I’ve been reading something in a newspaper about Edward de Bono, who is suggesting that schools should teach children how to think. I agree but with a few additions.

We need to rebalance how people are taught to think and recognise that new ideas respond best to certain kinds of tools and environments. This means that we need to relax a bit and build flexibility into whatever systems we use. It also means that diverse inputs should be valued and that serendipitous situations should be encouraged. Education clearly has a fundamental role to play with this but we shouldn’t forget that education is only one part of the puzzle. Schools should teach children (and their parents) that formal education is important, but it is less critical than many people realise. The family unit is far more important. At least that used to be the case.

Parental influence is waning these days, partly because the family unit is less fixed than it used to be (i.e. families are more likely to split up) but also because parents now have to compete with a host of other influencing factors. This has obviously always included peer groups but it also now includes things such as mobile phones and websites that compete for finite attention and potentially drain the brain of concentration.

The old adage that you become like those you are with would seem to hold true for technology and architecture. We instinctively know this but we somehow ignore it. We know, for instance, that landscapes, music, art and so on influence how we think but the effects are so subtle that in most instances we are oblivious to it. We therefore continue to build and inhabit spaces that appear superficially efficient without stopping to think deeply about what these places are doing to our minds. We hear demands from employers for ‘out of the box’ thinking aimed squarely at employees that are themselves placed inside row upon row of identical cubicles.