Jesse Richardson: How To Think, Not What To Think at TEDxBrisbane (Transcript)

Jesse Richardson

Here is the full transcript of entrepreneur and author Jesse Richardson’s TEDx Talk presentation: How To Think, Not What To Think at TEDxBrisbane conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio: How to think, not what to think by Jesse Richardson at TEDxBrisbane

TRANSCRIPT:

We can probably all agree that education is important, right? That’s pretty universal.

But I want you to think back to your time in school, and see if we can remember something. See, if you can remember a time when you were actually taught how to think. But the lesson you were being given was specifically teaching little you as a kid with big wide eyes in a sponge-like brain: how to go about the business of thinking.

Now, if your experience was anything like mine, you’d probably struggle to think of a single instance that occurred. And when you think about it, that’s completely insane; isn’t it? And at least, what, 10 years that we all spent in school, we get taught all sorts of knowledge, like and this plus this equals that, such-and-such happened in 19-dickety-two, which is great. But the actual teaching of how to think, not so much, right?

So the idea I’d like to share today is that we need to teach kids how to think, not what to think. Now, if you’re unfortunate enough to be talking to a conspiracy theorist, they might tell you that the reason we’re not taught how to think, is that the powers that be — don’t want a sheeple waking up to their lizard people, GMO, chemtrail vaccine propaganda, or something. But I suspect the real reason is quite substantially more boring and plausible. As Sir Ken Robinson identified in his wonderful TED talk on How Schools Kill Creativity, it’s just kind of how the school system responded to industrialization. And now it’s a big entrenched bureaucracy and bloody hard to change, right?