Critical or exploratory thinking?

Facts and information are clearly not enough to get you through life.  Critical thinking gets mentioned a lot as an alternative but this has an extremely negative, and narrow, connotation.  What is really needed is the opportunity for people, whether in work or in education, to be able to explore a subject comprehensively and think creatively around it where necessary.

This is not the focus of our education system and yet it is fundamental to every aspect of both personal and work life.   In my view the tools and techniques developed by Dr Edward de Bono are incredibly powerful in meeting this need.  The academics like to be academic.   Edward de Bono goes for tools which meet the equation of simple + practical = effective.  This seems to me to be the equation we should be looking for.

Nobel prizewinners, taught by Edward, found training in these tools amazingly powerful as have unemployed youngsters who can’t read or write.  That’s a pretty big spread of capability.  It is amazing that somehow in education and business training we don’t yet seem to have got the message.

There is an interesting debate in education about the need for a shift from learning facts, often by rote, to learning to learn.   Part of this is driven by the fact that information is now so readily available literally at the touch of a button.   What we need is to get the balance right, but most importantly learn how to explore something beyond simply repeating facts or being critical.