Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play

Abstract

On August 23, 2013, I met with the President of Tsinghua University, the leading engineering university in China. Because I'm a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tsinghua is known as the MIT of China, it's not so surprising that the two of us would meet. Perhaps more surprising is where we were meeting: at the LEGO toy company in Denmark. The president of Tsinghua, Chen Jining, had traveled to the LEGO Group in search of a new approach to education and learning. The Chinese government had selected Tsinghua to lead a nationwide initiative on comprehensive university reform. Chen recognized that the Chinese educational system faced a serious problem—not just at the university level, but throughout the whole system, starting with the youngest children. The Chinese education system, Chen said, wasn't preparing students to meet the needs of an evolving society. The problem wasn't visible by looking at students' grades and exam scores. In fact, many Chinese students were performing well according to traditional measures. At Tsinghua itself, almost all students had received excellent grades from elementary school through high school, and many continued to get A grades at Tsinghua. Chen referred to them as A students.