People generally agree that most of their knowledge was gained in full-time academics.
But if we frankly think of how we discover what we are good at, we would
agree that we gain this knowledge from experience, friends and colleagues, and from
reading, talking and doing. This is what Howkins (2010: 54) calls “the real learning”;
people need to learn, not to be taught. The process of learning has to be permanent.
We can change in bursts, like American biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) suggested
that evolution happens not in a continual development but in bursts of punctuated
equilibrium (Howkins 2010: 49), but learning has to be continuous. According to
Howkins (2010: 54), “the creative mind that does not learn from others or from itself
will wither away as certainly as an animal will die without food or an engine without
fuel will stop”.
There is a need for some change in people’s attitude to the process of working with
others. Most of people want to work with less creative and less successful people as
they see it as an opportunity to win a competition. Howkins (2010: 6) highlighted this
struggle and explained that “with some activities, you want other people to be less talented
or successful so you can get ahead; in the creative ecology, you want to work with
people who are better than you so you get ahead”. Through conversation and dialogue
we need to share our knowledge with as many people as we are able to. As Howkins
(2010: 56) predicts, “group’s learning capacity will increase as it has a wider variety of