob would never have dreamed of such an offence. He had enormous integrity and commitment to children, and saw himself more as an academic activist than a great original thinker. Having discovered the ideas of Feuerstein, he tried tirelessly to get them embedded into the English education system under the rubric of thinking skills. He was an early member of the Department of Education and Science’s Thinking Skills Group in the 1980s and continued pressing Feuerstein’s insights into the way children learn, and fail to learn, through his articles and academic work.