In the UK students know most of the names of the wives of Henry VIII and even the date of the teaty of Utrecht - but have not the faintest idea as to how the corner shop works. In Europe, students spend twenty-five percent of their school time on mathematics and yet use less than three percent of this in their lives. Thinking', the most fundamental of all human skills, is rarely taught explicitly. And when it is taught it is only taught as 'critical thinking' or problem solving. These are only a very small part, indeed, of general thinking skills.
Education is much too important to be left to educators.
Educators only know what is traditional in education not the real needs of the world outside. A young girl in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, who had been taught the thinking lessons, was asked if she used these lessons outside the classroom. Education is everywhere designed for the top twenty percent who are going to make it to university and a professional life. The other eighty percent are rejects who never make it. In two weeks it is possible to to teach more useful thinking skills than in fifteen years of school and university.