Jinan has spent 40 years living with ‘learning communities’ of artisans and is relentless in his search for the process that enables knowledge creation.

He believes that the modern educational paradigm is based on ‘how to teach’ and not on ‘how we naturally learn’.

He has researched and systematically documented children’s spontaneous activities to decode how children simplify the complex world they experience in order to make sense of it. With over 4000 videos and images of various activities that children undertake, he convincingly presents proof. He also posits that creativity is an afterthought in the current teaching paradigm at schools, whereas it is the first principle in a learning paradigm (viz., when children engage in unstructured play) because learning means to uncover the unknown.

Jinan has also been concerned with the homogenization and westernization of aesthetic sensibilities. He has dedicated 20 years to studying how aesthetic sensibilities are formed in traditional cultures and how modern education distorts these sensibilities. This led him to initiate a conference series to address the fragmented aesthetic sensibilities in modern man. His concern is that cultural diversity will soon be extinct if we don’t explore various aspects of the formation of aesthetic sense in humans and the fundamental role of beauty in life.