If creative thinking to problem solving is the twenty-first century critical skill, then what are schools, colleges and universities or any institutions of education (including those of training & development for the working adults) doing to develop these real skills in students & everyone else? Apparently not enough at all! It remains early days in codifying and disseminating standard practices of problem-solving in educational institutions.
Such a structured system can seem to be producing automatons, mediocre students (learners) who are mass products of a cookie-cutter concept. In view of that, comparing “factory schools” to production-line manufacturing processes may not seem too extreme, the fact that students (learners) are always fed with “WHAT” to think rather than “HOW” to think is indeed worrying still.
Let’s put it this way, be frank, the world no longer rewards people just for what they know as Google already knows everything, but for what they (the people) can do with what they know. Problem solving is at the heart of this, the capacity of an individual to engage in cognitive processing to truly understand and resolve problem situations (using own intellect) where a method of solution is not immediately obvious.
First things first, to be self-sustaining in life, exactly from the beginning it’s truly essential to position (get) our mindset right throughout the cycles: LEARN FOR MASTERY, not test score. Why so? Simply because in reality it is the MASTERY that counts and lasts for life, NOT TEST SCORES! Don’t you get it!?
