Professor Zhu Yongxin’s Interviews and Speeches Related to

By admin | 未知 Updated: 2022-04-22 14:03

Professor Zhu Yonxin was interviewed by Beijing News and is published on the website of World Journal of Future Education by Cam Rivers Publishing, Cambridge, U.K., in December 2021.
 
 
Interview with Professor Zhu Yongxin
 
Will diplomas no longer be needed in the future?
 
In his recently published book Future School Professor Zhu Yongxin, the well-known educator, has put forward the idea that traditional schools will all be replaced by learning centers and diplomas will be deemed unnecessary. Although some of his visions may be regarded as utopian fantasy, no one can deny that his ideas and the discussions triggered by them have greatly inspired us when we try to picture education in the future.
 
The modern school system has its deeply-rooted problems, which have drawn many criticisms since the initiation of the “deschooling movement” in the 1960s. The most fundamental problem lies in its emphasis on efficiency, which has resulted in producing talent the same way factories manufacture goods. Under the current educational system, uniformity is reflected in every aspect of school life, from school admission date, school time, class schedule and syllabus to teaching materials, teaching progress, and test-based evaluation criteria, regardless of students’ different personalities, abilities and performance.
 
It’s like Procrustes’ bed in ancient Greek mythology. According to the legend, Procrustes the devil owned an iron bed. Those who had been warmly invited to stay overnight at his home were only allowed to sleep in this bed if their size was the perfect fit for his bed. The taller ones would have had their legs and feet chopped off whereas the shorter had their bodies stretched to the same length as the bed.
 
The standard of the modern school system is like this bed, Professor Zhu Yongxin has said. Restrained by this standard, students are exhausted in their study with very little happiness. The results of the inherent defect of our modern school system are that their personality traits have been neglected and repressed and they cannot fully develop their potential.
 
What changes do we have to make to address these deeply-rooted problems? Twenty years ago, prompted by his finding that his education theories and approaches were out of sync with current practices, Professor Zhu Yongxin initiated the “New Education Experiment”, advocating the replacement of old-fashioned spoon-feeding and test- and score-oriented educational approaches with a new, humanistic education. This year, Professor Zhu, having dedicated himself to the study of Chinese education, has published his new book Future School: Redefining Education based on years of observation and practice. In this book, he shares his reflections on and visions for the form of school, teachers, the content and approach of education, evaluation criteria and the general educational system with readers.
 
Professor Zhu Yongxin believes that traditional schools will disappear and be replaced by learning centers. In the meantime, ubiquitous learning, unlimited by time and place will, step by step, take over from campus-based education where times and locations of study are fixed. The so-called learning centers can have various forms. They can be based online or on brick-and-mortar premises developed from current schools as well as off-campus training institutions or social educational institutions. In the future, students will study in various learning centers instead of in fixed schools. The curriculum will also be more comprehensive and personalized. The concepts of class, grade, and classroom will be reshaped, as will the test-based evaluation system of which the college entrance examination constitutes an important part.
 
These ideas, which may sound far-fetched to many, actually have prototypes in the real world. Professor Zhu Yongxin provides a large number of examples in his book, examples we can find in our real life, and by reading which we may realize that the vision of learning centers is more than an ideal we look forward to, but a prediction that will definitely come true. Perhaps the question we are more interested in is “How far are we from such a future?”
 
How far? Nobody knows. As Professor Zhu Yongxin has said, things can suddenly look entirely different before we even realize any change has happened. Therefore, instead of asking how far we are from the future, it would be more realistic for us to follow closely every incremental change that may affect the future. And that is more important. As Professor Zhu Yongxin has pointed out, the future will only come when we start to create it. In this sense, the future school will not independently come into existence in the future, but will rely on our dedicated efforts to build it, starting now.
 
 
In the future, schools will be replaced by learning centers
 
Beijing News: The title of this book – Future School: Redefining Education – may remind many readers of the “Future School” craze in recent years. But the “future school” you refer to is actually a “future learning center” instead of what people would normally think of. What is the difference between these two?
 
Zhu Yongxin: Traditionally, people would think of brick-and-mortar premises when it comes to the concept of a school. What I want to say is that in the future, schools will transform into learning centers. Schools, in the traditional sense, will no longer exist. School, or more specifically, our modern school system itself, is the product of historical development. It did not come into being with the birth of the universe, and the concept of school is evolving.
 
Beijing News: There have been many discussions on future schools and various practices in recent years. But many of these were traditional ones in essence, except for their application of advanced technology and architectural renovation, at great expense, in the name of building a “future school”. What is your comment on the so-called future school nowadays？
 
Zhu Yongxin: In many cases, people simply label schools equipped with advanced technology as “future schools”, using this technology as a fashionable and eye-catching promotional stunt. Honestly speaking, most of the so-called “future schools”, including some pilot programs launched in the past few years, as well as seminars on related topics, have not reflected in-depth study into the change of school structure. Much of our research has remained on the application of technology but have not touched the essence and nature of school itself.
 
Many people still find it necessary to have physical schools and would panic without them. But in the future, the situation will change. Learning will become ubiquitous and be based on platforms quite different from traditional schools. Traditional schools came into being due to the shortage of education resources that necessitated the concentration of all resources in one place to maximize their effect. But now, you can learn whenever and wherever you want by using mobile phones or computers. We are already in an enabling environment for ubiquitous learning, which saves us the trouble of travelling to school. In fact, in the past, some people were able to learn a lot through reading when they could not or would not go to school. Traditional school, being the special product of the industrial era – a specific stage requiring the mass production of talent – will experience the process of birth, development, and fading away with the passage of time.
 
Beijing News: Many schools have been experimenting with new approaches to embrace and cultivate students under the current educational system. Have you seen any good examples of this?
 
Zhu Yongxin: There are many unique educational practices across the world. Sudbury Valley School, founded in the 1960s in the US is one good example. The school has no predetermined syllabus. It provides education resources according to the learning requests of students. This example inspired us to imagine that education in the future will value and respect the free will of students.
 
In High Tech High, another popular school in the US, class teaching only accounts for 30% of the time and the other 70% ais spent on group, project-centered study, in which students work together to research and solve real-life issues with the delivery of a product or report in the end. In this way, students will be fully engaged and unlikely to lose interest, as they choose the research topics themselves.
 
Similar programs can be found in China as well, but are scattered in various fields. For example, the Affiliated High School of Peking University has opened a Moonshot Academy where project-based learning is adopted and fragmented courses are replaced by more integrated ones. Other examples like Waldolf Schools, many small-scale schools, as well as our new education experiment have helped promoted the reform from various aspects to a certain extent. As for future schools or learning centers, there will be no fixed model. I think they should be persified to meet the different needs of different groups.
 
Beijing News: Just now you mentioned the school High Tech High. The US documentary Most Likely to Succeed was made about this school, which has gained an enormous and enthusiastic response. Could you please elaborate on its merits and demerits?
 
Zhu Yongxin: I think there is no one-size-fits-all learning method. The project-based educational approach adopted by High Tech High may not be suitable for, for instance, those who prefer to learn through lecturing. The best education services help all students to find the most suitable inpidual way of learning. There is no panacea-like educational approach adaptative to all changes, and this is the fundamental feature of education.
 
In the future, traditional school diplomas will no longer exist.
 
Beijing News: I have learned that you started to write this book in 2015. Were there any memorable sources of inspiration or experiences in the process?
 
Zhu Yongxin: The original aim of writing this book was to provide guidance to the development of new education. I have been promoting the New Education Experiment for the last twenty years. The continuous expansion of the experiment puts me under great pressure. I keep asking myself where will I take them. People have been using my ideas, but have we embarked on the right path? Five years ago, nearly all fields, including traditional businesses but particularly the financial landscape, have been changed by the internet – apart from education. I have been wondering what possibilities the development of new technology would bring to education and how it will affect our educational reform.
 
This is an issue that affects the whole country and education in the future. Though books on future school and future education began to appear on the shelf five years ago, I failed to find answers that satisfied me. In 2015, if my memory is correct, I found a book named The End of College in the bookstore of Harvard University. The author believed that universities and colleges would come to an end as more and more courses become available online. What will be the point of the existence of universities and colleges when everyone studies online? After reading this book, I cannot help thinking whether this will also be the destiny of primary and secondary schools, that they will likewise come to an end in the future. The answer is yes, in a manner of speaking. But this book mainly focused on the disruptive impact of the internet on schools and on the likelihood of ubiquitous learning. It listed problems without providing solutions.
 
Beijing News: Speaking of addressing these issues, you have been advocating for the establishment of a national online platform for education resources on the basis of opening universities to all. How would you describe this online platform? What will it be like?
 
Zhu Yongxin: This book is in some ways an educational reform plan, in which I cover almost every link in education and every factor of the school system. Of course, this is the most basic work, without which educational reform would be impossible. Now our education resources are scattered across different schools and online providers. They are all developing courses but these vary considerably in quality. Therefore, I put forward the idea that the government should build a national resource platform, pooling education resources for all age groups, and not just any resources but global resources selected and evaluated by the expert committee for curriculum design. In this way, people can find resources for whatever they wish to learn. Even children from poverty-stricken families in remote areas could access to these online education resources for free. This project will also be conducive to promoting education fairness and building information technology-based education highway. The platform will be a huge bank of national education resource and once this fundamental project is complete, anyone will be able to learn at any time.
 
I would also like to emphasize that the learning ability of a person is very strong, as demonstrated by the famous “tree hole experiment”. In this experiment, staff from Apple put an iPad in a tree hole in a remote village in India to observe what would happen. The iPad was discovered by several children, who quickly got the hang of it and were using it as a versatile learning tool. The experiment showed how strong children’s learning ability is – once they were provided with good enough resources and tools, they were able to study by themselves.
 
Beijing News: In addition to upgrading technology and evolving ideas about education, it seems that there is one other indispensable condition for such change to be universal: improvement of family finances. For the average family, especially those in rural areas or in suburbs with relatively low income, it will take much longer to see the benefits of such changes. How can we ensure it is easier for children from such families to get access to these education resources?
 
Zhu Yongxin: I have thought about this. The solution would be to issue education vouchers, with less wealthy families in remote areas being given more vouchers. For such families, the government will not only offer learning vouchers, but also opportunities to study in cities with reimbursement of travel expenses. The future learning centres would to a large extent serve as an assistant to students when they use this national education resource platform, providing guidance throughout the process.
 
Beijing News: So, things like school registration will be gone as well?
 
Zhu Yongxin: In the future, things like our traditional school diploma will be replaced by course certificates. Where you learn and what courses you take are far more important than diplomas.
 
Diplomas have served as a reference to measure the ability of an inpidual in traditional society when there was no better way for us to gain a quick understanding of a person. It will not be necessary in the future when what I call the “credit bank” is set up and all learning records will be saved in different data centres. The credit bank represents a thorough change, with the focus of learning being shifted from such results as diplomas and test scores to the education process. Each and every one of us will have his or her own database.
 
In the future, employers no longer need to refer to diplomas in making hiring decisions. Traditional education prepared us for work whereas education in the future will prepare us for a life in which learning has no end. The University of Stanford has initiated its 2025 plan recently, inviting students at any age to come and study. In the past, students must graduate from high school before they can have the chance to go to Stanford. But in the future, according to the plan, you can go now if you consider yourself competent enough for Stanford and your competency is in turn recognized by the university, whether at the age of ten or ninety. Moreover, in the past, students must earn enough credits to graduate within six years, but in the future, a student’s status will remain valid for sixty years after registration, which means those enrolled can study in Stanford their whole life. This is a very big change to the way of learning.
 
 
In the future, each part of the educational system will be inter-connected.
 
Beijing News: Mixed-age learning in future schools represents an interesting trend. Actually, nowadays some young people choose to live together with the elders in nursing homes to keep each other company and learn from each other. Such examples can be seen as a transition to future learning centres.
 
Zhu Yongxin: Many early childhood educators have been paying attention to mixed-age learning. One of these was Maria Montessori. Her ideal kindergarten provided mixed-age education, unlike ours, which pides students into classes based on their age. Salman Khan also explained the unique merit of mixed-age learning in his book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. 
 
I graduated high school in 1977. The first university students after the college entrance examination was resumed bore witness to mixed-age learning. Graduates of the 1966, 1967, and 1968 sessions were in the same class as those of the 1977 session. The age gap between students could be as wide as twenty to thirty years. I felt I had learnt as much from my classmates as from my teachers. We complemented each other perfectly, especially when it came to joint research, as each of us played a different role according to his or her strength. So mixed-age learning is sure to be a future trend in education development.
 
This will be a focus for future study, but right now we have made clear class pisions based on students’ age. In the future, there will be no educational institutions, only different learning centres without such titles as on- or off-campus. The whole education system will be inter-connected and  governments will be able to buy courses through education service purchasing for students to choose between. Presumably a large number of curriculum-design companies will emerge and those that fail to provide quality services will be washed out. Such competition will lead to improved efficiency in teaching.
 
Beijing News: In the future, teaching will also become a freelance job. I heard a saying once that teaching will become a job for the elite. But it seems that in future learning centres, anyone can be a teacher.
 
Zhu Yongxin: On the whole, teaching will be a job for the capable in the coming era, or in your words, for the elite. This is inevitable. No one will ask you to teach if you are not competent enough. The future may bear witness to more personnel of high calibre standing out in competition and becoming teachers.
 
Also, for many, being a teacher will not be a way to make a living, but to enjoy life. They will be able to pass on their ideas and thoughts the way masters have imparted knowledge to disciples in the old days. The scale and structure of future learning centres will be highly inpidualized, presenting a landscape of great variety. It will be like going back in time to the era of Confucius, when even a master as wise as he had to consult Lao Tzu. The more capable a teacher is, the more attractive he or she will be to students, and we will also be able to see interesting and persified teacher-student combinations.
 
Beijing News: You mentioned in your book that such private sector education platforms such as Logic Show, Himalaya and Zhihu have, to some extent, contributed to the realization of the plan on building future schools. What is your comment on the current controversial scenario where people have to pay for knowledge and the fact that much of their curricula are hastily and roughly prepared, which seems to be at odds with our ideal of a future school?
 
Zhu Yongxin: This is indeed the case. But likewise, one cannot guarantee that what teachers have taught in schools is impeccable. The situation is similar; whether or not the content is valuable is decided by the choice and evaluation of our society. Last month, in a publishers’ forum held in Shanghai, the Vice President of Himalaya said that their company is an educational institution in nature, where knowledge have been imparted through listening. I think it is also quite normal for the quality of content to be varied. But in the end, contents with poor quality will be eliminated, because no one will pay for them. What has been preserved and propagated is often of a better quality.
 
Of course, in addition to the market, I do hope there will be state-certified third-party institutions to properly manage and guide education resource providers by means of ratings and customer reviews to ensure that quality education resources are shared by more people.  
 
The concept of future learning centres is not a utopian fantasy.
 
Beijing News: You have suggested making teaching content less difficult to leave everyone more time for independent learning. We have seen some efforts in this regard as we reduce the burden for students in compulsory education and try to bring down the level of difficulty for the college entrance examination. But the process of structural adjustment has been slow under the current, exam-oriented system. That’s when measures like independent enrolment were introduced, which have caused various new problems.
 
Zhu Yongxin: As long as the college entrance examination and other means of selection exist, there will be targeted courses and services to help students to prepare for them. But this will not be the case in the future. As I see it, though I have not included this idea in my book, in the future there will be a big change in both the employment and income distribution system of our society.
 
Our current education services are tailored to fit our socio-economic situation. First, the cost of employment is high. Therefore, employers want students from top universities, preferably those on the lists of “985” and “211” projects, leaving very little chance for the rest. This reflects the deficits of our human resource management system. Compulsory education in our country lasts nine years, which means those who have completed the nine-year education should be deemed eligible for applying for all job positions. Any company rejecting an application simply due to the applicant’s academic qualifications should be accused of educational background discrimination. I know that many companies have their lists of preferred universities and won’t even glance at applications submitted by students from other schools. I think this problem should be addressed by the enactment of a law against educational background discrimination.
 
The second problem resides in our distribution system. The income gap between different areas of our society is much too wide and should be narrowed through secondary and tertiary distribution. Just like in northern Europe, where a technician can be the neighbour of a university professor and people working in different fields have similar living standards.
 
These are the two big issues behind education, employment and remuneration, which have been neglected by many. I pointed out these issues during the meeting of the Standing Committee of the CPPCC National Committee. I said that education has been blamed for many social issues. People’s dissatisfaction with our education system in fact mirrors their discontent with problems to which education cannot provide solutions. Once these issues are solved, our education would be different.
 
Beijing News: You have had a conversation with John Couch, the Vice President of Education at Apple. He believes that educational reform must be bottom-up whereas you believe, the order should be the opposite. What is the reason behind such different views？
 
ZhunYongxin: It’s partly due to different national conditions, but this should not prevent us from learning from each other. Couch sets much store by the power of the society, which is quite right. Without public support and grassroots action, it will be hard for educational reform to carry on. People will feel half-hearted about top-down reforms if they are not fully convinced.
 
But why do I highlight the importance of top-down actions? Because in China, the top-down approach can be very powerful. Take my “new education experiment” for instance. At first it was conducted only at the primary level and was promoted and implemented in one school after another. How could it develop so fast later? It was all thanks to our cooperation with administrative departments for education, after which hundreds of schools joined our efforts. This has demonstrated how powerful top-down action can be in China. Similar scenarios can be found in the example of rubbish sorting. We have been promoting it for years without any significant effect. Without strong administrative power as the driving force, it would be hard for us to achieve the results we want. Therefore, I think we should combine the top-down and bottom-up power to more satisfying effect.
 
Beijing News: You have also mentioned that, on top of general institutional reform, which certainly is an aspect that should be emphasized, the most thorough and effective way to redefine education for each and every teacher would be to explore how to promote the development of future learning centres from the perspective of educators.
 
Zhu Yongxin: Indeed, educational reform should be relevant to everybody, to every family. In my book, I have devoted a whole chapter to talking about what parents should contribute to learning centres. Parents constitute the most fundamental and crucial driving force behind educational reform.
 
Parents are the most important teachers as children spend their formative years at home. By the age of seven, a child’s brain structure is pretty much the same as that of an adult, which means that a person’s basic learning ability would be developed before school age. What would have also taken shape by then are his or her inpidual cognitive style, behavioural habits and character.
 
A lot of changes in education begin with parents, whose inpidual efforts would finally converge into a strong driving force for such changes to take place. I would say that if one third of our population read this book and identified with my ideas, change will naturally happen before the whole country embrace the concept. Once they discover the ideal of learning centres, they will build them voluntarily if there aren’t any already.
 
 
What we need is more than school reforms: we need the re-building of our education.
 
Beijing News: You have mentioned another cause of difficulty in educational reform in addition to structural factors – the underdevelopment of basic psychology and sociology, two pivotal disciplines in education. You have not, though, discussed the matter in detail in your book. Can you elaborate on this issue?
 
Zhu Yongxin: This issue concerns the professionalism of teachers and educators. I think teaching is the most difficult and sophisticated work among all jobs yet right now it reflects a serious lack of professionalism.  
 
It involves two factors. First, the curriculum needs improvement. Second, several key disciplines that education studies rely on, including psychology and neuroscience, are underdeveloped, resulting in a lack of professional knowledge to understand students’ psychological and brain development.
 
Each person is unique in psychological and brain development. In the 1980s, a new discipline was born in the field of education – Learning Science. It is now the trendiest discipline in education, involving experts in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology. They tend to focus more on issues like how to study in a more efficient way, how to better remember what you have learnt and which areas learning take place in. But it is a fairly young discipline. I once attended a meeting with these top scientists and I asked them, “You have spent so much time on researching how to improve learning efficiency, but have you ever considered whether it is worthwhile to study something useless in an efficient way?” This reflects the complexity of education sciences.
 
I have highlighted the sociological basis due to the fact that education itself is characterized by the politics, ideology and society of a particular country, which would have unique requirements for its education values and culture, making reform and change difficult to promote.
 
Beijing News: Some of the ideas in your book are based on the changes brought by the internet to the form of schools and teaching in the future. Does this mean that the key still lies in technological progress?
 
Zhu Yongxin: I think so. I think there are three stages of technology-based educational reform. In the first stage, technological progress has shown its influence on education since new technologies means were used in teaching in the 1960s. What has come after is the complete change in teaching methodology, with the emergence of Khan Academy and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The third stage would involve a much deeper change that reaches the educational structure. Despite the fact that we have completed the first two stages without structural change, the previous achievements are much less effective than they should have been. Therefore, we need structural reform. Real change can only happen when we break the rigid structures of traditional schools.
 
In fact, many attempts have laid the foundation for such change; the establishment of education groups is one of the examples. But right now, our education groups and schools remain mutually exclusive, with students and teachers coming together in fixed locations.
I have an idea that can help quickly change the current situation. First, we should promote the mobility of teachers and students. Second, we can add unique features to each learning centre, making them highly inpidualized, for example, with one specialized in artificial intelligence and the other in art. There will be neither summer and winter vacations nor weekends, people can attend whenever they want.
 
Beijing News: Is it true that some future school alliances are making such attempts?
 
Zhu Yongxin: Frankly speaking, none of the designers of all the so-called future schools I have seen so far have thought in such systematic way, which is also the case for books written by globally-renowned experts, including the book I have mentioned, The End of College. Most of the authors of these books do not have a background in educational studies and therefore it is difficult for them to see from a holistic process- and structure-based perspective in building future schools.
 
I have neither talked about educational reform from the perspective of a technologist nor neglected the role of technology in the whole process, which in fact concerns the rebuilding of the whole educational system instead of a simple reform of schools.
 
Beijing News: Are there any actions we can take first given the present conditions?
 
Zhu Yongxin: I think ideas and concepts should come first. We must build a vision and consensus on the development of future schools and learning centres so that people will know that this is our goal. It’s better to take actions sooner than later. I think that out of all counties in the world, China is the most likely to achieve educational reform through the combined efforts of the government and civil society, which is technically possible as well. Once the development of future schools is seen as an urgent need by all in China and becomes a national project, we can truly turn our dream into reality. Of course, it takes time for such a goal to be achieved. Such a big change will not happen overnight. Small changes take place first in small areas, then become bigger and more widespread. The whole process can continue so subtly as to be unnoticeable before things suddenly look completely different.
 
Source：
https://www.bjnews.com.cn/culture/2019/09/09/624509.html?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0