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• Anticipation: being active and imaginative rather than
  passive and habitual.


• Learning by listening to others.


• Participation: shaping events, rather than being shaped by
  them.

Obviously, then, innovative learning requires that you trust

yourself, that you be self-directed rather than other-directed in

both your life and your work. If you learn to anticipate the fu-

ture and shape events rather than being shaped by them you

will benefit in significant ways.

In making what the authors of the Club of Rome report call

“the shift from... unconscious adaptation to conscious partic-

ipation,” we make or recognize new connections, generating

useful syntheses, and our understanding deepens.

Movie director Pollack discussed the forces that work against

innovative learning. “Everybody has the ability to free associate,

but society tends to frown on active fantasies. Beyond a certain

age, we stop playing games, ‘let’s pretend,’ ‘what if,’ and all that.

It goes on in your head anyway, but at some point you start to

feel guilty. You know, you listen to a symphony and imagine that

you’re the conductor, and there you are, conducting like crazy,

but then you get to be a grown man, and you say, ‘Gee, I’d hate

for anybody to know that I’m pretending I’m conducting the

symphony.’ But that kind of fantasy life is the real key to prob-

lem solving at every level. It’s certainly the primary tool for

problem solving in art, whether it’s painting or dancing or cho-

reography or directing films or writing scripts or writing novels

or whatever.” Creative problem solving is a form of innovative

learning.

In innovative learning, one must not only recognize existing

contexts, but be capable of imagining future contexts. American

Knowing the World

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