Translator: Andrea Giglio Reviewer: Marco Caresia
Good morning! I am very excited; thanks Claudio!
But after an introduction like this, it makes me look immediately annoying;
maybe we can say that, being a few decades older than him,
I have done something more, nothing special.
We are, therefore, talking now about the four 'I'
for creativity and diversity.
Let's start from the first three.
The first is Innovation,
that can only be generated by the intuition.
And intuition, luckily, sometimes generates the Invention.
It is important to understand, we have to ask ourself,
how can make these three I interact.
It is important to understand the connections
that make them animate, one next to the other
because it is essential to facilitate their creation.
And in this context,
we wondered, what is the role of diversity in unleashing creativity.
'Intuition', as almost all the Italian words,
you know, has a Latin origin.
Intuition means 'looking inside' and then try to understand,
from inside, what we are talking about.
But intuition is not just that thing
that seems a bit cold and comes from the brain,
and it is not even just poetry and imagination.
It is a way in which our mind works.
And our mind does not work like this: it does not work as a computer, luckily!
We are not yet replaceable by a computer.
Our mind works, as previously mentioned by Claudio,
by tags, by keywords.
If I say 'yellow', some of you think about the sun,
some other thinks about saffron, somebody else thinks of a sunflower,
and somebody else thinks of the t-shirt he wanted to buy yesterday.
I do not. Our mind is working by links.
Luckily; and these links can be somehow connected
partly with our synapses, partly with our creativity,
partly with our intuition and then they generate creativity.
There are tools for those involved in this activity,
there is the brainstorming,
which is a way to generate, in a group, new ideas, new thoughts, new proposals,
and there are some simple rules, as I marked:
we have to gain our focus on the subject we want to manage;
we must not interrupt anybody
in order to let the creativity and the ideas flow;
we should neither judge, nor interpret, we have to let the creativity go forward.
The other word, 'Invention', of course with a Latin origin,
comes from 'invenire', that is, finding, search and find.
What is it?
Thanks to the invention we do have creativity,
or what is now called 'serendipity',
in other words we can find something, casually or by chance.
I mentioned Marconi, but think about Christopher Columbus.
Christopher Columbus discovered America by serendipity, by chance:
his idea was to go to India, as you know.
And this is an element,
but this is not enough, we'll get to the point.
Innovation, another easy word to understand,
the word 'nova' makes us understand 'to find',
to look for something new.
And we believe that innovation must be without excuses.
We do not need brakes for innovation,
because it is with new ideas that we can grow.
Innovation should be simple, sustainable,
safe, aware, competitive and inclusive.
Intuition, as Einstein said much better than me,
"The mind only works if it is open like a parachute."
And we get to the parachute, speaking of intuitions.
The first idea of the parachute was by Leonardo da Vinci.
When? In 1485.
It took 400 years before somebody was able to make the first parachute
and he did it it exactly in the same way.
And from there, from this intuition, we've got the innovation,
innovation that now is a useful thing.
Another innovation: Newton's apple.
The apple fell and he understood and found how to define a new law,
the law of gravity.
There is another circumstance which is essential,
it is the possibility to go ahead outside the schemes,
because if we are locked in the usual patterns,
the creativity is compressed.
And now, alas, we are coming to the fourth 'I'.
We want to have the hope to be able to change:
but our school is like that.
Our school is terrible.
If you think of a six years old child, stuck him in a school desk
- stuck is the right word -
throughout all the morning, and sometimes all day long.
How can we hope and think
that he or she suddenly may become a creative person?
We turned off all his/her creativity during the first years of his/her life.
We can do better.
Compulsory education, Ivan Illich said, switches off the urge to learn.
Mark Twain was even funnier when he said,
"Luckily, I managed to avoid that the school might interfere
with my education."
It is comical, but it gives us a good idea of what I mean.
So, this is much better.
Surely, you've seen this movie. Unfortunately the actor died recently.
These are the things that drives our interest: that school can be changed
and that we can try to change it!
We are in a time of 'spending review', Claudio said it before.
But we can try to change without spending anything.
Our young people have a smartphone, it's in their pockets,
At home they have a computer.
Our teachers are not so ready to conform to this,
but our youngsters will 'grow up', in particular there will be,
sooner or later, a generational change
and people in their twenties will be the teachers of tomorrow
and they will have to change things dramatically,
to move those school desks and to make changes in their classrooms,
even physically,
it makes no sense to keep the classroom as it is now,
because now I can learn what a child, at the same time,
is writing on the Internet in Australia or Iceland, it makes no difference.
Ivan will talk about that later so I will not speak about this,
but it has been a beautiful experience, a CoderDojo at the Chambers of Deputies:
the countenance of this child says everything,
but Ivan will tell you more about that.
I count on that, I count on that,
I think it will be the right solution to improve our country,
because children are ready, they are many, beautiful, full of energy,
determination, we just do not have to put a stone over their head,
anything but the gallantry's glass ceilings.
Claudio was talking about.
By the way, please note, that here in the first row there is a busy place
just to remember women that are not here because of femicide.
(Applause)
Remember that, "If I just see, I'll forget,
if I can read, I will remember, if I do something, I will learn."
And this is the point: we have to give our children
the chance to do things not just teach them.
We have to put together notions, which are important,
information, of course,
because we do not want non-educated children.
We are glad to give them notions.
But we have to use teaching methodologies
allowing these children to let their creativity flow
in order to enhance their diversity, because diversity is in each one of us
like in those apples from Trentino.
Diversity is in all of us: we are, fortunately, strongly different,
by gender, by history, by culture, by skills, by passion, and love.
There are people who can do the high jump, there are people who can do the long jump.
Each person brings its own value and the school should have the goal
of enhancing the value of each of those diversities.
We are talking about ecosystems
and this is another picture from Trentino, fantastic!
This is a beautiful region.
The ecosystem was defined by Darwin in a different way.
Each environment has its own ecosystem.
The ecosystem is based exactly on the value of diversity.
It is on the diversity that we have to prompt
in order to ensure we start from the intuition,
invention, innovation, and instruction.
Should we stop here? Maybe not.
I believe that we need a fifth 'I', "inclusion",
but that's another story, we'll talk about it in another thread.
Thank you!
(Applause)