Paul, my next door neighbour, was a career engineer. After completing his Cambridge University degree he also went through a full apprenticeship. YES! Apprenticeships are a system, established from medieval times, to train ‘skilled workers’ under the auspices of a Master Craftsman. Paul wanted to ensure that, as well as having an academic qualification from one of the world’s top universities, he became fully rounded in his competence to handle any and all engineering challenges thrown at him. His was a true dedication to quality of thought and action.
A Skilful Mind and Hands
When I attended Paul’s funeral, there were several hundred others there too. He was known throughout Gloucestershire for his craftsmanship, because in retirement he had taken up an interest in clocks, exploiting his long engineering experience. He collected them and restored them. He therefore met a wide variety of people who all had old clocks they wanted to get back into working order.
Not only did Paul deal in clocks in the home. He regularly climbed Church Towers to fix their ancient clocks. Paul also kept our Victorian town clock, perched above the High St, in good working order. He refurbished it regularly and at the spring and autumn time-changes he crawled along its support structures, out over the street, to change the hands back to, or forwards from, Greenwich Mean Time*. He even built a fully scaled replica which is proudly displayed in our Civic Centre.
A Skeleton Clock with Thunks
To celebrate a significant birthday (my 70th) Paul made a skeleton clock**. He sized it to fit a glass dome he had stored in his work-shed and decorated it with the symbols of the Effective Intelligence ‘Thunks’ in brass. If you haven’t yet come across the Thunks you can explore from here.
A Mind to Admire
Among Paul’s other hobbies were tapestry-making and embroidery, chair covering, wine and beer-making. He taught my wife how to make cordial with the elder-flowers collected from the Gloucestershire hedgerows; perfect for a gin cocktail. He mended the ancient Georgian shutters of our old house, fixed garden tools and rescued ageing gutters. I could go on. This man was truly generic with his mind and his hands. In other words he could tackle all things physical not hidden inside a computer chip. Nothing daunted him. He knew how to think things through from first principles. He had a mind I greatly admire.
Education Now
The top ambition of education should be to encourage this kind of generic thinking among our young people so they can take on a wide range of challenges. It has been my mission to grow these kinds of thinking capabilities with people in business. Now my educational Trust*** has taken on this mission. We have a team who lead the outreach and continue the research and development, in collaboration with associates across the world. In time we shall grow the resources of the Trust to provide services to families and teachers as well as to business, which is our long term ambition. My own career was to have been as a school master, but polio intervened and I had to change the course of my life. One day our Trust will be able to fulfil what, as a young man, I was prevented from doing.
What we are seeking to achieve right now
We are embarked on expanding our mission online: to take generic thinking – also known as metacognition – to all who have a desire to raise their standards and performance in skilful thinking. Both words and numbers are the most basic generic skills already taught at school, yet every subject taught also has many application for life, but which sadly are rarely explored. The great example of this is English grammar, which for many years was actually abandoned in England as if it were irrelevant! It is essential for understanding thought. While schools and universities can do excellent work in teaching special subjects, they have yet to devote the time and skills of their staff to developing more of their students’ generic thinking skills.
* Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the yearly average (or mean) of the time each day when the sun crosses the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London, England.
** Wikipedia: Skeleton_clock
