Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Cecilia Bernabeni
Good afternoon everyone.
Today I'll try to bring you
inside an utopian tale,
about an imaginary community
able to establish a school that trains creators.
That is to say, those people who in the age of "knowledge in action"
are capable of generating ideas that turn into adventures.
"Ventures", in English:
not only entrepreneurial adventures, but adventures of several kinds.
And these people
put well-being before well-doing,
well-being with themselves and with the community,
in the sense of altruism, something Adam Smith spoke about
in his famous essay "Theory of Moral Sentiments".
Creators replace workers
of the Industrial Revolutions of both steam and electricity.
Today we have a new revolution: "Knowledge in action",
which requires the ability
to push knowledge towards adventures.
This story has premises:
this is a first premise.
People who have so much knowledge, experience,
are in the fashion industry and see a hat.
But the children say to them:
"Oh, we have to be lenient with you adult!".
Why is that?
Because adults, who have knowledge and experience,
do not have a mind with an intuitive eye.
Children see this,
a snake boa
that swallowed an elephant.
Second premise: we are in 1919.
The intellectual Giovanni Papini
published an essay, a pamphlet, "Chiudiamo le scuole".
Amd he asks that schools are transformed into experimental labs,
where teachers and students together
can ask questions that were previously unthinkable,
and learn together from mistakes.
In 1921, Mahatma Gandhi
on "Young Indian", a famous Indian magazine of that time,
wrote that
"School must enable students to think with their own head".
And both refer to David Hume, who in the eighteenth century wrote:
"Learning has been as great a loser
by being shut up in colleges and cells,
and secluded from the World and good company".
And we have another premise.
We are in '69: Skinner wrote exactly what you read:
"If machines begin to think
how will we humans continue to?
A problem that's so salient today,
confronted as we are with Artificial Intelligence.
Think, think - how? 1969, Skinner.
And to conclude these premises,
in the 1990s Tiziano Terzani, a famous journalist,
went to a primary school in Tokyo.
In this primary school,
the teacher asks the children one thing.
And for the thing she asks, there is one and only one right answer.
The questions don't count, the answers count;
the teachers' questions count, not the students' questions.
And what does she ask?
"Children, what happens to snow, when the weather is warm?"
The children answer in chorus, "The snow melts".
"But that's not true: the truth is another",
says one child,
"Spring has arrived".
Since the answer is extrovert, it is considered wrong.
That's why I think
that starting from these premises we must get to some conclusive stories.
Why not create a bridge
between humanities and scientific disciplines,
and even merge them?
Why not to call this bridge "STEAM":
in English,
Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics merged together?
In Italian the word sounds even better, "STIMA" [Esteem]
as "Ingegneria" begins with an "I" unlike "Engineering".
And how about calling this bridge after Madame du Chatelet,
the great multifaceted polymath,
who fluently dealt
with Latin, Greek and science at the same time?
And if we did this, what would happen?
We'd see a new landscape,
one with hills of knowledge.
But as we climb these hills,
what do we see?
We see holes of "creative ignorance".
No longer the old holes of ignorance
that pushed us to enter into a disciplinary well
and dive all the way into it, going more and more into details;
but in the meantime, while we learnt more and more,
the world changed:
What Ptolemy said is no longer true, not even what Newton said.
Einstein is no longer right either,
and even quantum mechanics is at odds today.
So we have to nurture creative ignorance, like foxes.
Becoming ignorant, not being ignorant.
Ignorance follows knowledge, it does not precede it.
As foxes, knowing many small things,
We are no longer porcupines who master just one huge topic.
And then, again, we must look at new schools.
The roots of the tree are more important than the fruits:
it's a tree turned upside down.
The school of Musk, in the U.S.,
which believes
that children must be able to learn according to their abilities;
the multilingual school in Tokyo,
which invites children
to write the same sentence in different languages,
because in this way they learn new things.
And so on, many other schools
are being established around the world today,
including the experimental laboratories of my University of Atlanta.
So I invite all of you to become polyhedral, polymath,
and change in the process today's state of the art.
We need "cathedrals' thinker",
who changed the world, like it was done in the Renaissance.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)