Lateral Thinking - Education

Education

Lateral thinking can be taught and originally Edward de Bono put forward an education program for teaching thinking. CoRT spans some 80 different tools for thinking. Lateral thinking is a serious alternative to say training in creativity, and as such the tools must be taught and trained using a didactic and pedagogical approach very different from both the training in logic/analyses (vertical thinking) and the training in creativity/sensibility (horizontal thinking).

The training is thus only to be conducted by teachers that must make use of the automatized materials. This ensures that the education is not biased towards either of the opposing political positions, that is the vertical ("right wing" stereotype) or the horizontal position ("left wing" stereotype). Conducting the education of young kids form the age of 5-7 years, will thus counter any bias (unintended as well as intended).

Based on the cognitive knowledge the correctly conducted teaching and training will thus protect the pupils form various pedagogical approaches Cognitivism. When taught in the correct way the pupils will learn strong thinking, as an alternative to thinking purely based in traditional vertical/horizontal thinking. The result of this is that all pupils should maintain their original thinking bias, as any other "thinking training" would carry a political favour.

To further counter the influencing on the pupils original thinking style you have Parallel thinking, where you can combine various lateral thinking tools - either alone or with other thinkers. Using parallel thinking (not the Yoga version) in this way will again protect the individuality of each of the pupils.