What do creativity, problem-solving, conflict resolution, sense-making, innovation, discovery, design, invention, entrepreneurship, recovery and job creation all have in common? What's the common denominator here?
......THINKING SKILLS .....
This week I attended the Youth Entrepreneurship Summit in Toronto sponsored by cybf.ca and Industry Canada as part of Global Entrepreneuship Week.
In discussions with participants and in the Q&A session I made the business case that we should be teaching both critical and creative/lateral thinking skills to all children starting in public school…and right through college and university and especially to kids at risk such as our Native Indian population.
We’ve been teaching lateral thinking skills to gifted kids across Canada for the past 40 years (so we know how to teach it and we know it works) and Corporate Canada regularly sends its top CEOs and managers to attend courses on lateral thinking by Edward de Bono, yet we ignore the rest of the entire population-heaven forbid that we actually teach them to be effective thinkers. People who have paid property tax to support our education system should get refunds because the education system has failed us, since most kids exit the school system cognitively deficient !!
In grade one, when we start to learn numbers, teachers first teach us the operacy skills behind numbers, which are plus, subtract, multiply and divide and then we go on to higher order operations which are based on these basic cognitive operations. But when we switch from numbers to ideas, notions, values and assumptions we somehow forget that we need to teach the corresponding critical and lateral thinking skills to invent and explore ideas.
Research shows that kids who are taught lateral thinking as a separate subject as early as grade one or two, show a corresponding grade improvement across all subject areas.
In the UK, kids at risk(who are already full of street smarts) and who were taught a ½ day workshop on lateral thinking skills as teens, later grew up to become successful entrepreneurs or community leaders at a percentage rate that was far greater then the normal population. When I taught a course on lateral thinking skills in business at Conestoga College in Kitchener Ontario in the 1990s, it was one of the most popular as voted by students.
Just think how much more successful all entrepreneurs would be if they all had a background and knew how to overtly use and apply their cognitive skills..and we already have an under-utilized mentor network-gifted ed teachers can mentor entrepreneurship lectures and professors.
Walter Derzko
Wow this is a powerful article. I will be adding this to my favorites.
Posted by: Donothan Gamble | May 25, 2011 at 12:49 PM