INNOVATIVE THINKING:Thinking skills training is the most important lesson one can learn and implementation is key to our future success, argues Edward de Bono
'The rest of the world will soon be a tourist centre for Indians and Chinese." The originator of lateral thinking has imagined a radically different future for the West.
Dr Edward De Bono's prediction is based on the fact that both the Indian and Chinese governments have introduced his thinking skills training programme into schools.
Any country that doesn't teach its children how to think, says De Bono, will be left behind.
De Bono, who was recently in Ireland to address a gathering of academics at the Irish Management Institute, is baffled at the continued eschewal of thinking training by Irish educationalists.
He believes that current curricular models have become obsolete.
Born in Malta in 1933, Edward DeBono has gained global renown for his practical programmes on thinking skills.
He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, holds an MA in psychology and physiology from Oxford, a DPhil in Medicine, a PhD from Cambridge, a DDes (Doctor of Design) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and an LLD from Dundee.
He holds professorships at the Universities of Malta, Pretoria and Dublin City University. He was appointed Da Vinci Professor of Thinking by the New University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix in May 2005.
He claims that the link between good thinking practices and entrepreneurship is obvious, but that there are broader issues at stake if the subject is not made central to the schooling experience in Ireland.
De Bono does not advocate tagging a thinking skills component onto an overloaded curriculum. He has more radical change in mind.
"Current school curricula are based on a 2,500 year old model. There's plenty in there that could be removed. We don't need to teach vast amounts of information to children anymore.
"They can access the information they need easily. We need to teach them how to learn, not what to learn," he says.
"I argue that the teaching of thinking skills is even more important thareading and writing - more important than anything else you can teach.
"It should form the basis of all learning. Thinking skills training is like software for the mind."
The notion that teaching for knowledge is outdated is shared by other leading educational thinkers, such as the creator of Multiple Intelligence theory, Howard Gardner.
Both he and DeBono argue that the current model of curriculum design reflects the needs of the past, not the present and certainly not the future.
"The curricula in current use in Europe were designed by religious orders to equip students with the knowledge needed to defend their faith against heresy," says De Bono. "Clearly education must serve a different function now."
De Bono's Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT) programme for schools is widely used around the world. According to its creator, the programme increases performance in all other subjects, as students gain new insights into how to approach challenging areas, and gain self confidence in the process. Usually aimed at students between the ages of 10 and 14, it can be profitably used by children as young as four. It is suitable for students of all abilities, from remedial to gifted.
Schools using the CoRT method in Argentina did so well on national tests that they were investigated for cheating. De Bono trained 250 teachers in Venezuela who went on to train a further 107,000 as part of a government-sponsored programme. In China, CoRT is now in place in schools in five provinces.
In 2005, de Bono travelled to India to meet with President Kalam to discuss the training of a million teachers to teach thinking in villages and communities. Indian schools are now taking up the programme in their tens of thousands. This approach, says de Bono, will give the Indian people a competitive advantage that will be hard to beat in the coming decades, especially by nations who preserve older curricular models.
We are such as nation.
James O'Sullivan is a retired principal who has been trying to raise awareness of De Bono's methods here for decades. He came close to securing a place for thinking skills training in the Irish curriculum in the 1990s, after long negotiations with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment in the run up to the Revised Primary Curriculum. However, political exigency pushed the notion to one side and the new curriculum was rubber stamped without DeBono's inclusion. Now, CoRT is only used in occasional schools where a teacher pioneers the training out of personal interest.
"You get one person with a vision and they will drive thinking skills training in a school," says O'Sullivan, who has trained hundreds of teachers in the method and is currently training first year business students at Dublin City University.
"The problem is that for the training to be really successful, a whole school approach is needed. It's extraordinary that the Irish system doesn't allow for thinking skills training."
De Bono has been described as the originator of lateral thinking, but surely he merely discovered a natural phenomenon, rather than creating it?
"You may have an idea that is an example of lateral thinking, but that doesn't mean that you have deliberately applied lateral thinking skills. What I have created is like software for the mind - by using these programmes, you can employ lateral thinking skills systematically. Lateral thinking is just one type of thinking skill, critical and creative thinking are also part of the programme," he says.
De Bono recently brought a group of Nobel prize winning economists to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to discuss their ideas. The "Festival of Thinkers" created an opportunity for key theorists to share their lives and ideas. The location was not significant, but recalled for De Bono the teachings of the prophet Mohammad - "One hour of thinking is worth 70 years of praying."
De Bono follows with one of the aphorisms that attract so many to his programmes. "If you do not design the future someone or something else will design it for you."
Teaching thinking skills
There are a number of approaches to De Bono thinking training in schools; the Six Thinking Hatsprogramme is perhaps the most famous.
A series of different coloured hats are used (actually and not metaphorically) to help students to understand what kind of thinking they are employing at any given time. This gives them the opportunity to adjust their thinking processes in order to seek out new ways of doing things. Altering perception is the key, says De Bono. "Ninety percent of errors are errors of perception rather than logic."
The CoRT programme for schools invites children as young as four to examine their own perceptions through games and exercises. The programme develops students' self awareness and gives them more control over the decisions they make. It encourages creativity in ideas and problem- solving. It also develops the idea that an untrained thinker might not be able to improve a situation because they are unable to see beyond the fact that there is no apparent problem with the status quo.
Random entryis an exercise devised by De Bono to help people to approach old situations from new directions. "You cannot see the beginning and ending points of a situation from within that situation, you have to step outside it," he says. Random entry involves seeking out connections between random words, chosen from a grid using dice, to situations at hand. Workers at a platinum mine in Venezuela generated 21,000 ideas in one afternoon using this method.
