East Meets West in Class
February 26, 2013 Leave a comment
Updated February 25, 2013, 5:02 p.m. ET
East Meets West in Class
Pericles Lewis is founding president and professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, a joint venture between Yale University and National University of Singapore, to open in August.
ON INNOVATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Universities are often places where a lot of innovation takes place on the part of the faculty and in the research labs and so on. But they’re basically very conservative institutions. They don’t change much. Here in Asia we’re building up new colleges and universities to experiment in new ways, to break the mold, to think innovatively about both what’s the best that liberal-arts education has to offer but also how do you modernize through experiential learning, better quantitative skills in the students and getting students to stretch themselves. Unfortunately, to some extent in American universities, it’s quite possible to get by by skipping the hard courses.
ON WHY ASIAN UNIVERSITIES ARE LOOKING WEST: Asian universities have been very successful at technical education that does use a lot of rote learning, that can be delivered to large groups by a single professor. The graduates have great technical skills but are not necessarily open to innovation in a way that they could be. I think a liberal-arts approach adds something to the overall set of skills. You do hear from CEOs that they get graduates from top Asian universities who have a lot of technical skills but who don’t have some of the leadership qualities that they’re looking for.
ON YALE-NUS COLLEGE: National University of Singapore has been extremely innovative and has grown very big. And so the opportunity to have small classrooms with close attention to the student is something they’ve struggled with a little bit. Yale-NUS College is an opportunity to provide that kind of really intense experience that you get in the small seminar room: 15 students talking with a professor, learning, actively inquiring. That is very valued here in Asia. We see it in lots of other countries, trying to develop this active learning approach.
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