TED fans discuss education reform

By Liang Meilan

Beijing fans of the influential TED talks (Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference) gathered at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art last Saturday to watch TED videos related to education reform.

Organized by TEDtoChina, this was the first event to bring together local and expat fans of TED. TEDtoChina is an independent project, started in 2008, committed to spreading information about TED and promoting the TED community in China.

“We set up this non-profit project with the hope of encouraging and supporting social innovations in China by introducing elite ideas from around the world and inspiring local creativities,” said Ellen Cheng, the moderator.

A video of a speech titled “Do schools kill creativity?,” given by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, was presented. In the video, Robinson lays out convincing arguments about how schools sap creativity and argues that we should reverse the trend.

TED enthusiast and guest speaker Kris Bartkus, an education expert and graduate of Harvard University, commented on Robinson’s logic and initiated a related topic on education reform.

He took “risk-taking” as the most important skill that students should learn in school, a concept that is seldom taught. “Someone who is a risk-taker is someone who is willing to have an original idea and execute that idea independently, even if there is opposition to it or it’s unclear how successful it will be,” he said.

Bartkus said the objective grading system in most schools is crazy and hopeless. “This system of objectivity, beautiful as it is, ends when we leave school,” he said. “If you have a good idea in school, the teacher will give you a good grade. But in real life, no one will care about your good idea. There are no people whose job it is to evaluate ideas. There is no government ministry in charge of evaluating ideas.”

In Bartkus’s opinion, the most obvious conflict for educators is between trying to balance the desire to objectively evaluate students and the desire to prepare them for situations where they will not be objectively evaluated.

He proposed having classes that involve interaction with the outside world. “In the class, students are given a difficult, open-ended task that involves advertising some idea in the real world,” he said. “The task can be something like asking an important government official to give a speech, or starting a micro-business. At the end of the semester, there would be an objective evaluation of how well the tasks were completed.”

Bartkus, who works for Sophos Academy Group in Beijing, a company aimed at introducing the Western education philosophy, said this plan should be adopted by the Chinese education system, which over emphasizes objective grading.