Reinventing education for an entrepreneurial culture

School: New models

The New International School of Japan in Tokyo encourages ‘translanguaging’: using more than one language at the same time to improve expression and social skills since it is essential to see things from multiple points of view. The aim is to prepare pupils for careers in which they may have to take on different roles at different times. Also, with the creation of learning environments with learners of different ages, older students can help younger ones. As Shotaro Tani (2017) reported in the Financial Times:

‘Language is a tool for expression’, says Mr Parr, the headmaster. ‘The kids can think, speak and do research in any language’.

The Global Happiness Council, an international group of independent experts that publishes an annual report on happiness in the world (the Global Happiness Policy Report), argues that to expand the spaces of freedom we need schools that activate ‘positive education interventions’:

The interventions train students to engage in a variety of activities and exercises. These include remembering what went well today; writing letters of gratitude; learning how to respond constructively; identifying and developing character strengths; and training in meditation, mindfulness, empathy, coping with emotions, decision-making, problem solving, and critical thinking. (Global Happiness Council, 2018: 15)

The four ‘knowings’

The four ‘knowings’ are: Knowing-How-To-Do; Knowing-How-To-Think; Knowing-How-To-Imagine; and Knowing-How-To-Understand. With the rise of artificial intelligence, Knowing-How-To-Do will become increasingly marginalized unless it is combined with Knowing-How-To-Think, Knowing-How-To-Imagine and Knowing-How-To-Understand. To achieve such a combination, the arts and creativity need to be brought into play. Thus STEM – that is to say, instruction in the intellectual gyms of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics must transition to STEAM, where the added ‘A’ is for the art that breaks with the tradition of incrementalism. The innovationists – artists who dream, conceive and introduce radical innovations that endure for decades – take over from the incrementalists.

Endowed with the ‘four knowings’, the new generations will be able to aspire to jobs that grow more enriching as their ludic quality increases. Like the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, the students of today should be trained to become hunters of ideas, since they will have to work in the multifaceted professions of the future.

In our time, a combinatory game comprising the composition of varied narratives, artistic creations and the construction of processes and artefacts configures the path of work. Along with that path, one can glimpse on the horizon a pattern of work opposed to those occupations that exhaust us physically and mentally. Entrepreneurship is art even before it is business. New enterprise creations are works of art. Art is a game of fun. Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1949) is the creator of a company. This figure coexists with Homo Sentiens, who can appreciate subjective experiences, Homo Faber whose mind finds inspiration for innovative thoughts, and Homo Laborans who sails in the sea of ‘doing things’.

With work and play no longer decoupled, working and emotional life will be improved. So, the ‘high’ school is a field of play that requires students to direct all their efforts to creative thinking rather than memorizing, to give priority to a real understanding of phenomena rather than to obtaining higher scores, to conceive common models integrating their chosen disciplines with all other areas of study. This type of schooling is an unmissable opportunity of which society and business must take full advantage, so that natural inclinations to explore and play are productively developed. Creativity is repressed by teaching that encourages students to obey authority unreservedly, to give answers without asking questions, to perform tedious tasks promptly: all this raises walls in the mind of the student – walls that can be brought down by play, which enriches the imagination The student who enters this new territory of education treads a new path, appreciating transdisciplinarity and the beauty of imperfection. Along the way, the explorer will revolutionize the entrepreneurial spirit by responding to any questions that arise with the aid of the four ‘knowings’.

Learning

Learning prepares the mind to formulate questions rather than give answers, and in particular to cultivate abstruse questions that reveal unusual paths to explore.

Learning also prepares the mind for an understanding of ignorance as something that is normal rather than as something that deviates from the norm. Learners exploring ignorance – ‘agnotology’ is the term coined by science historian Robert Proctor (2008) – take pleasure in not finding what they are looking for, and they are not afraid to confront the uncertainty that comes from the ‘unknown unknowns’. In this way facts classified as immutable, fixed once and for all, are challenged and may be proven wrong. In the learning process, the leading actor is the experimenter who enters the ballroom with a light tread, unburdened by accumulated knowledge, where questions that are not known dance the can-can, as Mark Forsyth (2014) writes in his The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted.

In the early 20th century, the Italian writer Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) spoke against the school that did not invent knowledge but prided itself on transmitting it (Papini, 1919) and shifted the emphasis from teaching students to give the right answer to learning in experimental laboratories – through which both students and teachers are prompted to raise new questions and to learn from errors.

Learning through conversation

Conversation is a dance performed by turning over a topic with partners. A willingness and the ability to change demonstrate the conversationalist’s versatility. The discussion thus becomes collaboration, and those who have learned to collaborate and improvise prevail, as Charles Darwin (1809–1882) famously argued in his theory of evolution. Partnership eliminates the background noise that occurs when ideas collide and, in so doing, enables participants to recognize the signals that indicate how the problem in question can be resolved.

The Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam considered that the development of students’ understanding through conversations with each other and with their teachers was far more important than the process of memorizing that predominated at many religious schools of the Middle Ages. In the wake of Erasmus, the Moravian educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) suggested that teachers should exploit the sensitivity, and therefore the feelings, of students rather than merely accepting their ability to memorize. Equally, learning through conversation, according to the English philosopher and physician John Locke, had to be at the centre of the school curriculum.

The culture of conversation, which is at the heart of current forms of open innovation, has its roots in 17th- and 18th-century Paris. Yet, the Age of Conversation, at the crossroads between the Scientific Revolution with its two great agitators Galileo and Newton, and the Enlightenment symbolised by the Encyclopédie under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert, is not the exclusive prerogative of Europe, with France and England contending for the supremacy. On the other side of the North Atlantic, members of the generation following the Pilgrim Fathers, generally acknowledged as the first settlers from Western Europe on the East Coast of North America, were committed to ploughing the fertile ground of conversation that would contribute to the formation of the United States of America. In the foreground was Benjamin Franklin (1705–1790), polymath and a founding father of the American nation – and also a corresponding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a club of industrialists, scientists and intellectuals formed at the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution.

Triggering the conversation to change together: this is the purpose that – according to the ‘nation builder’ Franklin in his autobiography – can be pursued bearing in mind that ‘the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade’ by adopting the Socratic method of the ‘humble inquirer and doubter’, and therefore ‘drop(ping] abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation’ (Franklin, 2014: 23).

Mutual improvement through conversation was Franklin’s aim. In 1727, aged 21, he formed a discussion group called the Junto Club, pursuing the ideals of knowledge and freedom that distinguished the most famous Parisian salons of that time. Learning by conversing involved a dozen friends, who met on Friday evenings. As to the team spirit and shared goals of mutual collaboration within the group, Franklin wrote:

The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discussed by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties. (Franklin, 2014: 65)

School of imagination

Followed by creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, imagination is the first act of a representation that reveals a new world. The characters are those who, being crazy enough to think they can transform the world, really change it (to paraphrase Steve Jobs).

The wind of a learning revolution transports imagination. A reinvented school translates hope into reality. Self- and cross-learning tools must be offered so that the young generations can realize their individual and collective dreams. Rich diversity and intense interactions in learning lead to experimentation and run counter to the front-loading educational system; they are sources from which creative ideas can grow into entrepreneurial opportunities. In schools equipped with experimental labs, students can pursue original ideas and direct their passions, and then new traits and styles of entrepreneurs, in tune with the economy of the 21st century, will be able to flourish.

Ludic school

The ludic school is a playground in which students must think creatively rather than memorize. Priority should be given to a correct understanding of phenomena, not to obtaining higher scores, and common models should be devised to integrate the chosen discipline with all other fields of study.

The ludic school is, therefore, an unmissable opportunity that society and business must exploit to the full to develop people’s natural inclinations towards exploration and playfulness. Those inclinations are repressed if students are taught to obey authority unreservedly, to give answers without asking questions, to perform tedious tasks promptly. All these procedures raise walls in the mind. Games that enrich the imagination pull them down. The student who enters this new territory of education follows a path of discovery, appreciating transdisciplinarity and the beauty of imperfection.