Humberto Schwab

Training teachers from a poor district school made me once again aware of the impact the genetics of a system have on people. They are basically transformed in certain industrial workers, put in front of students in difficult cultural  circumstances,  living in the idea that this situation is the best for everybody.   But  we have to make an environment in which young people feel motivated, we have to organize communal approach by teachers, they have to construct dialogues with one another about there basic task: dialogue with the kids.  In order to do so, it is paramount that teachers have a sensibility for questions that concerns the meaning of learning, working and living. What is a meanigfull life?  is the organising question that should be in the core of our eduactional sytem. For teachers and pupils alike. Let us make learning an atractive part of all our lives by designing  learner userfriendly environments.

There is the possibility of doing some real innovation. Innovation is not doing “new things”, it is about rethinking and reconsidering the way we organize our system that is steering us. Human beings are not fixed or closed entities. They are not like atoms (at least what people think atoms are), as most cultural theories and scientific approaches regard them, without any awareness of this fact. We are interactional creatures which in fact have their identities at the level of the skin, at the boundaries between inside and outside world. The inside and the outside world are both “objective”. We are just positioned between them. The external surroundings trigger our internal world. Different surroundings are caused by different buttons being pushed on. The funny thing is now that we can just switch on the buttons that trigger us: that is the amazing thing called human experience. Only you cannot change the buttons on your own, we need to do this in orchestrated action. Innovation is about creating new surroundings so that we can have a more satisfactory human experience, but this depends of our choice to elect the buttons we push. Therefore we need deep wisdom about our real nature and most delighted state of being. You will not find any of these wisdom in de industrial knowledge society; that is knowledge about fixed atoms (which again do not exist as such). In order to create “good” human experiences we need to question the classical and renaissance thinkers, their topic was the most delighted and happy human state of being.

Now that we are almost freed from heavy industrial thinking and wil come into i-thinking or light industrial thinking, we can start again with he renaissance and dream the best dream. The point is that most people have only heavy industrial dreams and have lost the capacity for light industrial dreams. That is why innovation is always a socratic search: we need a continuous stream of collaborative thinking in socratic dialogues. Without daily training you will fall back in heavy industrial thinking, feeling and acting.

Pakhuis de Zwijger organised the 6th of March a round dinner table about the question: ‘what is creativity?’.