SOPHISTIC INTERPRETATIONS OF THINKING CAPABILITIES OF PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS IN CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE
Authors:   Doctor in Pedagogy, Professor, Professor of Educational and Socio-Cultural Management and Social Department, LODATKO Yevgeny 
Published: June 2022

Introduction. In any field of knowledge, thinking and its stylistic manifestations play an essential role. This enables the participants of an educational pro-cess to apperceive the psychological and pedagogical prerequisites, mental entities of a cognitive activity, and real opportunities of enhancing the subject knowledge and skills that serve as a basis for conscious acquiring concepts and methods of action.Mastering subject knowledge and mental skills re-quires an understanding of the subject matter, which is considered to be a complex and methodologically signifi-cant task not only in secondary school, but also in profes-sional training of teacher-trainees. An equally important aspect related to the understanding of the nature and cognitive capabilities of "critical", and "creative" thinking is an adequate evaluation of the age-determined character-istics of learners as well as their ability to master these "types" of thinking.The purpose of this article is to assess the possibilities of applying the concepts "critical thinking" and "creative thin king" in primary school, interpreting their essential contradictions to learners' thinking abilities, preventing conceptual and semantic redundancy as a prerequisite for advanced intellectual development of primary school pupils.Among the research methods of this study, the prefer-ence is given to semantic and analytical methods of stud-ying uncertain psychological and pedagogical concepts "critical thinking", "creative thinking", and "creativity", which have been broadly employed in pedagogical dis-courses in recent decades.Results. In the article, the conceptual import of think-ing and its derived concepts, which are widely used in modern pedagogical discourse, are subject to analysis. Also, the research studies whether mental capacities of primary school learners are compatible with the defining attributes of “critical” and “creative” thinking. It is sub-stantiated that to expect primary school learners to ac-quire these "types" of thinking is futile and even incompe-tent. Moreover, the idea of “conceptual purification” is emphasized, which implies that it is essential to rid do-mestic pedagogy of “innovative’ modern terminology that actively and unequivocally fills scholarly-pedagogical and other information resources.The originality of this study is meant to rationalize and illustrate the inconsistency of the age-determined traits of primary school learners and qualitative character-istics of such concepts as "critical" and "creative" thinking, which are widely used in modern pedagogical discourses. Conclusion. The circulation of ambiguous interpreta-tions of such concepts as “critical” and “creative” (as well as “logical)” thinking that has been widely spread in the last decade, brings disorder and even terminological chaos into the system of advance psychological and ped-agogical dominants. This requires the proper streamlining of the system of concepts, derived from the concept "think-ing", in order to prevent manipulating the thinking abilities of primary school learners and their logical development in basic school.This study though far from being conclusive yet offers several insights into the issue of enhancing thinking in primary school learners. The suggested rationales are compatible with the necessity to develop critical thinking of primary school teacher-trainees so that they could adequately assess modern trends in the secondary edu-cation system, and consciously and competently respond to the calls and beliefs coming from the organizers of various events concerning the advertised strategies of fostering thinking abilities in primary school learners. This outlines an implication for further research in this domain.