Harnessing the full creative potential of all society in Ontario Canada

The long-awaited Martin Florida report makes as its top recommendation: Harness the full creative potential of Ontarians beyond the creative elite professionals, entrepreneurs and artists.

This is an admission of the strategic failure of our education policy.

We are still stuck an elitist  19th and 20th century education mindset. We generally teach and test for rote memorization of information-which is soon obsolete and not for our ability to create anything new. The only significant way to harness this full creative potential of all Ontarians is for the Minister of Education to take a bold step and decide that all public school children get at least one hour a week of direct teaching of both critical and creative lateral thinking skills. We already know how to do this - we've been effectively teaching cognitive thinking skills to our gifted children, (who go on the join the creative class), for over 40 years but have chosen to ignore all the rest of society, to our economic peril. This means a tough decsion of adding an hour a week to the curriculum or dropping an hour from some irrelevent subject area.

In fact, parents who have been sending their kids to school over the past four decades, have full justification to ask for a refund of the education component of their property tax, if not a class action suite against the education system. The Ministry of Education has broken its social contract to society, by failing to ensure that our youth get the kind of education (both complemetary parts-the knowledge and the cognitive skills to use and apply that knowledge) to permit them not just survive but thrive in the 21 century.

".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones

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Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

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• ".....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"-old Japanese proverb
• ".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones
• ".......Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  --A. Einstein
• ".......Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are surefire showstoppers..." --Walter Derzko

• ".......Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  -- Margaret Mead

• ".......Small minds discuss people; Average minds discuss events; Great minds discuss ideas; --Anon

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