Asia Increasingly Moves to 'Pupil-Centric' Teaching

I first caught onto this in an issue of Adbusters of a few months ago, where it was stated that China had taken the decision a few years ago to transform their complete educational system from being "teacher centric" to "pupil centric".

In other words, rather than organising classes the "teacher-centric" way the Europeans taught the world, the objective has become to create learning experiences which focus on personal interest, creativity, self-reliance, social skills, and an interest for life-long learning.  With over with over 200,000,000 students and an amount of schools and teachers to match, such an overhaul is not a simple one.

After reading around a little more about the topic, it's amazing how big this movement is across Asia.  It also makes me wonder what will happen when the West gets confronted with this new generation of Asians, who play by rules we are always talk about, yet never really apply. 

Add to this an ease with new media which is even greater than with our kids (if you want to know what I mean have a walk through downtown Shanghai), and I think it would warrant a proverbial "Houston, we have a problem"

Perhaps our educational system needs some shock therapy.

Should Southern European Marketeers Move to China?

I had a very interesting debate last night with the CEO of the Greater China chapter of the American Management Association on the cultural differences between Chinese and Europeans and how this applies to executives who want to do business here.

In this he recounted from the experiences in one of the more successful training programmes they run in Shanghai and Hong Kong on "intercultural communication".  What was very striking to me was that none of the big issues he mentioned were "new" to me.

Not because I'm such a wise man of the world, yet more because the issues which business people - read mainly Anglo-Saxons - face in China are extremely similar to the ones they, and their nordic counterparts face when moving into Southern Europe, in which I define anything south of Brussels as Southern Europe).

"Yes" doesn't always mean "yes", if something is "normally" or "in principle" OK, it isn't necessarily so in practice and there is a bit more of a nuanced/balanced, even hesitant attitude to new initiatives. This offers in my opinion a great competitive edge - to which my dinner companion agreed - for marketeers from countries like Belgium, France, Italy, South Germany, ... who have been brought up with this working enviromnent as they will be able to much quicker to work with the local Chinese counterparts and thus achieve results.

So, if you're a marketer in this category and are worried about your business being outsourced from right under you, it may be wortwhile to just pack your bags and go East.  It is really happening over here.

Posted from Hong Kong.