Re-imagine K12 education in a global context

The unusual exchange

Over the Chinese New Year holiday my three children, aged five, seven and nine, spent a month at Imagination Lab School (ILS) in Palo Alto, California – our latest venture that opened in August last year. They returned to Beijing brimming with excitement over the new friends they had made, but also over the projects that they’d worked on together around ocean pollution.

Project- or phenomenon-based learning (PBL) has its roots in the work of Finnish educators, but is becoming popular around the world for its ability to make learning not just fun, but more importantly real and relevant. ETU made the decision to use PBL across all of our campuses as a vehicle for students to explore the UN Sustainable Development Goals (if you need to refresh yourself on your SDGs then look here). The theme for my children’s time in California was ocean pollution, with the children reading and researching the issue, identifying key facts and messages, and then building a campaign of ‘public service announcement’ posters that could spread the story through the school community and beyond.

ILS is the third ETU campus following Beijing and Guangzhou, and an upcoming partnership with a Singapore school will be our fourth coming . We talk about ourselves as a ‘Global Family’, and the project my children joined was a pilot for programs that will make this a reality, with student ambassadors travelling in both directions between Beijing and Silicon Valley in April and July this year – the first of many we hope to see over the coming years.

But why this school in the US?

I will cut to the chase. I believe one of the biggest holes in US K12 education is the lack of global competence, and it seems to get even worse when it comes to China. I hope our efforts with this school can be a starting point to address it.  

Don’t panic, I’m not representing the Chinese government or any official entity (and I should clarify this education effort is not related to the Gates Foundation either.) 

I myself benefited hugely from my own education and life in the US (PhD in Molecular Biology from UCLA in 2005, then 10 years at McKinsey, where I left as a Partner in the Palo Alto office to join the Gates Foundation). But I have to say that from the first day I arrived in the US in 2000, it was clear to me that the mainstream culture, despite all its greatness, is very much inward looking. And over the last two decades it did not seem to get better. Of course to some extent this is the result of America’s strength as a nation, which can naturally breed a certain myopia about the outside world. However I believe if America is to keep its greatness, it will be essential for the next generation to have an outlook that reaches beyond their own shores, and to be equipped to grapple with issues weightier than the latest celebrity gossip.

Born, raised, and now working in China, I have seen enough not to be naively positive about my homeland. And I’m not saying that education in China is great either – far from it actually, which I will get to later in this piece.

But looking from the US side, I have to say the lack of understanding of China from some well-educated Americans is shockingly high, even to the extent that proper discussion can hardly take place due to the lack of awareness of basic facts and context of China. For example, how many living Chinese people can you name: politicians, actors, artists, anything? One? Two?  You are probably already doing better than most Americans. If you ask middle school students in China to name 5 cities in the US, I’m sure close to 100% of kids can do it. If you ask the same question in reverse in the US, probably only the “nerdiest” have a chance.

After I had children myself, I started to understand why. If you are from a well-educated, well-meaning middle-class family, there is a very high chance that you can go through your entire K12 education barely encountering China at all. Of course part of this is China’s own fault: our film industry is vast, but so little of its output seems ‘culturally translatable’. Meanwhile the state-run propaganda machine can be terribly bad at telling even the best of China’s own stories to outsiders.

I have been sitting on the final selection committee of the Rhodes Scholarship since its entrance to China in 2015. In that time I’ve seen so many inspiring young people who, in the nobility of their dreams, and in the stamina that has already propelled them from very modest backgrounds, truly encapsulate the scholarship’s lofty vision of ‘fighting the world’s fight’. However their stories get lost behind a one-dimensional narrative of China as an authoritarian and predatory country.

So the view from the US mostly boils down to China as a remote and (at best) irrelevant country. When I was involved in recruitment at McKinsey, regularly reading resumes from the brightest students from the best schools in the country, if China ever appeared at all, it seemed to be only as an ‘exotic experience’.

China, it goes without saying, makes up 20% of the world’s population, boasts 3000 years of history, and is the second largest global economy and the largest trade partner for much of the world including the continent of Africa. But more and more US politicians are now claiming that China did all this by ‘stealing’. Again I’m not trying to defend all of China’s trade practices, but if you use some common sense, and critical thinking, is it really possible that a country with four times the population of US could (or would need to)do all this by ‘stealing’? American education stresses critical thinking, but when it comes to China, it seems that this capability is suddenly gone, with opinions flying around untethered to facts or logic.

The flag on the countries indicate which country is its largest trading partner, based on 2015 data.(e.g. the largest trading partner for US is Canada)

So, this is worrisome, and the point is, this will hurt America.

When looking at the US’s current China policy and listening to the public debate, it seems clear that there is a strategic misread of China. And this, I have to argue, is a direct consequence of the lack of China competency in US education over many years.

This is why when Steve Schwarzman started his Schwarzman College effort in Tsinghua University I found the vision inspiring (I’ve had the honor to sit on its Academic Advisory Board since 2016). He basically said that tomorrow’s leaders cannot be global leaders if they don’t understand China. Therefore Schwarzman College’s admission is 80% non-Chinese and 20% Chinese. Being close to it I know its setup and operation is not without challenges, but the college embodies a foresight that feels visionary, even daring, compared with the general malaise described above.

But wouldn’t it be even better if this could start earlier? In a world with so much family travel and international vacations, can’t our education be more global as well? In a world where people meet in Davos to talk about globalization and ‘creative disruption’, can’t we bring some of these insights to education?

Is it time to re-imagine K12 education in a global context?

I’m well aware that international travel is a luxury, and I don’t want to simply promote  another service for the ‘haves’. But my point is that even within the population who do have the means, this is not being thought of or done. And even for those who do not have the means, there are ways to do it – using the internet, why can’t we connect kids in different countries to work together through the same projects around UN’s SDGs, for example?

But in reality is this is not happening at scale at all, because K12 schools are usually a sadly lagging part of most societies, far from the “cognitive frontier”. So although this idea seems straightforward and compelling to an education outsider, it’s still lightyears away from being done.

What we are doing to address it

This is the vision behind the school in California. Although it’s small, we wanted to make learning and global connection real for our kids. The school already has daily Chinese classes, which we will soon be ramping up to ‘full immersion’ – with roots in Beijing we believe we can boast the most authentic Chinese learning environment possible.

But the goal is far from language alone. The vision is a great local school for the local community, with a substantive global connection. There are a few ways we do it.

1. Project-Based Learning across all campuses. Our themes will be centered around UN SDGs and will be synchronized on both side of the Pacific. Our students will naturally see that we share the same world, connected by water and wildlife, even when separated by a long-haul flight and a 16 hour time difference
2. Technology platforms that connect teachers on both sides on class planning, recording  students’ stories and achievements, and conducting assessments
3. Student ambassador programs, where students can spend a month on a different campus – just as my own children recently did
4. Taking full advantage of the summer and possibly other opportunities to connect parents with enrichment experiences for their children that reinforce what they’ve learned at school.
5. An increasing number of partnerships with schools around the world who are seeking a global connection driven by the same global outlook

We’re taking small steps for now, but I believe these initiatives could be the start of a K12 education experience that actually fits these interconnected times that we live in.

Learn more about our effort at https://www.imagination-school.org and more on the broader ETU Family of Schools https://www.etuschool.org/en/