Go abroad - are you up to the challenge?

Education is too often thought of as a process of transmitting information or ideas. I think education has a larger role: I see education as a process that allows me to explore my own personal values and goals, gives me insight into the human condition, provides the tools to make a contribution to society, and creates the mental structures to develop wisdom.

I just returned from Shanghai, where I participated in a review of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.   It was a packed trip, punctuated by helpful feedback from the review team and great connections with some of the most amazing people I know.

We helped to create the Joint Institute because it could be designed as “landing pad” for College of Engineering students to study engineering, abroad, in English, in China, during the summer!  And while all classes there are taught in English, they are mostly populated by the Chinese Joint Institute students, The American students can take classes in Chinese language, and Chinese culture.   So the American students study and live alongside Chinese students, run around after hours like students everywhere, doing things maybe I wish they would not, all the while meeting Chinese students at one of the strongest engineering schools in China.  It's a life changing event.

Whenever I go to China I’m very aware of being a minority: people take pictures of me, adults sneak peeks and little kids gape.   And the differences are more than skin deep: my values and expectations are, deeply, the result of my society and upbringing; they are the product of my culture. While I believe in universal human values, those commonalities are buried under many layers of cultural subtlety.  Learning how to work with someone who is different in a deep way is a challenge, and learning how to survive in a human environment where my reflexive actions are the wrong ones, is difficult.  It’s difficult and frustrating, but taking these challenges on provides an unparalleled opportunity for growth that cannot be created within the normal campus experience.

Those who return from a great experience abroad, one where their own assumptions of culture and expectations have been challenged, have a light in their eyes: they have changed, and they get it.  I wonder if you are up to the challenge?

Fast Food Education

Ken Robinson has given a couple of great TED talks about education.  The latest is here.   In this talk Sir Ken comments that our current educational model is based on the same approach to quality control as fast food: batched production of standardized items.  It’s an old observation that our school system, especially K12, is based on the needs of the industrial revolution, with standardized expectations achieved through clock and calendar driven processes.  This is true of engineering education at the college level as well – our curriculum is based around specific disciplines and well defined knowledge expectations in which parts are bolted in order onto the chassis of the student to form the complete product: a statics module, a dynamics module, a thermodynamics module, a fluids module, a control theory module.  The total quality management approach to engineering education, formalized now in the ABET continuous improvement model around 11 objectives (lovingly known as “A” through “K”), is a late 20th century industrial engineering model.

Most of us falsely believe that the way we educate today is the only proper way to educate.  Our teachers educated this way and we were successful, and so it has always been.  But our current approach to education is only about 100 years old.  Even the system of grading students goes back only to wild and divergent experiments in the 19th century, timed with the arrival of mass production of books and the mass education for workers in an industrial society.  Our educational system is designed for quality assurance through uniformity, and uniformity is not the obvious means to generate creative solutions for a complex future.  We must reexamine this manufacturing approach to education.  My friend Jack Hu argues that while the 20th century was the time of mass production, we are moving into a 21st century in which the right model is mass customization.  Ken Robinson argues for an agricultural model, in which we create the environment for growth, and the growth—the intellectual growth of the student—occurs because the environment is right.  What other models can we develop for engineering education in the 21st century?