MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

In “How Do Innovators Think?” (HBR Editors’ Blog, 5:21 PM Monday September 28, 2009)
,  Bronwyn Fryer writes:

We also believe that the most innovative entrepreneurs were very lucky to have been raised in an atmosphere where inquisitiveness was encouraged. We were stuck by the stories they told about being sustained by people who cared about experimentation and exploration. Sometimes these people were relatives, but sometimes they were neighbors, teachers or other influential adults. A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).

Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business Publishing. All rights reserved.

This is the kind of upbringing that Thomas Edison (see a previous post) and the Wright brothers (see anecdote 1 and  anecdote 2) had.

The context for this paragraph from “How Do Innovators Think?” is the initial answer to what Jeff Dyer (Brigham Young University) and Hal Gregersen (Insead) learned are important skills from their survey of 3,000 “creative” executives and interview of 500:

Dyer: The first skill is what we call “associating.” It’s a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning — an ability to ask “what if”, “why”, and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture. The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people’s behavior. Another skill is the ability to experiment — the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

Fryer: Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

Dyer: We’ve found that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven’t been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business Publishing. All rights reserved.

We meet again Kipling’s “Six Honest Serving-Men.”

All this, thought for the day? No, a thought for life…

In The Montessori Method, Dr. Maria Montessori wrote (pre-1912):

We often hear it said that a child’s will should be “broken” that the best education for the will of the child is to learn to give it up to the will of adults. Leaving out of the question the injustice which is at the root of every act of tyranny, this idea is irrational because the child cannot give up what he does not possess. We prevent him in this way from forming his own will-power, and we commit the greatest and most blameworthy mistake. He never has time or opportunity to test himself, to estimate his own force and his own limitations because he is always interrupted and subjected to our tyranny, and languishes in injustice because he is always being bitterly reproached for not having what adults are perpetually destroying.

There springs up as a consequence of this, childish timidity, which is a moral malady acquired by a will which could not develop, and which with the usual calumny with which the tyrant consciously or not, covers up his own mistakes, we consider as an inherent trait of childhood. The children in our schools are never timid. One of their most fascinating qualities is the frankness with which they treat people, with which they go on working in the presence of others, and showing their work frankly, calling for sympathy. That moral monstrosity, a repressed and timid child, who is at his ease nowhere except alone with his playmates, or with street urchins, because his will-power was allowed to grow only in the shade, disappears in our schools. He presents an example of thoughtless barbarism, which resembles the artificial compression of the bodies of those children intended for “court dwarfs,” museum monstrosities or buffoons. Yet this is the treatment under which nearly all the children of our time are growing up spiritually.

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In The Montessori Method, Dr. Maria Montessori wrote:

True rest for muscles, intended by nature for action, is in orderly action; just as true rest for the lungs is in the normal rhythm of respiration taken in pure air. To take action away from the muscles is to force them away from their natural motor impulse, and hence, besides tiring them, means forcing them into a state of degeneration; just as the lungs forced into mobility, would die instantly and the whole organism with them.

It is therefore necessary to keep clearly in mind the fact that rest for whatever naturally acts, lies in some specified form of action, corresponding to its nature.

To act in obedience to the hidden precepts of nature — that is rest; and in this special case, since man is meant to be an intelligent creature, the more intelligent his acts are the more he finds repose in them.

(pp. 354, The Montessori Method by Dr. Maria Montessori, trans. Anne E. George, (c) 1964 Schocken Books, New York (and (c) 1988 Random House), ISBN 0-8052-0922-0)

This idea is generally consistent with evolution, Aristotle’s philosophy, the Renaissance’s and the Enlightenment’s ideas of reason, the philosophy of man of the ancient Greeks, modern science and technology…