The Learning Revolution - Chapter 15


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Book Summary
Contents Page
Learning Revolution Library
Skim-read the book
Remember the Main Points
Check your Thinking Style
Count to 10 in Japanese
Think up Great New Ideas
Personal Learning Styles
Check your Fog Index

Preview the CD-ROM

Just do it!	503

New Zealand communities have owned "trustee" savings banks, with their profits distributed to the communities they serve. But when the Government opened up New Zealand banking to international competition in the 1980s, the trustees of the Auckland Savings Bank made a bold decision: they sold 75 percent of their bank to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. They put the $NZ350 million proceeds into the ASB Charitable Trust, and invested them around the world. It is now by far New Zealand's biggest trust, disbursing millions of dollars a year for major educational, cultural and charitable projects.*

The international conference model

  International conferences on new methods of learning and education provide another gateway to the future.
  Singapore was one of 44 countries that sent delegates to Arthur Andersen's 1997 Learning for the 21st Century conference in Chicago. Significantly Singapore's delegates were chosen by the Ministry of Education and the National Computer Board.
  The Singapore Government in mid-1997 also paid for every school principal and deputy principal in the country to attend a one-week International Conference on Thinking. The keynote presenters read like a Who's Who from the pioneers in creative thinking: Howard Gardner from Harvard; Robert Sternberg from Yale; Edward de Bono from England; Israel's Reuven Feuerstein; Venezuela's former Minister for the Development of Human Intelligence, Luis Machado; David Perkins from Harvard; and such thinking-skills pioneers as Paul MacCready, Robert Sylwester and Richard Paul - all brought to Singapore to stimulate the drive for creative thinking.

The "learning organization" model

Hundreds of companies are also taking advantage of new methods of learning to build their corporations into learning organizations.
Norway's Telenor telecommunications company is using accelerated learning techniques to develop its 18,000 staff. It's using the Norwegian translation of The Learning Revolution and Peter Senge's The

* A donation of $NZ2-million from the ASB Charitable Trust in 1990 enabled co-author Dryden and Lesley Max to form the Pacific Foundation. It paid for most of the "Where To Now?" television series and a range of New Zealand parent-education programs, including a pilot project for combining parenting education with a preschool and health center.


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