My Dangerous Idea

Things are busy for me this fall as I am starting teachers' college. This has left me with less time to read the books I would like to read. Still, I am slowly working my way through a book called What Is Your Dangerous Idea? It is a compilation of short essays by many of today's top thinkers.

To more narrowly define the question, these thinkers were asked to describe an idea, not necessarily their own original idea, but one they think about a lot. The key is that the idea should be "dangerous" not because it is assumed to be false but because it might actually be true (John Brockman).

I do not wish to talk about any of their ideas in this post. Instead, here's one candidate idea for most dangerous that I often think about:

The Asian approach to education is actually superior to the Western approach.

Given that I'm now taking a program to become a teacher in Western society, this is certainly a dangerous idea.

I might be dead wrong. There is plenty to criticize about the style of education they dole out in countries like Japan, Korea, and China. Kids in those Far East nations spend crazy hours devoted to study. Without any statistics at hand to back this up, the suicide rate amongst students is said to be much higher in those countries. Many kids are sent to Western countries to study in the belief that they will receive a better education. And of course, we shouldn't forget the primary criticism that Asian schools focus on rote learning, while their Western counterparts nurture creative thinking.

But as I discussed in a previous post, intuition isn't all it's cracked up to be. Our intuition that our education system is better just might be wrong. In case you doubt that, here are a few quotes from the news recently:

"An evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 18th among 36 countries in secondary education. Almost 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate from high school on time; in South Korea, it’s 7 percent." (New York Times, August 23, 2009)

The National Education Association (in America) reported recently that results from testing found: "The fourth and eight graders who tested in mathematics improved their average scores compared to European students, however, fail to compete with Asian students from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Singapore." (September 8, 2009)

"Asian American students achieved best scores in the 2009 U.S. SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) college entrance exam in mathematics and writing, according to a report by the U.S. College Board." (August 27, 2009) How about that -- Asian-American students even beat the rest of America's students at their own game.

As a former English teacher in Korea, I'm well aware of the perception amongst many of my foreign colleagues that we Westerners are lucky to have been educated in North America. But what is the basis of such an assertion in the face of statistical evidence that says otherwise?

Whether or not the Asian methodology is better than the Western, what it really boils down to is effort. Asians take education more seriously. They are willing (as a general rule) to put more time and effort into their studies. U.S. President Barack Obama even felt it necessary to lecture America's youth on their responsibility to themselves to be better students. How many kids will heed his advice?

Given the population difference between Asia and the West, the new century will soon become the Asian Century. I'm not here to criticize that; I just think that we Westerners will have to pull our collective head out of the sand and consider which parts of the Asian approach to education we should adopt.

It would be dangerous not to do so.

Connecting Dots - Part 1

I'm very much a believer in a concept that others may put less faith in: that everything happens for a reason.

If I go back to important life choices I've made, particularly since high school, I can see how those choices appear to have been utterly necessary to get where I am today. This way of thinking has long influenced my own understanding of how I met my wife, who is Korean. If I connect enough dots, I end up back at high school in Wiarton, Ontario.

It started off when I became good friends with a guy named Terry. We met in the summer of 1985 while playing ball together, and we went on to become best friends within the next couple of years while attending high school. It just so happened that his dad, Ernie, was the principal of the school. Ernie was a fine educator, and an even better human being who made me feel welcome in his home whenever I visited Terry. So in late 1989, when it came time to apply for college or university, and I had chosen broadcasting school, Ernie took me aside and recommended going to university to get a degree instead. But not just any university. He recommended the University of Guelph, where Terry was going to go. For some reason, I capitulated and accepted Guelph's offer of admission early in 1990. This would be the first dot connecting to my wife.

While at U of G, where Terry and I roomed together in our first year in residence, I met a guy named Kenn. He was an animal science major, or an Aggie. Terry and I became great friends with Kenn, going on road trips to Cooperstown, New York, and Chicago, Illinois. I also had the good fortune of attending two Aggie-sponsored trips thanks to my friendship with Kenn. On the second of those trips (to New York City), I met this girl named Miriam, who was a classmate of Kenn's. Miriam and I began dating early in 1995. This was the second dot.

My relationship with Miriam wasn't destined to last very long. I already had plans of going overseas for a year, and Miriam wasn't interested in following me at the time. Nevertheless, there was a stroke of good fortune involved -- for me, at least. I had committed to going to Korea to teach, and Miriam just happened to have two friends teaching at a school in Seoul. Through Miriam's friends, I was able to sign a contract with Universal Language Institute. This was the third dot.

Why? Because in the same month that I began teaching at ULI, a young college student with the English name Heather began taking English classes at ULI. Before the end of 1995, Heather and I began dating, and we soon recognized a great similarity in our personalities and interests. Of course, we eventually got married. I still believe that it was always my cosmic mission to find Heather, and neither one of us can imagine being married to anyone else. All those important life choices I made brought me to her.

These are the dots I have connected with the benefit of hindsight. And one might ask, what's the purpose of writing about this?

I've just finished reading a chapter of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, in which he talks about what it will take for people in the 21st century to compete in a globalized society. In one section about teaching liberal arts in schools, he quotes Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. Jobs tells how he dropped out of college after six months because the classes were not stimulating enough. However, he continued to "drop in" on courses that he thought sounded interesting. One course was about calligraphy. He explains how learning about fonts and spacing in the calligraphy course may have seemed like a perfectly innocuous way to spend time. But ten years later, when he and Steve Wozniak were developing the first Macintosh computer, Jobs brought that experience in the calligraphy class to the design of the computer's graphical interface -- and changed the history of the personal computer forever.

Jobs goes on to say, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." (Friedman, p.318)

This idea is important to me for two reasons at this time. First, I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few months mentally dissecting my choice two years ago to attend Vancouver Film School, only to find myself immediately after graduation getting back into teaching. Was that choice wise? So far, it seems to have done nothing more than bankrupt me, with no likelihood that I will gain from the choice I made to study screenwriting.

The second reason relates to the bigger idea that Friedman argues in this chapter, which is that we need liberal arts in the education system. As someone planning to become a history teacher at the high school level, I find myself wondering how to explain the need for such programs when so many people say we need to focus on math and science.

With these two reasons in mind, I will explore them in my next post... for this one has gotten way too long.