Democracy of Talent?

The discussion or rather self-reflections about the "tiger mothers" and "paper tiger kids" phenomena has never faded away from the headlines of Chinese expat forums. Recently, a hot debate on one the leading forums is whether the "Waldorf Approach" to education can make sure to produce "real tigers" in the future.

If you google "Waldorf education", you will notice a most-emailed-article on NYTimes this month. It is about one of Waldorf Schools, which is located in Silicon Valley, that emphasizes on teaching students knitting socks and fractioning cakes while minimizing the trace of computer devices and technology-assisted learning in their classrooms. This unique pedagogy is to "focus on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans." A Microsoft engineer-parent echoes with this philosophy when explaining why he sent his three children to Waldorf, "Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers (computers are distractions)".

This article aroused wide disagreements among readers, which you can glance in the comment section. However, it is the core word, "engagement", that interests me more than the debates over the effects and potential harms of educational technology. Because the negligence of such a component is leading the world's largest educational system, China, to face great difficulties in fostering innovation; while the US will retain its strength as the world's innovation leader thanks to the system that builds upon this notion.

Last fall and this spring, I gave an overview about China's education system to a broad audience at the China Scope Conference at MIT and Columbia. While there were many issues to cover, in the talks, I focused on China's thousand-years-old exam history to select bureaucrats, the size of cohorts and thus tremendous competition for upward mobility, and essentially a competition for life among families other than individual students, which all hold true till today. And those issues, by the end of day when a Chinese student graduates from college, unfortunately means unemployment and un-employability of the "assembly-line products" through schools teaching for tests.

Op-ed columnist David Brooks carefully coined those problems as "The Dictatorship of Talent". Although his observation was done in 2007 during a trip to Shanghai, the city which topped PISA's test earlier this year, my presentations indeed walked through the same issues as those mentioned in his article.

One of the issues that tearing the Chinese expat mothers living in America apart is whether to send their kids to a school that drills students heavily to prepare them as good test-takers, or to embrace a Waldorf-like schooling. And this mental conflict rises between the cultural genes shaped in the 2000-years-old Chinese exam system, and to the view that creativity will lead to ultimate success in information area.

Brooks borrowed the concept "meritocratic paternalism" from one of his Chinese friends who argued for and defended the advantages of Chinese way, using many evidences of economic success of the country in recent thirty years. It is the same economic development that turns American education accessible and affordable for many Chinese families, who send their children to study here to nurture "merits" in them; at the same time, the increasing wave of students returning to China and becoming part of the "paternalism elites" of Chinese society might be a clear indication of how little the American education shifted the deep-rooted Chinese philosophy in those students.

So all of us might agree logically that it is close to impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are. Maybe a truly game-change reform is to replace the "dictatorship of talent" with a "democracy of talent", the center to which is the emphasizing of "engagement and peer interaction", not "obeying to a father-like, know-all teacher". Efforts have been made by educators and policy makers in China on this direction since 1998, but it was the students and parents that were resisting the "engagement, children-centered" campaign. Instead, students even worked harder ever since then with exam-centered approach.

In other worlds, kids of "tiger mothers" in China are not going to take over the world as American parents worried. The card of the game is at the hand of American schools and parents. People in Silicon Valley have been truly driving the innovation and growth of our world, so as long as we all pay attention to what they believe about education, the momentum, the continues spell of creative ideas coming up from the Valley will be carried on by the kids who are in schools that preserve their creativity. After all, the Valley's success has grown out of democracy of talent, so let us hope American schools, whether Waldorf ones or public ones, can keep students engaged in learning and critical thinking.

Where is the next Steve Jobs?

The whole world is mourning the passing-away of the great visionary of our times. While Apple's stockholders wondering about the company's future, people are trying to measure the impact of the loss of Jobs from different perspectives (many articles on this topic on major media).

Joy Chen, former vice mayor of Los Angles, who is now a head-hunter and has been maintaining a good blog site to teach young people about how to cultivate the best out of themselves and prepare them for global competition. Ms. Chen's new blog raised a good call with such a title, "Now Your Turn, Create Something", to guide the younger generation to see how we can learn from the achievement of Steve Jobs.

Although she mentioned that "creativity is any act of creating something new", which I strongly agree, I think we could never underestimate the harms of a rigid, exam-oriented education system could do to our children, current students and future builders of the world.

Prof. Wadhwa just did his testimony at Capital Hill on how to stop the brain drain that US is facing potentially. The war for not only "the next Steve Jobs" but the next patches of minds that can foster the emergence of great ideas like PC, iPad, etc. is now. Hopefully we can see some interesting government responses from China/India about the new labor and immigration related bills here in the US, which might show us some hints about the future map of global distribution of "intelligence treasures" like Steve-Jobs-es.