Having lived in Beijing for 15 years I could really relate to this report;

“In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.”

Always adapting, the Chinese are masters at analyzing trends, seeking to copy and then improve. I remember Chinese education being delivered in the rote memorization formula.  Those days are gone.

As Daniel Pink reported [frequent readers will note I really do respect Mr. Pink’s work],

“[Indiana University professor Jonathan] Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’”

In America we are having a Creativity Crisis! Research show that American creativity is declining.  what went wrong -and how we can fix it.