AS-The Innovative Mind

Where creativity is defined as a derivative of freedom, playing with ideas, refraining from the judgement of people in a climate of challenge and high goals, innovation is defined as applied creativity. Creativity and innovation may be regarded as two siblings who play in the school yard together. They acquire skills for an ever expanding globalized market place.They learn that to be successful means to be creative and innovative in order to allure diverse customers to the market. Thus our future education would better take a way towards a symbiosis of creative and innovative knowledge and information. Our aim under the above title is to draw a poststudent picture through a philosophical symbiosis of knowledge and information: A student who smartly adapts the Platonic phrase ‘Know Thyself’ into its popular variety ‘Inform Yourself’ to be creative and innovative. We use brainstorming as a method to clarify our views. Our examples are somehow fictional while we try to draw the picture of a symbiotic student in between modern and postmodern tendencies experienced in the problematics of education. We endeavour to base the creative and innovative knowledge and information on the philosophies of British, American, French, Asian, Latin thinkers. Among many categories of educational research, ours can fit into The Educational Philosophy. Our method is also a literary quest which borrows some fictional figures of worldly known writers such as Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelly, Robert Musil, and last but not the least, our contemporary writer Hasan Ali Toptaş. Rather than finding an absolute solution for the ongoing problem of education, we attempt to adapt the idea of symbiosis, which we borrowed from Kisho Kurokawa, to the creation of a symbiotic student who stands for the reconciliation of knowledge and information. Ours may pass as an humouristic essay on our digitalized existence which can be elegantly summarized as ‘we are our memex.’ Our boss is creative and innovative information technologies which use knowledge as their recruit. If we are allowed to make a joke on this, we are doomed to be lifelong learners in order to survive in this era of communication which may be called as well, a type of cultural industry where there is always the danger of producing individuals in the service of business world. In a way they are creative and innovative slaves perfected by education. Future studies may further delve into drawing that slave student portrait in minutest details. Ayten Suvak