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 © 2005-2009 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 " The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !! To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page
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