How to Nurture Lateral Thinkers

I’m generally a fan of traditional education, and I think, all things being equal, a traditional education is going to be more productive than an informal one. 

Now, by traditional education, I mean a wide variety of things – traditional schools, colleges, trade schools, Red Cross CPR and First Aid training courses, etc. Anything with a curriculum and formal assessments. 

That’s not necessarily a hard knock against homeschooling, unschooling, casual apprenticeships, etc. – they can work just fine. I just think, based on my experience, that they’re less predictably effective than traditional education. 

There’s an exception, though, and it’s probably more common than most traditional educators would like to acknowledge.

Lateral thinking – thinking outside the box, so to speak – is often ill-served by traditional education. 

Back when I used to teach in a public school classroom, we had to do these things called bellringers – like a five-minute warm-up to keep the kids occupied while we teachers took care of things like attendance, calling kids aside to talk to them, etc. 

I used to give them odd questions I picked up off the internet. Things with no real answer – questions that would test one’s lateral thinking. Questions like this:

• How many cows are in Canada?
• Let’s say you live a long and healthy life and feel no ill health. And you hit 90. Them 100. Then 110. Then, unbelievably, 115. At what age do you begin to think you might be immortal?
• Would you rather fight one bear-sized duck or twenty duck-sized bears?

When I posed these, the majority of students didn’t think much about them, applied some sort of straightforward logic to the problem, and gave a quick answer. They’d say, “like a million,” “150,” and “20 little bears.” Some students struggled with the questions. They’d say something like “none, probably,” “120,” and “neither.”  

Other students never got to the questions. They’d start talking about the differences between cows and steers, how much of Canada was populated, whether there were other names for cows in Canada, what being immortal entailed, the aggressive nature of ducks, etc. 

In short, some students saw the problem as something to solve – a destination. Laterally thinking students didn’t look for a solution; they interrogated the question. 

Now, I’m oversimplifying things a little. It's not like the world is divided between vertical thinkers and lateral thinkers. Most of us have a little bit of one or the other in us, though we tend to favor one approach. The point is, that the vertical thinkers turned their papers in, and the lateral thinkers didn’t (again, generally). 

So, it’s fair to say that traditional education doesn’t always accommodate lateral thinkers, but it’s also true that the world, the way we’ve built it, needs relatively few lateral thinkers. Even those of us who think laterally don’t always appreciate that quality in others. 

If you’re dining at a restaurant, you probably don’t want your waiter thinking about your order laterally – you probably don’t want the waiter thinking, maybe one large French fry would be better than fifty shoestring-sized ones. 

However, it’s in the lateral thinking that advancements occur, and that’s a really good argument for traditional education to be more accommodating of (and encouraging to) lateral thinkers.