Woo:
Now it’s discussion time. We have heard from our 4 speakers, from the perspectives of university, creation, social education, and another cultural education system, a talking about their cross-cultural experience. Do you have any comments or questions for them?

Audience:
I have a question for Mr. Li. You have mentioned that a professor of the Peking university described a phenomenon, that China is now nurturing a generation of egoists. It sounds like the result of the political infringements on education. Do you think there is room for education workers to fight against or overcome such infringements in China?

Li Liuyi:
I think it’s hard for the education workers to fight against the government. The formation of this system traces back to 1949. The system has been here for 60 years. It’s a very firm and solid system. In fact, the education reform has been done for 30 years, along with China’s opening up. In the first 15 years, there was a major reform, which the government has officially branded as a failure. The education reform more than 10 years ago was a failure. The government admitted that a number of reforms had been failed. Education reform was a failure; health care reform was a failure.
They realize such failures, so they are now making amendments. But how powerful are the amendments? How much changes will there be in the system?
We have yet to see. For more than a decade, with the rapid developments in the economy, the problems have become all the more serious. Hence, they are not only problems about the systems, about politics. They are problems arising from the way people handle economic development and how they see the future.
And we have problems in these areas. The real problems we are now facing in education are not only related to politics, but also to the economy as well as people’s attitudes towards education, politics and economic development.
Why are people all so busy now? Why do people all strive to make money?
All the citizens are busy making money, and then problems arise. So, it’s not a political issue only, but if we want a change, China needs…
Actually, it’s easy to bring about changes in China. For instance, after Mao Zedong posted a poster on Tiananmen Square, the cultural revolution began.
Changes can happen very fast and easily. But a force is needed to set things into motion. But how to set things into motion, and how strong should the force be?
Politically, how big and forceful should the changes be? It’s difficult to predict now.
Thank you.

Woo:
The question about politics and education, how about in Switzerland? How can you convince your government to allow you to go outside? Is there a political reason behind that?

Hartmut:
Yes, sure it is. We are privileged that we don’t have to convince our government in what we are doing. It’s a question of money. Our system is like- we have a global budget we get every year, and if we don’t need the money for teaching, learning and research, we can use it for other topics, like building a branch somewhere else. It’s still connecting to our learning, teaching, goals and assignments, but it’s not regulated by the government. As long as we don’t need more money, and ask for more money for engagement worldwide, they don’t care.

Woo:
But how are you going to assess, because you have just started this cross-cultural experiment in education? How are you going to assess the result?

Hartmut:
I mean the main thing is to bring it back to our home curriculum.
The main assessment has to become part of our curriculum offered at home.
As long as it’s only exploration or things like that, it won’t last very long, and we can’t afford to keep on investing in this context. Like in HK, we invested a lot of money for the first 3 years, as the programme was running, but now it has become part of the curriculum of the departments in Zurich. They have to finance this special arrangement through the money they have for that teaching programme. Is that understandable? But it’s not a political issue, and as far as I know, we were never in some ways kind of control what we are doing abroad.
The only thing which is a major topic in Switzerland is- though we have 1/3 foreigners in Switzerland, we are always asked how many Swiss students are studying at the university of the arts, and we have to prove there are much more Swiss students than foreign students, and that is stupid. Like in music, theatre or dance, it’s necessary to stay connected to the international world, and to bring students from all over the world.

Woo:
Do you have any plans? Just like what Ada mentioned. Is it possible to recruit local students? Or HK students? Or students from Taiwan or China for your programme? Is it possible in the future?

Hartmut:
It should be possible, yes, we are trying to. But it’s very funny. I was in San Francisco 2 months ago, and I visited Minerva Schools. I was also very impressed by their approach. I was talking to the students before, it’s funny about this experience. What I found most exhilarating is, there are no classrooms anymore. It’s a school without classrooms, and what does that mean? Another example is, sorry, I just have to tell that Stanford university is also very nervous about new approaches concerning education. They have this open loop university. I don’t know if you heard of that. They also don’t rely any more on the approach that has to be classics- 3 years’ education, and then everybody is ready to follow professional path. Open loop university is, you can study there for 20 years or so, and you can stop studying, do professional work, go on studying again. It’s like loops, and you are able to choose. These models are very interesting.
Concerning the question, what is education in terms of being connected to society, to social life, to political and other circumstances？We are a closed, still we are a closed monastery kind of, so we have to open our doors and open our systems I think.

Li Che-Lan:
I’d like to give a brief response to the question just raised. I think it is good news that China’s leaders also admitted the failures of education reform.
That means they know that education needs to be reformed, and that they have failed, and that they want a better education, better educational outcomes. Now if we relate everything to this system, no doubt such connections exist, and are also very important. But if we do it that way, we would feel really miserable.
Because, all we can do now is to admit the existence of this system. It’s in a state of existence. So if this system is not changed, or just before any big changes takes place, what can we do?
In fact, I think we don’t have to be that pessimistic. There are many problems of course. We should say that there are bound to be lots of problems. But as Mr. Li has said, in the past, because of the rapid economic growth in our country, there are many problems, but yet, there is still prosperous progress. Resources that are available to the society have been significantly increased. When we have abundant resources, in fact, we can have freedom and space. So, I think as long as we know how to make slightly better use of this freedom, it’s already quite good. A little bit of knowledge is good enough already. We don’t need complete knowledge. You don’t have to go overseas, although many people do so.
Even staying at home, you have lots to do. And the teachers don’t have to bend their principles for survival, but it’s fine to just bend a little once in a while.
I think we can still have lots of room to maneuver. For myself, I’m teaching in HK and have many friends from the educational field in the Mainland. In fact, I can see that they are doing their best to get things done within their own small areas.
I think that there are still lots of space for them to do something, without the threat of being put into the jail. There are actually lots of space. More, there are mainland students pursuing their study in HK.
In the past few years, there are heated conflicts between HK and China, which is a problem we have to solve. Otherwise, I very much want to take in more students from the Mainland, as HK provides quite a good environment of education for them. We can be very inclusive. In terms of internationalization, HK is doing a good job basically. I can say HK is doing a better job than the universities in the US or Europe, because localism is strongly held in those countries. We in fact have localism and I have converted. In recent years, I told my university that we are not localized enough, especially in terms of teachers.
In certain disciplines, we have too few local teachers, and this will affect our researches and teachings. It will also result in our teaching in the ivory tower, being disconnected with local developments. So our teaching team has to strengthen its local manpower. In other words, we have been very successful in internationalization. Students from the Mainland, especially the undergraduates, and my own students in particular, are very different. I can tell they are very different indeed. So I very much welcome them to study in HK. In the land of HK, we have much to do, and I believe that there is also a lot of space in China as well.

Li Liuyi:
Now, the private sector of the economy is paying more attention to education. The educational programme that I’m going to start in Chengdu is not government-funded, but it’s totally supported by the private enterprises who put money into the education system. As you have just said, we do have some room in the present system. The reason I have embarked on doing something is to explore the possibility of doing something useful for the future outside the main system. Why do I keep emphasizing on being useful to the future? Because the whole education system has implanted in us generations and generations of consciousness and concepts, which are so well established. So if you want changes or some greater developments, you have to start when people are very little, very little indeed. That’s why I plan to start from the age of 3. We would help them free their natural abilities in culture, art and other areas, and change their interests and appreciation of beauty. In fact, there is space, and we have to look for the little space outside the main system. There are such possibilities now.

Woo:
Anyone?

Sharon:
Thank you.
I was struck by…Mr. Li has talked about 2 things that I’m very impressed with.
One is the concept of cross-culturalism, which is firstly, very complicated, and secondly, very common. It’s not a modern concept, but has been there for thousands of years. It can be said that from the very beginning of human history, cross-culturalism has started to take place. 5,000 years ago, there were exchanges between China and Africa. Exchanges have taken place for thousands of years.
So, this concept has not emerged out of the blue. We are talking about 2 concepts, one is creative education, and the other is cross-culturalism. These 2 concepts are built upon a certain premise, an assumption, and also, a certain value system. Hence, the 2 concepts of creative education and cross-culturalism encompass these values: freedom, diversity and respect for individual character.
So my question is, we have just talked about cross-culturalism, it’s like mixing apples, oranges and tangerines together. If you say cross-cultural, cultural, discipline, like you’re saying, cross-cultural is cross-cultural discipline.
Like theatre and performance, that’s cross-cultural. I think this is right.
Like in law, I myself am a lawyer. We have legal culture, legal language and basic legal concepts, and they constitute a system of culture. If you put the students of law together with the students of theatre and dance, it’s also a kind of cross-culturalism, because their professional cultures and languages are different.
But what I mean is, this kind of creative education, who is it for? For whom?
Whom is this creative education created for? This kind of cross-cultural process, who is it for? What is your idea about the dissemination of this process? If you have a very appealing and meaningful project, maybe a school? 100 students? 70 students? Or 20 students? Or 1000 students? That’s a very small number.
So I want to ask- what is the vision if we want to have creative education?
Is it for an elite small number? Or do you think we start from a small number, and then spread it out? Will it spread? And how will it spread structurally as a process? It’s a really important, exciting and interesting idea for a small special group of people. But for the whole society- HK, 7 million people, how do we reach 7 million people? Zurich, 9 million. How can we reach 9 million people, not in Zurich, but in the country? China, 1.4 billion people. How we gonna do that?
I think my colleague Elaine’s question- in China’s current education system, the values of diversity and freedom are not accepted. It can’t be said that it’s about Chinese culture, but it is communist culture, which has existed for only 60 years.
I just want to complicate things a little bit, who is this for? Who is this education for? It’s the future of whom? Whose education? Whose future? Because if we don’t care about all the children, we would have very limited results. We need to care about, thinking about what the future is. The future for all the children, the future for not just the privileged children, or the special children.

Li Liuyi:
Thank you.
It’s an especially meaningful question. It’s not only for a small group of people, but it’s about future, relating to our future. I think there are 2 parts: one part is the professionals. For instance, those pursuing studies in performance, dance, painting, cinema or those who write novels, they are professionals in the arts fields. You have cross-cultural awareness and thinking, and you find your own ways which suit you best, so you are naturally in the creative process, and you will surely have progress. This is the professional type. Another type, as you have just said, is about how to make it more universal and more popular. I think this is the vision we aim to realize, and it’s in fact a kind of lifestyle. If more people have this kind of awareness, say for example lawyer, you get training on performance, so you have feelings about drama. You go to the theatre often.
This will no doubt improve your quality of life. In this way, through this lifestyle, education or learning, you bring an improvement to your own quality of life.
In fact, this is our real vision for the future. If you are in a professional field, I think it’s easier to master and control. For instance, we may offer classes time and again, and we train people over and over. But how can we spread these trainings to a larger area? Talking about ways to spread, I think the theatre itself is a good spot for dissemination. An audience goes to the theatre to watch a play and has exchanges with the stage. As an ordinary audience, he is able to find a more meaningful lifestyle in this way.
Stepping into the theatre is actually an act of cross-cultural exchanges, learning, or education. And this is a very good mode of deliverance. Hence, I have profound hatred for the internet. Why? Because it blocks out people-to-people exchanges. The theatre is the one and only one public space available now.
We can have face-to-face exchange or heart-to-heart interaction only at the theatre. Hence, when rehearsing a play in Beijing, I gave the actors an example.
I asked them, “Can you still taste the full experience of dating?” These days, fixing a time for dating is already not that easy. After ordering some dishes, you take the camera out to take photos, then post them in your chat groups, and then have chats online. It’s time for food, and you take a bite. Are you really dating?
Absolutely not. Don’t even talk about writing love letters, you know? The internet has a lot to offer, so much so that it isolates people-to-people exchanges. The theatre is the only public space where people can have exchanges with one another. So, why is it necessary to develop the theatre? It’s for reviving people-to-people exchanges. Actually, people-to-people exchange is the most important space for enhancing normal, constructive and harmonious development. As you have just said, this is one way to promote popularization. Another way is education, offering education. As education within the existing system can’t solve the problem, we have to bring about changes through education outside the system. That’s why in these years, I have been…
In fact, Mr. Yung has moved and inspired me into taking action. He has constantly paid a lot of attention to education all these years. We got in touch with this old comrade, and wondered why he always cared about education?
Gradually, we look into why he has been so dedicated to education, and what is its importance. This led me to do a lot of social education, from primary to secondary schools. One point that I have mentioned is very important, which is about white-collared and blue-collared people. They return to the theatre, to another space to exchange, to interact, to produce a kind of cross-culturalism, or to learn. Another important issue I have mentioned is that China will become an aging society soon, and this is a very serious problem. We are doing something about it. So, what outcomes will real cross-culturalism bring? In fact, our lifestyles will be changed. Our quality of life will be improved.
With the change and improvement in lifestyle and quality of life, the relationship between people will be changed. And after the change in relationship, the harmonious society demanded by the communist party will appear.
Thank you.

Joseph:
Hello. Thank you.
My name is joseph, and I am from HK Academy of Performing Arts. Thank you first of all for your fascinating sharing, and I applaud each one of you for the efforts that you are making within your own spheres of influence, to promote this idea of cross-cultural education, or otherwise it’s really something that has been on the table for a very long time. I just want to point out that, for example, diversity itself. In academia in the last 20, 30, 40 or whichever number of years that we look at, it has been a melting pot, a salad bowl, intercultural, intertextual, cross-cultural. These are all different words that are being used to discuss this exchange of culture. And what happens at the borders, at the junctions between 2 cultures? So the inter-cultural role exchange happens in that dialogue between 2 people who are different, who see themselves as us and the other, so the other can be anybody who is not us. So this is very fascinating that it’s happening here, and really it’s happening all over the world. In an experiment of the art, a cross-cultural production of Peter Brook, “The Mahabharata”, with all its problems, but also all its fascinating successes, has been staged for decades.
And I think it’s good for all of us to be aware of, for example, the University of California in the 90’s had a centre for inter-cultural performance, very specifically looking at these exchanges and what happened.
Dialogue, I think is critical, and it could be that we become very harmonious and wonderful, but it could be there are pressures, and it’s at the pressures that we learn to understand each other, I think that it is really critical. I’m a little bit worried about one of the presenters talked about a single set of rules for the games of education, because we are talking about individuals who go to school and every single one of them is different. All our wonderful discussion about education and the performing art, I’d like to draw on, my question is, very recently was released, what they called the PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. That was conducted by an organization for economic and corporate development, which is a global test for education, but they only test them in science, mathematics and language. And this is a global test I remind you. HK ranked very high up, no.2, if I’m not mistaken, after Singapore. So for me, this is a big issue, because we are not looking at what Sir Ken robinson talks about education, we are not looking at Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, we are not looking at Aristotle, and we are not looking at so many different people, so the test for education remains very conventionally, mathematics, science and language.
And we are here talking about a very small privileged group of people, but how can we take education and make people understand that the art, music, dance and theatre is an equally valid intelligence,So that would my question for the four, or whoever will address it.
Thank you.

Woo:
Ada, you want to answer first?

Ada:
Thank you for this question.
As the supervisor of a school that calls itself the school of creativity, I’m always asked this question, and lately, my answer would be a bit like this. We read numerous articles on the fourth industrial revolution and the digital age is coming, and very soon, artificial intelligence is here, and the robots could serve as old people’s companions, these robots could remind the old lady to take pills, medicine, and so there is really no need for people.
Then I read another article about that in the year 2030, about half of the jobs we see now will be disappeared, especially white collar clerical jobs, they will all be automated, and they will be done all by machines.
But a lot of articles have also substantiated, and they said that what other jobs that would never be replaced by artificial intelligence? Those are the jobs that are creativity related. Those are the jobs such as theatre directors. So Danny, you will never be replaced by AI. And film makers, artists, anybody who is creative, and teachers, who are humanistic and compassionate. All these things cannot be replaced by non-humans.
But the jobs that parents, especially Chinese parents, really go for, and push their sons and daughters to do- lawyers for example, I’m a lawyer actually, lawyers can be replaced very easily, because of algorithms and soft wares. Even if you know nothing about the laws, there are DIY websites, where you can draft the contract, where you can prepare a will for yourself. You don’t have to go to a law firm, you don’t have pay heavy amounts, and you can do it yourself. So I was telling the young law students be more creative, perhaps your second job will be more stable, if you are creative. This is actually a very difficult mindset change. I think the whole world is reflecting on education, and on what the world will be like in 20, 30 years’ time, and it all ends up to be, let’s be more creative, let’s value the art more.
But after they say that, after such a forum, they go back and do their own things, and then there is still examinations, and the universities still Jupas scores. And eventually, I think the more we talk about that, I think the mindset change might occur just sooner or later.
That’s my hope.

Hartmut:
Just one remark. I would say it’s very hard to answer your question concerning works of art. I mean that, like we are also very much dealing with the question, how privileged must a young person be to become a student of our university. He has to be privileged by his parents, by his environment, by circumstances, by education, primary and secondary education and so on and so on. That’s hard to solve.
But I think another thing that we can deliver for society is, the artistic approach to the field of solving problems. There’s also a cross-cultural aim we have to follow, a task. Artists are able to deal with uncertainty, for example, uncertainty isn’t a problem, but surrounding which is necessary to become creative. And so we have close contacts to the school of business, and they are very interested in learning how artistic approaches to solving problems can be used for other fields of social and entrepreneurial stuffs. There are fields where cross-cultural engagement can be linked to questions, artistic work can solve. I think artists shouldn’t solve problems but they should ask questions, and they make propositions, and invent scenarios and things we didn’t know before.
I mean that this is something we can really deliver to society, to a broader field of society, how to approach problematic situations which are overwhelming us everywhere and all the time.

Woo:
Professor Li?

Li Che-Lan:
What I mentioned earlier about having one standard in education, I think what I’m trying to say is not prescriptive, not in a prescribed mode. But the very fact that we are now discussing creative education, that’s the question. Why do we need to discuss it, right? Because education is, by definition, supposed to foster creativity. So is it something we should take it for granted? Why should we have a forum to discuss about creative education? So the fact that we have to organize events, invite speakers, all these to have a such a special occasion to discuss it, that means that we are not doing well. Our education, by and large, have not performed, ok? At least, we haven’t got distinction, in fostering creativity. So that’s why what I mean to say, I think we have to face the fact that, the dark side, not to say Mainland China, because of the regime situation, so even in HK, I would say everywhere, ok, everywhere.
The main stream society expects we educators to tell people how to comply by and large, so creativity exists only at the periphery. And then only when we have too little of that periphery, then of course, we find this problematic. But if we have too much, that’s again not too good as well. So I think we are always struggling to find an equilibrium, but as educators, we have to face the fact that we have to admit the dark side of education, and also to always try to rescue creativity from our acts. So I think there is always inherent dilemma that we have to face. Maybe I can elaborate a little bit the experience of the City University, actually our little experiment, I would say this is still ongoing. How to promote creativity in education, other than our elaborate exchange programme, which actually in part address has addressed the problem of scale. We do have very ambitious objectives to make it not something privileged, of small groups of students only, but we aspire to up to 60% of students having that experience.
We believe that of course, ideally everybody would have that experience, but we simply have to implement it in good time. And we also believe that once we reach a critical ratio, even for those who don’t themselves have that direct experience of going out, then they have seen enough people coming in, and then the other peers also going out, as long as we don’t create that feeling that, if you are not within the 60% who have that experience, you are second class students. So this is something we need to avoid. Then I think everybody can have some positive overall effects of that experience. I think that’s what we try to achieve.
And secondly, we already made it an objective in our strategic plan of our curriculum that we have to enhance this discovery element in all of our programmes, teaching programmes and experience. By discovery which means that… again we are admitting that sometimes we are not doing the things, we take it for granted, because we believe that we should… why we need to stress discovery in our education and university education?
Aren’t we doing this all the time? Yes, we should, but we don’t think we are doing enough. That’s why we have made it a goal that we have to make all our programmes discovery-enriched.

Woo:
Thank you, Prof Li.
Well, it’s already 5 pm, so we should conclude our forum here. We’ll have another session at 3pm tomorrow. There will be more guests from HK and overseas to continue to talk about education. Of course, education is a topic that we can never stop discussing, because when human beings continue to exist, there are continual problems.
So, there are always problems that we need to discuss, and education is definitely one of them. Let’s thank our four guests for their sharing.
A big hand for them please.
Thank you very much for attending this forum. If you haven’t left your contact details yet, please do so on the outside. When we have further information on our curriculum, we will send it to you.
Thank you. Goodbye.