Recently, John Seely Brown or often referred to simply as “JSB”, a visiting scholar at USC and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, breezed into Singapore and delivered a lecture entitled, “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change” at the Singapore Civil Service College (click on the book on the left if you want to know more). JSB gave his insights on how learning is taking place in today’s connected world.

He started his lecture by highlighting a group of surfers known as The Grommets. This group of surfers is based in Maui, Hawaii. The Grommets have become the leading proponents of a new water sport called aerial surfing. If you look at them in action, you will see a lot of similarities with skateboarding. According to JSB this group of surfers became excellent because of the way they learn to improve themselves at the sport. According to JSB, The Grommets underwent these stages in their pursuit of excellence:

a) Deep collaborative learning with/from each other;
b) A passion to achieve extreme performance and a willingness to fail, fail, fail on the way;
c) Accessing and learning frame by frame the best surfers around the world via videos of the pros;
d) Use of video tools to capture and analyze each of their own improvisations;
e) Pulling the best of ideas from adjacencies: wind surfing, skate boarding, mountain biking, motor-cross and others;
f) Accessing spikes of capabilities around the world – leveraging networks of practice around the world; and
g) Attracting others to help them around the world

What JSB found most interesting was that the group came together and began to “critique each other on-the-fly almost all the time and to compete like mad with each other the rest of the time.” And they do so passionately. They will try out new ideas and fail continuously and end messed up on the quite unforgiving waves. But as JSB pointed out, they would do it again and again.

The Grommets also learn  by watching the DVDs of other great surfers. They would actually do a frame-by-frame viewing of the moves done by these surfers. Then they would ride the surfs again to try out what they had seen and try out their own new moves which they would also video and review. It is a constant process of learning, trying, and reviewing aided by a willingness to fail and fueled by passion.

One of the ideas that he highlighted was the idea of adjacencies. As JSB puts it:

“How do you start to pull ideas, moves, recoveries from adjacencies to hard core surfing. Obviously skateboarding would be one. And yes, Dusty is a darn good skateboarder too. And so he goes out and studies these skateboard moves. And so you say how do you appropriate this skateboard move over here and do what I am doing over there? But it doesn’t stop with skateboarding. Let’s look at mountain biking and motocross. One of the things that he does is to let the board get way out in front of him. It is a move that he appropriated from extreme performance in motorcross where you see these guys with their motorcycles out in front of them flying over an edge. There is an incessant ethic of how can I appropriate what I see into my own skill set?”
~ “The Cook Report on Internet Protocol, 2010″

The other two aspects of The Grommets learning that interested JSB was their understanding of local ecosystems or “spikes”. According to JSB, The Grommets “travel all over the world going to every kind of local talented place observing surfers and looking for new moves.” They use Skype to remain connected. JSB also found it interesting to see how they’ve figured out where there are local hotspots of incredible talent to visit and build relationships in those “spikes of incredible capability”.

The second aspect that JSB finds most interesting is that the learning is often reciprocal, in the sense that others would also come to them to share their skills. So as JSB puts it, he is interested in“how do they productively interact with folks so that people will begin to come to them to show them things with the result that they don’t have to go out as much.”

Learning about learning from JSB, I wonder about the kind of learning  takes place in schools and  most tertiary institutions. Schools are meant to be places that prepare students for the real world but when I compare the real world learning experiences of The Grommets and what takes place in schools, I cannot help feeling a wide disparity between the two.

I would just like to highlight a few differences. The differences, I believe are in the following areas:

a) the passion in the pursuit of learning;

b) the great depth of learning in a niche area yet open to learning from other niches;

c) the personalised yet collaborative nature of the learning (the building of an ecosystem of learning); and

d) the culture and willingness to fail repeatedly to achieve excellence.

By the way, if you think I had been at the lecture by JSB, I was actually not there. My wife was at the lecture and summarized it for me. It piqued my interest (and jealousy), and I went to the Net to find out more about the things JSB had said at the lecture. I have just highlighted one part of what I believe he had delivered at the Singapore Civil Service College. I believe, however, based on the additional work that I have done through the connectedness of the world today and important points noted by my wife, I have presented a fairly accurate picture of a portion JSB’s message. In my own way, I am already doing some of the things that JSB discussed about learning. Do you think this way of learning is interesting and useful? Share your thoughts.

(Addendum: By the way, if you want to view the same lecture done elsewhere, click here. If you want to download the video, click here. And if you want the slides of the lecture, they are here. And of course you can email JSB here).

In a recent issue of Time magazine, it highlighted the ridiculous situation in South Korea, home of Samsung, where a policing force has been set up to ensure that cram schools, hagwons, would not function beyond 10.00 pm. South Korea has enacted laws to that effect. This policing force would patrol the streets and raid hagwons that keep open past 1.000 pm. The country’s school and university examinations are deemed to be so important for South Korean children that cramming themselves till very late at night is expected of South Korean students. It was reported that teachers in the mainstream schools there have also resigned themselves to having students sleeping in class because they know these students go for such cram schools after the normal school hours. An industry has also flourished to provide these sleepy students with accessories to enable them to sleep better in class! Interestingly, these cram schools have not declined but have just moved a portion of their activities on line where their clients can buy, for example, additional assessment sheets.

In Singapore, the Sunday Times highlighted a new development in the country’s infamous tuition industry. This multi-million dollar industry has traditionally focused on school students who attend additional private tuition classes in addition to their already long school hours and mammoth amount of homework from school. But the Sunday Times report that these tuition centers now have a new breed of students. These new students attending these tuition classes are parents of school-going children. They joined these tuition classes for parents so that they can learn how to support their children in the latter’s learning!

Yet recently, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore announced some reforms, through the Minister of Education, Heng Swee Keat, in the education system. Among these changes, they announced plans to reduce homework to reduce the notoriously high stress levels in Singapore schools. From the Sunday Times report, it sounds like too little, too late.

The South Korean and Singapore experiences show that legislative measures and half-baked attempts to control stress through reduced homework is not likely to work. This is because these two largely Confucian heritage countries (CHCs) still have as their focus in their education system, high stakes examinations which decide largely the fate of students academically and from the employment point of view. As long as these examinations play such an important role, no real change will take place with regards to amount of homework or additional tuition classes.

But unfortunately perhaps for these countries, their education administrative elite is probably made up of people who came through such a system and is unable to envisage anything else. They begin to believe the increasing number of students doing well in these examinations is testimony of their systems’ success at education. Their belief is further given credence by books like Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”. Should schools all over the world jump on this testing bandwagon too? If they do, don’t they realize the effect of such a choice?

Heng Swee Keat, Minister of Education, Singapore

At the Ministry of Education (MOE) Work Plan Seminar, Singapore’s Minister for Education, Heng Swee Keat, announced that the MOE will move towards an educational system which is more “holistic and balanced”. According to a report from the Today Online website today, it is announced that:

“To achieve a more student-centric culture, a review will be conducted to determine which practices are too achievements-driven, as well as those which generate too much administrative work, bogging down the teachers. These practices will be refined or done away with entirely, where possible.”

The MOE will also “create a new Character and Citizenship Education framework” in response to request from parents to “place a greater emphasis on character-building among the children.”

My initial impressions of this brief announcement is that this new reform will not make much of a change with regards to reducing stress except perhaps for teachers and school administrators by reducing their administrative workload. No mention is made about making changes (much less removing) the high stakes examinations focus of the Singapore education system.

This the main cause of much of the stress that is in the system. School administrators, teachers, students and parents are affected by the outcome of the students’ performance in these high stakes examinations. No mention is made of the removal of the school ranking system either. In short the changes are only cosmetic at best, and at worst it shows that the country is still stuck in its 19th century factory-like schooling system abetted by an Imperial China-style examination system.

Perhaps more interesting is that the lack of real changes reflects the reluctance by the Minister’s bureaucratic advisors in the MOE themselves to rock the boat. Despite claims in the past, of the need to make changes to meet the demands of the 21st century, little has been done except for an expensive cosmetic infusion of money into a massive MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE), that has still to show any significant result with regards to how teaching and learning is done differently in Singapore schools. Underneath that ICT gloss, Singapore schools are still stuck in the 19th century.

What do you think of these changes that the Minister has just announced? Let us know your thoughts on these planned changes for the Singapore education system.