Lateral Thinking and Technology Education

The emergence of lateral thinking in recent years is a natural reaction to the enormous increase of information a human being is bombarded with, in the post industrial revolution era. Vertical thinking, with its sequential and fixed-order rules, which has been the foundation of traditional education, is increasingly being complemented by lateral thinking which aims at freeing the mind from the imprisonment caused by already established concepts and patterns. Thus paving the way for restructuring thinking patterns and generating new ideas. An attempt is made to show the context of lateral thinking to recent educational psychology developments. Developing lateral thinking skills has already become a pedagogical challenge to many educators. An analysis of technology education and its relevance to lateral thinking is presented in this article. Prospects for utilizing technology education as a platform and a contextual domain for nurturing lateral thinking are discussed. The main notion is that technology education, which is characterized by reconstructive learning activities of designing, making, using and evaluating of matter, energy and information in real-life situations is an appropriate environment for developing complementary incorporation of vertical and lateral thinking. Initial findings of a case study implementing lateral thinking through technology education are encouraging.