*Software For Your Brain** School Of Thinking -- Brain Freebie!
I have always thought of Australia as a clever country.
We even export cleverness! Australia continues to grow and export some of the world's best scientists.
Indeed, the School of Thinking based in Melbourne and also in Cyberia (on the internet at http://www.sot.com.au), is now the largest school in the world daily exporting thinking lessons to every country on the planet.
There are more scientists alive today than all the scientists who ever lived. In every sphere of knowledge, these scientists are questioning,exploring, experimenting, researching and updating what we once thought to be true.
As a scientist, I was taught that old truths are replaced by new truths as new evidence becomes available. As a human being living in today's world I don't need to be a scientist to realise this obvious fact.
The world is full of daily examples of this phenomenon - the explosion of knowledge, the information revolution, the high-tech advances in cybermedia, the sophistication of the marketplace, productivity increases in the workplace, the changes in geo-political spheres of influence, and sporting records continue to be shattered.
Replacing old truths with new truths is called thinking. To help promote this activity, I started the School of Thinking (SOT) in New York in 1979. SOT lessons have now reached over 50 million people worldwide. In a USAir article, SOT was once described as "the McDonalds of thinking".
I have sometimes been accused by the intellectual elite for "selling thinking to the masses". I take it as a compliment since I cannot think of a better thing to sell. SOT, now the largest school in the world, teaches not what to think but HOW to think - thinking as a skill - and provides daily thinking lessons to anyone, anyplace, anytime.
SOT's mission has always been to get 'thinking' taught to kids at school by placing 'thinking' on the curriculum as a school subject. At first, there was quite a lot of resistance to this proposal. But it did receive wonderful support from some very special people like my mentor.
Professor George Gallup (founder of the Gallup Poll at Princeton), who once encouraged me by telling me, "I believe your work in teaching people to think may be the most important thing going on in the world today."
Eventually, after ten years of running around the US from New York to places like Washington, Dallas, San Francisco, Puerto Rico etc etc and back to New York again talking to parents, teachers, legislators, the media, business and others, we met with great success.
In the mid-eighties 'teaching thinking' became a nationwide fad in US education led by media articles in two of America's most influential publications: a cover story I gave to the Readers Digest, and a lead story about our
project in the New York Times, "TEACHING TO THINK: A NEW EMPHASIS AT SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES" (Jan 9, 1983).
On returning to Australia in the Bi-centennial year, I launched the School of Thinking (SOT) at a meeting of 700 of Australia's municipal and federal states people in Canberra, 30 May 1988. To commemorate this I presented the Governor-General His Excellency Sir Ninian Stephen AK,
GCMB, GCVO, KBE with his own SOT Brainusers Kit and then awarded to the Honourable Robert J L Hawke AK, the Prime Minister of Australia, a former Rhodes Scholar, a special certificate appointing him as 'Australia's Number One Brainuser' to symbolise the vast potential in
turning-on the power of Australia's 16 million brains.
Later, on 8 March 1990, in Brisbane, Australia's Number One Brainuser, Prime Minister Hawke, decreed:
"No longer content to be just the lucky country, Australia must now become the clever country."
Since bringing SOT to Australia, I have worked a similar campaign to the one I used in the US, touring Australia giving lectures and working the media to see that Australian kids are taught to think for themselves.
The better way to do this is to have "thinking" put on the core curriculum as a school subject. Then kids will learn that knowing HOW to think is every bit as important as knowing what to think.
In 1995, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology invited the School of Thinking to advise on how Australia can further develop its "innovation culture". Part of our submission to the Parliament said as follows:
"Developing an innovation culture in Australia is the greatest strategic hope for our productive future in this economic region. The biggest obstacle we face in doing this is the cultural lack of value we place on 'thinking and innovation' compared to the value we place on being
'right' and defending our point-of-view.
This is historically due to the importation of our education system from Europe. Since the church designed our European education system in the middle ages, the traditional focus of education has been on teaching children what to think.
To date, we have not had an equal balance given to teaching our children how to think. Generally, this has tended to
produce a culture which, like other European cultures, feels it is more important to be 'right' than to be a thinker, to experiment, to make mistakes, to discover, to take risks, …… to innovate!
The mission of the School of Thinking is also to see that thinking is taught in Australian schools as a core curriculum subject, by 1999.
Today, everyone is talking about the human brain.
It's the new frontier.
In the increasingly competitive global business theater, world class corporations are realizing that the cleverness of their employees - their brainpower - is the ultimate corporate asset.
There is a new trend towards developing, managing and measuring the 'intellectual capital' of
the corporate enterprise. As a senior IBM executive said, "Our most valuable corporate assets go home at 5pm and are not even recorded on the balance sheet".
(to be continued)
originally posted at http://www.thinkers.com/chapters/preface.htm
Preface
