Two fish, ten years ago

This is a photo of me 10 years ago when I first visited Shenzhen in 2005. I remember that day a local friend took my family on a fishing excursion. I was fascinated by the ocean breeze, the sound of waves, and the sound of fishermen throwing nets. I guess this picture captured my happiest moment when the fisherman handed me two big fish they caught. That was a wonderful moment. 

I took time to find this photo because I feel it works as a theme for my talk today, ten years after it was taken. 

To give a fish, or to teach to fish?

An old Chinese saying goes, “Rather teach a man to fish, than to give him a fish.” 

Quite ironically, although it is a proverb, many people on the Internet mistakenly cite Tao Te Ching or more often Annotations of Tao Te Ching as its origin. Wherever its origin, we usually interpret it in this way: rather than giving someone a fish, it is better to teach them how to fish; or, rather than imparting knowledge itself, it is better to teach people how to acquire knowledge. 

I wonder if this proverb is rooted too deeply in their mind, as our teachers would always try to avoid giving us “fish” as if this is an inferior way of teaching. Rather, our teachers remind us it is the mindset that we learn. Back in primary school, we used to take turns to clean up the classroom. Our teachers might cite the famous quotation “how could you manage state affairs if you could not even sweep your own room?” That’s how individual education and a sense of collective honor is implanted into this routine task. When a math teacher at junior high teaches you three ways to solve a problem, he might attribute it to the cultivation of creative thinking. If you were asked by your chemistry teacher to memorize many equations, the teacher might have told you there are hidden philosophies within these equations, which helps you see the pattern and strategies to solve balancing problems. 

I guess these might all seem very legitimate. But it seems the so-call “mindset” tends to be least prioritized in the cycles of learning. It is only raised when we start to review what we learned. It seems to be more of an attachment to memory and knowledge, often mixed with crafty techniques and shortcuts.  

Now let us look at universities. Today, most world-class and top national universities emphasize students’ quality of thinking. I find the word “quality” more appropriate since different universities tend to use different wording for this idea, such as thinking habits, thinking skills, ways of thinking, critical thinking, innovative thinking, etc. Let me give a couple of examples. In 2014, the 2014 Undergraduate Education Manual of Peking University mentioned the word “thinking” 26 times. It appears in the description of almost every department or college, either as a part of teaching goals or as their core criteria. Another example is Yale University, which clearly mentioned their mission to enable students to think critically and independently. But this is as far as the word “think” goes.  

So here comes the most critical question. Since universities never, and cannot, give a detailed yet succinct description of where “thinking” comes from and how to teach one to think, the quality of thinking becomes something extremely vague that resides in the goals and direction of education, and hence become the most flexible, and even easily negligible, part of the evaluation system. 

Therefore, I believe when it comes to give fish and teach fishing, or when university professors advocate the cultivation of “thinking”, they tend to exhibit two symptoms: backward-looking and intermittent; abstract and vague. By backward-looking and intermittent, I mean the cultivation of “thinking” was not systematically incorporated in the learning process. It is also abstract and vagueness because the “thinking” part of the course material is not incorporated into the minute details of the learning experience. 

Fish as tangible, highly interactive objects of learning

So, the point I would like to make today is that when it comes to perfecting the quality of thinking, giving the fish is more important than teaching how to fish.Here when I propose a fresh look at this sentence, the “fish” represents tangible, highly interactive objects of learning, while “fishing” means underlying and often perplexing methodologies related to thinking. 

Pixar, incubator of ideas

This week 20 years ago, the first ever fully computer-generated animated feature-length movie was released and hit 350 million USD at the box office. The movie, Toy Story, was the first movie release by the Pixar Animation Studios. Since then, Pixar continued to amaze the world with successive hits such as Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up and Monster University. 

Pixar has attracted the most passionate and most creative minds from with a variety of specialties. They develop and use state-of-the-art technologies and aim for perfection in art. I am most impressed by the logic followed by the company and its staff, and their ability to break through barriers of thinking and create value. 

Stories are at the heart of Pixar. From conceptualization, outlining, drawing, visual effects, voice over, modeling, to animating and special effects, the entire production process was driven by stories. They strictly reject buying ideas from outside, thereby sticking to the originality Pixar spirit. To tell the stories well, each movie has its humanistic and philosophical aspects. For the same purpose, they developed RenderMan, the best image renderer at that time. Using story creation as the driver and animation as the medium, Pixar created value and happiness for their audience, and help shape better thinking quality among their employees. In an interview, a Pixar employee named Adrian Molina said working at Pixar was like studying for his master’s degree. On the one hand, he refers to the variety of open courses and training provided by Pixar employees, but more importantly, what matters more is the knowledge he learned through more subtle ways by working as a team member in developing storylines and making animations. 

If you are interested, you could do some research and learn more about their work environment. Then you will find out their workplace is like a playground where they can enjoy themselves freely. They would discuss a single shot all day behind closed doors, and they must learn each other’s technology stack in order to work together better. A great company, just like a great school, never advocates how they will instill a certain way of thinking in order to achieve a particular result. Rather, I feel Pixar perhaps tries to avoid advocating ways of thinking as much as possible.The example of Pixar and its employees tells us that the improvement of people’s quality of thinking depends on the accumulation of specific experience in creating things and making things happen.Pixar artists become animation masters because of Pixar because the making an animation is a process of identifying problems, solving problems, and perfecting the product by improving their technological and artistic appeal. Pixar co-founder once said, “Pixar has provided an opportunity for us to fail and to pull ourselves together after each failure.” 

The value of science fiction lies in the writing itself

Let’s take a break from animations and talk a bit about science fiction. I watched The Martian last week. Has anyone watched this movie? That’s quite a lot. So yes, the movie tells a story of a man’s return to the Earth from his entrapment in Mars, after going through many challenges. I was amazed at how real the plot seems to be, and how an astronaut is able to solve this seemingly impossible problem using all his knowledge. According to Andy Weir, the author of the original story, the story itself is a long collection of math problems. He spent a lot of time to perfect the calculation and solutions for each stage. Let alone all the expert knowledge required in math, physics, chemistry, astronomy and geology, just the logical flow and the real-life feeling of the story is already fascinating enough. Andy put a lot of efforts into this story. He talked to astronauts, do precision calculations by himself, and even create software to emulate environmental experiments. 

Let me stop here so as not to give away spoilers. Anyway, Andy Weir is a great example. Great science fiction writers are masters of sophisticated thinking. They are able to create a systematic framework out of the void and add powerful details to this framework. On top of these, they need to use a simple language to connect the story to people and markets. If Pixar is a place to foster thinking among groups of people, then sci-fi writers are individuals that explore and perfect their own thinking. Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin once said that he started to realize his way of thinking was quite different from his friends at an early age. “They have a limited extent to which they can visualize things. But I am able to visualize things at whatever fathomable scale.” 

Whether it is the grand universe described in the Three Body or the minute steps detailed by Andy Weir, these masterpieces faithfully reflect the authors’ bright thinking. Although I am just an outsider in the realm of science fiction, I believe the essence of science fiction is not about the science, nor the fiction, but about its writing. As a concrete and somewhat trivial action, “writing” works very much like knitting a sweater — it helps create and organize a network of thoughts, and then breathed life into the story through visualization.The act of writing makes science fiction go beyond just science and fiction. 

What I want is thinking, not ways of thinking

I cited the examples of animation and science fiction because I believe they lie between the boundary of science and art, creativity, and technology. Imagination, logic, together with branches of quality thinking, come together to create the new world. At Pixar, you see an institution acting as an incubator of thinking. They achieve breakthrough and innovation by solving individual problems. From Any Weir and Liu Cixin, you understand the efforts by science fiction writers in connecting orders using the power of words — writing is a way they train their minds. Most importantly, the idea of ways of thinking does not exist. Otherwise, thinking would immediately become a tool or passageway that extends the past. However, in the two examples above, when they create things from scratch, the world needs a kind of thinking that has never been defined before. 

Coming back to education and schooling. When we are advocating for the development of thinking, we should really look at the individuals in different fields that really shape the quality of thinking. They are the ones who extend education to career growth and lifetime learning. They are the ones who use pragmatic and specific ways of creation to provide people with fish, rather than the ways of fishing. 

Therefore, I would like to share with teachers here these two examples. We could learn from environments outside our own system when developing and shaping students’ thinking. I hope education would give me the opportunity to learn, to see, to take challenges, to solve problems by thinking and taking action by myself, and the opportunity to broaden my thinking, select the pathway of thinking and create value.Thinking has its own form, format, and emotions. But they are only visible when you wholeheartedly engaged in a learning scenario. 

People always ask why children are creative? Why do they have different thinking? Don’t always tell us that kids are like a piece of blank paper with infinite possibilities. It is probably because kids always find it fruitful, rewarding and meaningful to create something. Today, most of the time, students would only produce theses, exam papers, and certificates.The learning process does not represent a journey to gain knowledge.I hope teachers would give their students a big fish, which represents a grand challenge and to attract and shape their thinking through the charm of a fish in its most basic sense. 

Two practical ways to foster thinking

Towards the end of my talk, I would like to share my thoughts regarding the practices of two different education systems in developing students’ thinking. Neither system advocated for the teaching of “ways of thinking”. Rather, they provide the learning space and contents that concretize thinking and let ideas flow. These thoughts are gathered from my experience as a student at Minerva and Mentor in Residence of iCenter, Tsinghua University. 

When it comes to cultivating thinking, what Minerva does is to concretize the content of thinking and adopt and train thinking over time through different aspects of the student life and learning experience. There are only four foundational courses at Minerva for freshmen: complex systems, empirical research, multivariate communication, and formal analysis. Different course materials are combined and categorized into these four groups to cultivate habits of mind and foundational concepts. Let me take a quick example, body languages. It goes without saying that body language is able to transmit message and emotion and is an important part of communication. Although this bit of knowledge is so much common sense that it is most likely ignored, Minerva still puts it as a thinking habit in multivariate communication and provided concrete examples to illustrate best practices. Whether we are attending classes or not, when we write or participate in events, we are required to consciously apply this thinking habit as much as possible. At present, Minerva has compiled more than 110 thinking habits, each with a clear description and corresponding courses and events. Student evaluation also looks at the quantity and quality the student utilizes thinking habit. 

Therefore, from this perspective, we could Minerva turn our education slogan into learning expectations, especially those concrete habits of mind. 

I was honored to be recruited by Tsinghua University as a Mentor in Residence at iCenter, a platform aiming to become the largest maker space in a university campus, providing support for generating ideas, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It not only provides a rich set of mechanical and digital processing tools, but there is also huge room and supporting features to help students innovate. This is Mitch Altman, initiator of the Makerspace movement giving a lecture at Tsinghua University. In his talk, he mentioned that Makerspace plays multiple roles, including in particular the role of a community, which allows people to create things never seen before. Maker education is a model of learning by doing that all of us know very well. I think this is particularly suited for today’s society and should be discussed thoroughly and adopted. The core idea of this kind of thinking lies in its disrespect of “organization and discipline”, and it should encourage makers to think and create much more freely. The next Google might not be born out of a rented garage, but in a makerspace in a university campus.  

With these two examples, let me come back to where I started, the “fish” they provide is a highly interactive object of learning; is a specific and useful cue to develop thinking; it is also a practical challenge that can be addressed taking practical actions. 

Action and creation justify the existence of mind

Schools always call for developing ways of thinking and teaching fishing skills. But I believe very few student or teacher would be able to clearly define what “fishing skills” really are. Developing one’s thinking at schools is just a starting point in life that personality is shaped. We will be able to experience our innermost mind after repeated trials, errors, and even despairs. Then we will only start to feel amazed at the human mind, will remain mysterious and will help us create value. Therefore, I think education institutions can focus on the following two areas: 1. Continue to introduce new knowledge and extend students’ horizon, and at the same time continue to create inter-linkages between specific knowledge, events, and challenge, so that they complement and promote each other.2. Continue to accommodate students’ discovery and curiosity, and avoid limiting their ways of exploration too much. 

Today, 10 years after I took this photo, I really want to tell my young self in the picture that I hope she will be able to enjoy creating while enjoying the journey of her mind. I hope she will be happily holding her fish and to look for ways of fishing that is most suited for herself. I hope she is able to break through the limits of methodology and to freely enjoy and share this fish, or any other fresh and tasty food in the world. 

I would like to thank the audience for listening to my talk. We are all here for the theme of “future”, and together, we will head towards the future. Today, Shenzhen is an international hub for makers. But the start of this megacity starts from a simple yet beautiful fishing village. The development of this city tells us that only creation results in value; only action takes us to the future; and action and creation are the reason for the existence of mind. 

Thank you very much.