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EdwDB Teaching Thinking

Last Friday I happened to be at KPL and I started reading Edward De Bono's Thinking Course. I have read a few of his other books and found this one interesting.

This past weekend I started reading Teaching Thinking which I bought at a discount book store.

On the page about the author it says Edward De Bono has faculty appointments at the universities of Oxf, Camb, Lond, and Harv. It says he is regarded as the leading authority (enough qualifications for you) in the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. It says he originated the concetp of lateral thinking and developed technique for deliberate creative thinking.

There is an interesting passage in the introduction:

We assume that education teaches thinking. This is correct. Manifestly schools do not teach un-thinking. We are complacent. As one teacher said at a meeting: 'We don't need to learn to think. We're all right. aren't we?' Our best pupils pass the exams which education has set up as a test of their ability. Our most brilliant pupils come out of our best universities as brilliant graduates. But we must not forget that it is a self-fulfilling system. Education sets up its own exams to test how well it is preparing pupils for those exams. Nor must we forget the 'archway effect' which states that if a stream of brilliant people go towards an archway, then from that archway will emerge a stream of brilliant people, even if the archway has done no more than straddle their passage. Perhaps our elite universities do not produce brilliant graduates because of the excellence of the teaching, but because they take only brilliant undergraduates. Does education really teach thinking?
Edward De Bono Teaching Thinking Copyright European Services Ltd. 1976 ISBN 0-14-013785-8