SKorea's KAIST calls for creativity over conformity .
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South Korea's top technology university is leading a push for creativity over conformity . President of the state financed Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Suh Nam Pyo says the univesity's main goal is to produce global leaders who will help solve problems of the 21st century. In a radical shift from tradition, KAIST has eliminated written entrance exams, poor educators are denied tenure, even students who underperform lose their right to free tuition. Dr Suh believes for the system to change, universities have to change.
Presenter: Claudette Werden
Speakers:Suh Nam Pyo, President of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
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SUH: We try to instill the notion that people we produce here, got to be thinkers who can define the problems we need to solve and figure out the means by which we can figure out the problem and contribute to society. We are trying to produce future global leaders.
WERDEN: How is that different to what universities have been doing?
SUH: Y'know the Korean education process, this is true in many other countries but in the past the purpose of education in Korea was to get into leading universities and when entire education system is geared for selecting students to be admitted to leading universities they tend to bias entire educational process. so the emphasis then is on how to take examinations rather than how to think, to learn and how to practice what they learned in solving real problems.
WERDEN: How do you encourage students' creativity?
SUH: In order to enhance their creativity we are doing something most universities don't do, we require our freshmen students to take design subjects, all of them have to design something so we give instruction as to how one should think about creative projects, how one or what one has to do to come out with a system design and they in fact in groups of four, they design something that other people haven't designed in the past so the idea is whereas most schools, universities, teach students how to analyse we believe the additional element they need to have is in addition to analysis, they also need to be able to synthesize, that is they have to design something to create a system.
WERDEN: Can you give me some examples of their creativity?
SUH: Our freshmen they are just out of highschool, many of them didn't finish highschool because they are so bright, they come from science highschool they skipped the last year of highschool and they come to KAIST as a freshman and they are given task of solving all kinds of problems for example what's the best way of designing the intersection so that more cars can move through the intersection and enhance the traffic flow, so the purpose of this process is to produce graduates who have bi-modal thinking ability, bi modal meaning be able to deal with analysis and at the same time deal with synthesis, so by teaching synthesis at the same time as we teach analysis can function both in the world of design and analysis and optimisation so that's the kind of thing we are doing.
