CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

There was a packed house at the Tishman Auditorium Friday night for an amazing panel on how Progressive Education promotes the kind of creative skills that people need to make them more entrepreneurial. I gave a speech and hosted the event which you can see here:

http://new.livestream.com/TheNewSchool/progressive

My friend and mentor, the great designer Tucker Viemeister, was the first to show me the connection between Progressive Education and Design Thinking (they are almost identical) and he brought me on board to help City & Country school celebrate its 100th anniversary. 

New School President David Van Zandt was kind enough to lend C & C its Tishman Auditorium (New School’s roots are in Progressive Education as well, thanks to John Dewey) and he gave a wonderful, funny, introduction.

There were amazing talks by Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter, Lori Brewslow, Director of the Teaching & Learning Lab at MIT, David Rockwell who designs everything, including playgrounds, Mark Pinney, CFO of Vimeo, Eric Freitag, Director of Product Innovation at RG/A, Kate Turley, the Pincipal of City & Country, an extraordinary person, 

We’ve all been to lots of big events like this but this, for me, was one of the very best.

So take  moment to think about the connection between Progressive Education and Innovation and Economics. It’s critically important to get away from memorizing answers to problems and testing for them to move on to teaching people how to think creatively about understanding what is meaningful in a situation, being open-ended in facing challenges, and making the new.