Here is a startling story about an interview the daughter of my friend had. Our friend from Shandong, China e-mailed us one day with a peculiar question about his daughter. She just came out of an interview, not confident, but puzzled. She had been asked a question she didn’t know the answer to: “Where do you see yourself 5 years down the road?” We were incredulous at first, but quickly answered that this was a standard interview question that everyone thinks about. This just goes to show one example of how education is seriously in trouble in China. We have a word for those people in English: bookworms.

China, unfortunately, doesn’t have an education system that stresses one important aspect of study: passion. I come from an engineering background, which took many years of rigorous study and discipline. Since I started my educational career, one of my most trusted advisers, my father, told me that “in order to do well in your major, you must love it.” I can’t say that I loved computer engineering as a freshman, but I can say that I love it now. Part of it is sticking through it and just studying, even when it hurts. (the part Chinese excel at) And the other part is loving it, or having a passion for it. (the part Chinese lack) This is the major problem in their creativity. They don’t love what they do. They’re forced by their parents into studying that they do half-heartedly. They’re forced into a major that the government *picks* for them. (no joke) Which just spirals downward as they’re forced into a career that they have no particular interest in. Talk about a demotivator.

Finally, I just wanted to point out that there is a larger myth going around that states that “IP is not enforceable in China”. This myth has already been debunked (see my upcoming post on China IP, it’s been sent in for submission). As the post will say, in brief, there are two ways of enforcing IP in China, one is administrative, for smaller patent violations, and the other is judicial, for larger patent violations. So, you CAN keep what you invent. However, that’s not to say that people still won’t try to steal your ideas…..

Again, great post. Great comments. I much appreciated them.

How is one’s creativity and relationship to failure developed? I know that to a certain extent creativity is learned. It is learned through one’s upbringing, schooling, their friends, culture, etc., but I also know that it can always be learned. One can teach a dog new tricks- but it may take the old dog a bit longer to learn. It was brought to my attention in Organizational Behavior that structures for creativity inside organizations are just beginning to be studied and evaluated on their degree of effectiveness. New ways to develop creativity are being created, especially in organizations.

One’s relationship to failure is definitely something that can be transformed. Children are completely free of the constraints that fear of failure are. Throughout one’s upbringing things happen that cause them to develop a fear of failing. It is mostly what people make failure mean about themselves that has them be stopped by it. I know that as a former professional athlete, I had to overcome this fear in order to perform at a senior elite level. It took me numerous failures and a lot of mental training before I was able to not make failing mean anything negative about myself. My philosophy is that if one is not failing in life, then they simply are not playing hard enough.

Sir Ken Robinson had some great points. His example regarding the famous dancer is powerful and so accurate. It infuriates me that children who are not perfectly aligned with the current educational system’s teaching methodologies are considered to have some kind of a disorder and are usually put on drugs. I don’t have much experience with kids or the public educational system, but from what I hear the system is not working. The system needs a creative overhaul to foster and encourage the development of individuals in a variety of disciplines- including non-academic ones.

The answer to many of these questions really depends how one defines loaded terms such as “innovation” and “creativity”. If defined as people with discretionary time on their hands to come up with cool ideas being able to tap into VC capital (or a bank credit line or angel investors) quickly to start the next Google and world’s leading company, then the answer is very different than if one frames the question along the lines of, “what country, with 20 percent of the world’s population and only 6 percent of its arable land, has ‘innovated’ its way into the modern era just 25 years?; then you get two vastly different answers.

Here is a good post by the This is China blog, with some good insight from the comment thread, for further reading: Are We Innovative Yet? The China Challenge.

The This is China blogger seems to have hit the mark in terms of identifying the things that help hold down one definition of “innovation”, in China, but if so, China’s increased wealth will in time, in my view, change things like IP protection, quality of education at all levels, parenting methods and the like and things that are held in esteem, etc. Keep in mind that this cycle is nothing terribly new. This same economic cycle of development already happened in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

As an aside but related note, I recently heard Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun speak and he was excellent. He generally pulls no punches. He put an interesting twist to the “merits of online education debate” that relates to some of the issues that Jeff and Shasta raise in their posts. He said education should be much more open source, as Sun has been doing with its software (and which, by the way, Microsoft said it would start to do with part of its source code this week!).

He took a stats course, online, at Harvard a long time ago. He is a Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA. They guy is not a dummy. He completed his stats course at Harvard in 48 hours (he stayed up for two days straight doing it). He got one of the few As awarded in the course.

He said, in effect (I am paraphrasing here), “Harvard failed students like me. If it had allowed me to take more of my Harvard coursework like I took my stats class, I could have got going on life and finished Harvard in a year, instead of 4, and then I could have moved on and would not have been so far behind in trying to catch up with the likes of Gates/Microsoft and Ellison/Oracle”.

The remainder of his message?

He took all of us in the audience to task (the audience was all academics) by in effect saying (again, I am paraphrasing), “you have all meant well to create a system that ‘leaves no child behind’ in how you build your institutions and educational systems and teach people, but in your attempt to leave no child behind, you have set up obstacles to change and moving society moving forward and have forgotten the many, many, folks like me who you were holding back because of the traditional way you teach students and capture them, what else you required me to do that may not have been value added, etc. Please stop doing this and get your crap together.”

The audience was dead silent. We had collectively been busted.

One way he suggested we might do this is to make much more education open source, and online where people are given feedback immediately how they are doing, they can learn at their own pace (fast like him or slow if they choose, etc.), they take greater responsibility for their own learning, in doing so you can pull from quality resources around the world, etc.

I am sure that most folks at Cal Poly would love McNealy and what he was suggesting.

And hey, don’t shoot me, the messenger …

Or rather developed throughout the rigorous curriculum applied in the school system? Sir Ken Robinsons video brings to light that creativity can be fostered in education, or trained out of people like our current education system does. Creativity can be developed through the school system, but currently is not being foster in this area efficiently.
And what about failure? How do some cultures come to accept failures, while others try to avoid them like the plague? I think the reaction to failure is learned and trained into us. I’m not sure why cultures react differently to failure, but I do know that one’s culture and upbringing plays a large role in how someone reacts to failure. For example, if failure is made out to be the worst thing in the world, and people are thought of as a disgrace for it, they probably will do everything they can not to fail. However, if failure is thought of as part of life, someone may be more willing to take risks, and try again and again to get something to work.