Photographed by Chu Guofei

“Can China Lead? Education and Leadership in the Globalized World” annual China Education Symposium took place at Harvard Graduate School on May 2-3.

 

Educators, administrators, seasoned China experts and policymakers gathered at Harvard Graduate School of Education on May 2-3 for China Education Symposium’s annual conference, themed “Can China Lead? Education and Leadership in the Globalized World” this year. The day and a half long conference included five different panels on education, a number of presentations by up-and -coming social organizations, and keynote speeches from former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, Harvard Business School professor William Kirby and Harvard University professor and former director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies Ezra Vogel, among others.

Speaking on China’s ability to lead in the 21st century, Kirby stressed the importance of infrastructure, entrepreneurship and education for a nation’s development. He said that an educated populace is the real driving force for building a country, concluding that education makes the people while the people make the country.

In a speech focusing on education, globalization and the Chinese Dream, Rudd asserted that education is the most effective pathway for people to realize their national dream, and a key instrument for ensuring social equality and facilitating various social functions. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, everyone will be affected by the “global village”, which requires cooperating to contribute something to the world, Rudd said. Given the world’s complexity, he believes understanding and accepting the intricacy of international relations and learning to put oneself in another’s place are basic requirements for everyone that can only be facilitated by education from a global perspective.

Rudd also affirmed the importance of studying foreign languages for understanding different cultures, pointing out that currently the East understands the West more than vice versa. During a question and answer session, he said that Western research and teaching institutions need to elevate the importance of Chinese language instruction as China is becoming very important in the global order. The English language became widely used in the world only after the Second World War, and this does not mean it will always be a lingua franca, he advised.

Ezra Vogel reflected on Deng Xiaoping’s influence on China’s education, commenting that today it is not adequately instilling an innovation spirit or fostering critical thinking in its students. Vogel praised the Chinese government’s efforts to strengthen cooperation and exchange with international institutions and open the door for foreign instructors to introduce new teaching methods. He observed that it is natural that the developing countries learn from the developed countries in the field of education, but noted that an increasing number of American students are studying in China and hope to learn more about the country. By studying other countries’ development paths and unique features, American stu¬dents may find alternatives that the U.S. can emulate.

The symposium included five panels: International Higher Educa¬tion and Global Talents, Technology and Education Innovation, Early Childhood Education at the Nexus of Policy, Research and Practice, an Education: When East Meets West and Better Education For All. Each panel drew a mix of scholars, decision-makers and entrepreneurs from China, the U.S. and Australia. Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Yenching Institute, observed that scholars who visit China often hear the word “innovation”. Innovation requires an open attitude and close interaction and cooperation with international scholarship, an area in which she believes China has made outstanding achievements.

Perry expressed concern that China’s education policy has overemphasized university ranking, as many of the country’s top universities vie for spots among the world’s most elite institutions. The ultimate goal of education is to train talent and facilitate students’ all-around development, she reminded, encouraging a reexamination of the model and qualifying criteria for world-class universities.

 
Ren Youqun, vice president of East China Normal University, reviewed the internationalization of China’s education in recent decades: “Since the 1990s, China has attached more importance to the internationalization of higher education institutions and increased policy support for and investment in higher education. In 2011, the concept of collaborative innovation was introduced, advocating inter-university cooperation and cooperation between universities and external entities.” Ren cautioned that Chinese universities should not copy the world’s top institutions blindly when learning from them.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were a topic of heated debate at the panel of “Technology and Education Innovation”. Panelist Peter Bol, vice provost for Advances in Learning at Harvard University, currently teaches “ChinaX”, one of Harvard’s most popular online courses to date, with William Kirby. Bol commented that while their completion rates are low, online courses have a high absolute number of students. He predicted that in the future, MOOCs will include mod¬ules where students can choose to learn by themselves.

Ji Shisan, founder and CEO of popular science social networking service Guokr.com commented that MOOCs have redefined what it means to be a good student. Students can standout for self-motivation rather than simply from attaining high scores in traditional classes.

Will MOOCs threaten the demand for teachers? The panelists were generally optimistic about the extent to which technology will be disruptive to educators’ employment. Bol said that learning is a good thing, and as long as the need for learning increases, there will be more opportunities and society will improve.

Panelists in “Education: When East Meets West” shared insights from a case study involving Finland, the U.S., and China and reflected on lessons that could be extrapolated for other international education situations.

In the panel “Education for All”, speakers iterated that quality and equality of education are both important. Abhimanyu Singh, director and representative of UNESCO’s office in Beijing, warned that income gaps are causing an uneven distribu¬tion of education resources and stressed the importance of developing a policy that makes universal education feasible.

 

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 592, May 7, 2014

 

Translated by Jiang Hong

Revised by Charles Horne

The Chinese link:

http://www.csstoday.net/xueshuzixun/guoneixinwen/89420.html