IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Learning 159
how learners, teachers, and everyone else relate to one another. The third
issue is how best to design the support systems, platforms, and institutions
we need if those first two changes are to happen.
You may object to my having highlighted those three issues at the beginning
of this chapter rather than now, at its end. But I don’t have the
answers to the questions they raise, and I am in good company in declining
to make them up. Socrates once acknowledged (in words attributed to him
by Plato) ‘‘the common reproach against me, that I am always asking questions
of other people, but never expressing my own views about anything.’’
Socrates’ self-defense was that he did not set out to teach people; he set out
to pose interesting questions to them that would get them thinking about a
topic he felt needed attention. The same applies to the design of learning:
Questions are more powerful than answers in stimulating our curiosity and
creativity. As Pekka Himanen writes in The Hacker Ethic:
The metaphor was that of the teacher as master of ceremonies—the symposiarch—at
banquets. These took place in the evenings and, in conjunction with the dialogues of
the day, they were an essential learning experience. They were powerful experiential
events. The symposiarch was responsible for the success of their banquets in two
ways: first, from his elevated position he made sure that the intellectual goals of dialogue
were attained; second, it was also his responsibility to make sure that none of
the participants remained too stiff. To this latter end, he had two means at his disposal.
First, he has the right to order excessively stiff participants to drink more
wine. If this did not work, the symposiarch could order the participant to remove
his clothes and dance! 63
Ever since I read this text I’ve described myself as a symposiarch. The
worlds of learning would be lighter and more playful places if we could recapture
this ancient Greek approach in a world in which social, industrial,
and natural systems are gently nudged and stimulated rather than steered.