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| How to think
for great ideas |
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New program to teach
yourself or students creative thinking
Amazingly the most important
"subject" of all is not taught at most schools: how to invent your own future,
how to create new ideas.
Yet the world today needs a diet of revolutionary new
ideas as never before. As Roderic Gorney says in The Human Agenda: "For the
first time in our two million or more years we have the possibility of enough to go
around." But most of the world's political leaders are driving into that future
through a rear-vision mirror fixed on a bygone era.
In education, the contrast between past and future is
even more marked. As Robert Gross puts it: "We live in the first era in human history
when our species' entire heritage of knowledge, wisdom and beauty is available to each of
us virtually on demand."1
That gives us the opportunity to reinvent education and
usher in a golden age of discovery and innovation: to reinvent they way we think, learn,
work, live, enjoy ourselves and create. The models already exist.
Thomas Edison held 1093 patents,2
and electrified the world. Walt Disney and Apple Computers' Steve Jobs3
each founded giant commercial empires on the power of a new idea - and a different
make-believe mouse. Ray Krok4 was a middle-aged milk-shake
machine seller when he first visited the California hamburger bar of Dick and Maurice
McDonald. He was to take their basic concept, mix it with others, and turn the result into
the world's biggest fast-food chain. Georgi Lozanov, the Bulgarian psychologist, linked
yoga, meditation and music to revolutionize the teaching of foreign languages. The
Internet and World Wide Web have completely changed the way the world communicates.
Bill Gates is the richest man in America firstly
because he and his
Contents Page Preface
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