Duncan Green — Please help me answer some scary smart student questions on Power and Systems

Uncertainty and emergence in huge complex adaptive systems.

To what extent can reflexivity anticipate emergence anticipated and reduce uncertainty by applying creative and critical thinking?

Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to Power
Please help me answer some scary smart student questions on Power and Systems
Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB

Adam Jezard — Finland thinks it has designed the perfect school. This is what it looks like.

The walls are coming down in Finland’s schools – but not just the physical barriers between classrooms. Also going are divisions between subjects and age ranges, and students have more of a say over what will be learnt than children in many other countries.

According to CityLab, an architecture website, the country is undergoing an ambitious national redesign of its 4,800 schools. Some 57 new schools began construction in 2015 and 44 in 2016. Others are being refurbished using open-plan principles...

Education for life rather than a job.

Proponents of PBL [phenomenon-based teaching and learning] say it helps to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need to flourish today. Kirsti Lonka, a professor of educational psychology at Helsinki University, told the BBC: “When it comes to real life, our brain is not sliced into disciplines ... we are thinking in a very holistic way. And when you think about the problems in the world – global crises, migration, the economy, the post-truth era – we really haven’t given our children the tools to deal with this inter-cultural world.”...

World Economic Forum
Finland thinks it has designed the perfect school. This is what it looks like.

Adam Jezard | Senior Writer at Formative Content.

Education

Every child begins their journey through life with an incredible potential: a creative mindset that approaches the world with curiosity, with questions, and with a desire to learn about the world and themselves through play.
However, this mindset is often eroded or even erased by conventional educational practices when young children enter school.

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is often cited as an example of how children’s divergent thinking diminishes over time. 98% of children in kindergarten are “creative geniuses” – they can think of endless opportunities of how to use a paper clip.
This ability is reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses....

The World Economic Forum has just released its Human Capital Report with the subtitle “Preparing People for the Future of Work”.... It goes on to underline how schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills – or skills within more traditional subjects – rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration. 

This should be cause for concern when looking at the skill set required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important skills a child needs to thrive, according to the Future of Jobs Report....

Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are different aspects of the same skill. Karl Popper wrote a book entitled, All Life Is Problem Solving, which sums it up. And it is not just about human capital and job qualifications.

The ability to combine creative and critical thinking are necessary conditions for the multifaceted types of problem solving one will need for life both personally and socially. While creativity is natural for children, ciritical thinking has to be acquired. And after childhood creativity has to be fostered with nurture or the natural impulse may decline and studies show that it does in the case of most people.

This requires emphasizing active learning over passive learning.

This realization is nothing new. John Dewey was famous for his pragmatic educational philosophy decades ago. He also emphasized that education is a necessary condition for a healthy democracy.

Unfortunately, the Human Capital Report is about "preparing people for work" rather than preparing people for life in a comprehensive way. That is a recipe for failure, both for individuals and society owing to its misdirected emphasis on a part of life rather than the whole. Education must be holistic, and therefore it must be systems-based.

World Economic Forum

This is the one skill your child needs for the jobs of the future
Mirjam Schöning, Head of Learning through Play in Early Childhood programme, The Lego Foundation, and Christina Witcomb, Senior Communication Manager, The Lego Foundation

See also

Over the past few years, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have all endorsed a teaching method known as "personalized learning."

It involves students guiding their own lessons with the help of technology, while teachers take on more of a coaching role if problems emerge. For its apparent benefits in getting kids up to speed in reading and math, advocates have claimed it could — and should — become the future of US education.

But personalized learning is so new, many teachers still need to learn how it works....

Business Insider

There's a teaching method tech billionaires love — here's how teachers are learning it

Chris Weller

Erin Meyer — Are You a Holistic or a Specific Thinker?

A traditional tenet of Western philosophies and religions is that you can remove an item from its environment and analyze it separately. Cultural theorists call this specific thinking.

Chinese religions and philosophies, by contrast, have traditionally emphasized interdependencies and interconnectedness. The Ancient Chinese thought in a holistic way, believing that action always occurs in a field of forces. The terms yin and yang (literally “dark” and “light”), for example, describe how seemingly contrary forces are interdependent.

Here’s what one of my Chinese participants said after we’d discussed the fish and photo studies: “Chinese people think from macro to micro, whereas Western people think from micro to macro. For example, when writing an address, the Chinese write in sequence of province, city, district, block, gate number. Westerners do just the opposite. In the same way, Chinese put the surname first, whereas Westerners do it the other way around. And Chinese put the year before month and date.”

This affects the way business people view each other across the globe. As Bae Pak from the Korean motor company Kia told me: “When we work with Western colleagues, we are often taken aback by their tendency to make decisions without considering the impact on other business units, clients, and suppliers.”

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
Are You a Holistic or a Specific Thinker?
Erin Meyer
Here's a list of opposites that require integration in holistic thinking. Interestingly, it is bilingual and bicultural children of Eastern and Western parents that get this naturally, as was explained to me by a student of mine some years ago.

structural functional

static dynamic

analytic synthetic

essentialism existentialism

nature path

figure ground

individual whole

element system

isolated contextual

fixed flexible

angular curved

mechanism organism

expansion growth

ontic ontological

matter consciousness

ideological pragmatic

separate integrated

focal balanced

independent interdependent

kataphatic apophatic

scientific mystical

math music

rational non-rational

observation experience

perception sensibility

fact value

reason inspiration

logic intuition

head heart

external internal

masculine feminine

yang yin

opposition complementarity

exclusion inclusion

diversity unity

detail overview

drop ocean

particle wave

either-or both-and

quantitative qualitative

cognitive affective

two-value logic fuzzy logic

drops ocean

simplicity complexity

closed systems open systems

literal symbolic

science art

precision nuance

centrifugal centripetal

anchored centered

active passive

result-based process-oriented

work play

criticism creativity

make it happen let it be

control the process trust the process

rule-based spontaneous

correctness rectitude

actual potential

actualize visualize

freedom community

life is rational life is experimental

individual utility common good

self-interest love

strict father nurturing mother

Almighty Father Divine Mother

Joe Romm, Greg McKeown remember Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey, author of the mega-seller, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," died Monday at the age of 79.

Read it at Climate Progress
Remembering Stephen Covey
by Joe Romm

There are many who want to be like Stephen Covey. There are many who didn't like the way his ideas were expressed or applied. But Stephen was a man who was in the arena trying to teach and make a difference. In this pursuit, I do aspire to be like him.

Read it at The Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Stephen R. Covey Taught Me Not to Be Like Him
by Greg McKeown

Vikram Mansharamani — All Hail the Generalist

The Power of Foxy Thinking

Read the post at Harvard Business Review | HRB Blog Network

All Hail the Generalist
by Vikram Mansharamani | Lecturer at Yale University