Latest News

Home » News » Latest News » Content

Commencement Address by Richard C. Levin, President of Yale University, at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management

2013-07-15
View:

Both the 12th Five-Year Plan and the more recent report of the World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council, China 2030, identify the need for China to become a leader in innovation. This will be a major task for your generation.  It requires research and development infrastructure, which is already being assembled, and a strong regime of enforceable intellectual property rights, which will need to be created over time.  Most significantly, leadership in innovation will require strengthening China’s leading universities through a transformation of traditional Chinese pedagogy.  The skill of creative problem solving is not easily transmitted by a pedagogy that encourages students to accept without question the wisdom of the teacher.  Learning to think creatively and to innovate requires more active classroom engagement, in which students are made to think for themselves, to put forward their own arguments and defend them in vigorous debate. The leaders of Chinese higher education know that this transformation is needed, but it will require faculty to change their traditional teaching methods, and it will require students and their parents to accept the idea of vigorous classroom interaction in which all assumptions are open to challenge.