ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews several projects designed by the authors to serve at-risk populations. In these initiatives, Creative Problem Solving – in combination with mentoring, career awareness and other interventions – has been used successfully to reduce the recidivism rate of native Canadian inmates (the Second Chance programme), to reclaim talented but troubled high school dropouts (lost prizes) and other underachieving young people and to support inner city children and youths at risk of alienation, school failure, and gang involvement (MARS – Mentoring At-Risk Students).
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind? (Maria Montessori (1949), The Absorbent Mind)
