By William Maxwell
[Abstract: Here is part of the story how a conference of 250 leading scholars grew from 250 to over 3,000 in less than forty years and how it is poised to take its place as a new and non-governmental institution of a budding global civilization where every mind finds its “true calling” as predicted by Plato, Confucius and host of other visionaries, poets, and dreamers.]
The original stimuli for The International Conference on Thinking were several:
- No major research studies underway at the University of the South Pacific which is the “national university” of 12 smaller English language nations of the Pacific. The mostly overseas-born leadership of the University had not installed at the University a passion for cutting-edge research. Not one native Pacific Islander on the main campus held the doctorate.
- At the world level, a problem affecting almost every department of every university, except in Japan, was that students were entering universities far less prepared than in the past. In effect, the world’s children were losing IQ points.
In effect, an international conference on thinking would help stimulate solutions to such acknowledged deficiencies. The 52 members of the School of Education/Humanities (Education, English, Home Economics, Industrial Arts, Mathematics, Music, Psychology) approved the concept; the University Vice Chancellor, Dr. James Maraj, a Trinidad-born “guru” of the East Indian culture, with an exceptionally cosmopolitan personality and intellect immediately authorized a budget of $2,000. I immediately telephoned the world’s best-known author on training human minds on how to think logically, creatively, imaginatively, and, “laterally” — his invented term, — Dr. Edward de Bono, a Rhodes Scholar, with doctoral degrees from the Universities of Malta, Oxford, and Cambridge, and the author of over 50 books on thinking. He immediately agreed to come entirely at his expense, setting a precedent that future ICOTs should have followed, but did not.