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The relatively modern school is a one-story building containing nine classrooms. Every room is equipped with a sink and bathroom and has a direct exit to outdoors, which facilitates outside activities. The school had no kindergarten when we started. The first year classroom, 25 by 30 feet large, originally contained traditional seats and desks, which on our initiative were replaced by tables and chairs. Additionally, for the purpose of our program, art easels and green chalk boards that could be tilted were brought in, the floor was carpeted, and two rope ladders were suspended from exposed steel girders on the ceiling.

A child's learning of any facts depends in part on the child's general capacity to relate these specific facts to other facts in a meaningful manner. In all these examples intelligent comprehension is the most vital ingredient of the total learning process. Consequently, the School for Thinking, recognizes the psychological priority of intelligence over learning. Piaget's theory permits the school to separate conceptually what cannot be separated in practice: the learning aspect and the thinking aspect.

Development has to do with general mechanisms of action and of thinking; it pertains to intelligence in its widest and fullest sense. Everything that can be called characteristic of human intelligence comes about chiefly through the process of development as distinct from the process of learning. Learning deals with the acquisition of specific skills and facts and the memorizing of specific information. Piaget's theory states clearly that the general development of intelligence is the basis on which any specific learning rests.