The issue of innovation is closely related to that of technology and its impact on social and economic life. In a pioneering book Donald Schön (1967) not only recognized this bond between innovation and technology but also identified a series of misunderstandings attached to the ideas of invention, innovation, and creativity, stemming from an enduring Parmenidean attitude that should give way to a Heraclitean one, in order to adequately engage with what he later called the condition beyond the stable state (Schön, 1973). It is noteworthy that the reply to this condition was principally spelled out in terms of learning: “We must, in other words, become adept at learning. […] The task which the loss of the stable state makes imperative, for the person, for our institution, for our society as a whole, is to learn about learning” (Schön, 1973, p. 30). With similar statements Schön was in tune with the upcoming era of learning (and the associated risk of a drift towards ‘learnification’ [Biesta, 2006; 2010]).

But this is only one part of the story. Indeed, by elaborating on his ideas, Schön (1983; 1987) came to the notion of the ‘reflective practitioner’ and, by devising ways of educating him/her, he revived the tradition of craftsmen’s education. In a sense, a sort of self-deconstruction of his previous discourse is at work: whereas in his early volumes he insisted on the difference that the logic of technological innovation made in comparison with the tradition of craftsmanship (Schön, 1967, p. xiv), in his mature reflection Schön appealed to forms of education rooted in that very tradition. Still more interesting is that such a self-deconstructing move is the ‘repeat’ of what happened in Dewey (whose model of inquiry is at the basis of Schön’s (1992) reflective turn). Dewey has given us one of the most insightful investigations into the meaning of technology as one of the embodiments of the method of inquiry (Hickman, 1990); on the other hand, though, as was critically noticed (Metelli di Lallo, 1967), the kind of activities promoted in Deweyan schools belonged rather to the ‘lost world’ of the craftsmen’s workshops than to the epoch of the full deployment of technology.

Instead of treating this as a sort of contradiction, the proposed paper intends to valorise this double level (in Dewey through Schön, so to speak) and to argue that, from an educational point of view, the way to innovation (even the technological one, which is – as aforementioned – the prototype of any innovation) is better covered by mobilising forms of craftsmanship-like education than by means of massive investments in forms of technology-oriented learning.

In this perspective, a parallel between Dewey and Heidegger will be put forth. Although Heidegger (1935/1936; 1954) is usually understood only as an antimodernist enemy of technology, many of his insights on learning, such as the Handwerk, can be profitably put in relation with Dewey’s tenets in order to outline the project of an education for innovation as the project of a New Heraclitus.

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