The 2008 Did You Know 3.0 posted on YouTube (see Below) has an interesting, but unsurprising considering the pace of the world’s change, fact 00:51 into it: the top ten in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.
Hopefully this is something educators will soon take note of and rethink the way our schools systems develop education programs. Rather than teach and reward memorization for the sake of memorization in an isolated fashion, i.e., monodisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, students should be prepared to learn the skill that will be the most valuable asset in the coming decades: how to think creatively.
As James Watson, co-discover of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel Prize, writes in Avoid Boring People, “College [and by extension all the schooling that came before it] is for learning how to think.”
Thinking creatively involves the ability to associate ideas, and, in its most useful form, the ability to associate ideas from different disciplines.
Education systems must begin to take a cross-disciplinary approach in order to prepare students for an innovation-based future, as preparing students to learn how to think is the only sensible course of action in an unknown future.
Tags: Creativity · education · Innovation · james watson1 Comment
Wouldn’t it be great to see course titles like: How to Think Creatively, How to Approach a Problem, How to Evaluate New Information From Multiple Perspectives. Great post!