The idea of Imagination summit was floated at the 1 Malaysia Roundtable. There is a few of the Imagination Summit around the world focusing on education. The recently completed Imagination Summit at The Lincoln Center of Performing Art (USA) is a two years project started by The Lincoln Center as part of The Lincoln Center 50th years celebration, started as a imagination conversation around the country hosted by government, university, business community, cultural leaders with diverse group of panelists and with audience from private and public sector. This was concluded with a 2.5 days summit focusing on reimagining education in United states.
The idea of running a imagination summit in Malaysia will excite many people as it will enable the policy makers to go down to the grass root either in a townhall setting or dialog with the public and private sector on future of education in Malaysia. And education is deep in everybody’s heart. This is especially important as the education ministry is planning on a major education reform.
In parallel, the organizer can enhance this by having a Imagination workshop in different states for the under 30′s youth focusing a topic at a time. And it could be the under 15 for primary education, the under 20 for high school education and under 30 for university education. Think about having the under 15 tell the adult how the new school shall be designed with their creative mind. and the youth telling us the reality of life when they graduated and what they really need the University to provide. This will also encourage creativity, innovativeness and confidence in the younger generation who will be the future leadership for the country. This will also encourage the younger generation to learn mutual respect and forming multiracial community of learning which will be very healthy for future of the country. Couple of pointers:
- Which institution shall be chartered to run this? with the highly politicise environment in Malaysia, it will be wised that this is administered by a well respected institution (In USA , it is being conducted by The Lincoln Center) and perhaps learn from The Lincoln Center. Suggest a joint collaboration between USM & MU as a start will be very wise.
- Learn from The Lincoln Center how this was conducted and administer and adjust to make it suitable for Malaysia environment and the unique goal to achieve.
- Define the topic and focus area. The focus shall be on how to improve on Imagination, creativity, innovation and confidence of the future generations. Don’t deviate and try to do too much stuff in one go.
- Have separate stream, one dialog with the community in small group or townhall discussion (hopefully if it is run by institution versus political parties, it gets balance audience and not finger pointing). And another stream on youth or teenager workshop as suggested earlier. Capture and synthesize the learning.(this can become a huge University research project on future of educations, organization behavior, or even social pattern study.)
- Culminate this into a Summit, with report out of the findings at the national level. This will be input into the whole education reform effort.
The effort might seems to be big, but if we are serious about it and want to make this a effort by the people, for the people. The effect of the effort is long lasting and will be remembered as a goto event.
One of the question asked at the Roundtable is sustainability of this effort. It need to be sustained by the institution of education with a rotational chairmanship. From USM/MU to UKM/UTM for example with a fix duration (say once every two years) with a focus topic. As for the workshop, one of the problems of Malaysian project is start big and complex, and interest lost after 6 months. So, start simple with small group and than waterfall this to become an annual event as the participants will be different and therefore the imagination workshop can be sustained with focus on innovation, creativity and imagination.
Lastly two quotes
Albert Einstein ” Knowledge is limited, Imagination encircles the world”
Sir Ken Robinson @ the Imagination summit “I remember when I was running the national commission on creativity, education and the economy in the U.K., the Secretary of State there said, “We’re very committed to creativity in education but we’ve got to get literacy and numeracy right first.” And I said, this is just a basic misunderstanding. It’s like saying we’re going to bake a cake and if it works out, then we’ll put the eggs in. That’s not how it works.”
These two quotes summed up very well in two aspects: 1) That the future of competitions of nation depends largely on how creative and innovative of the future generations. 2) Sir Ken put it very well of his own experience of why it is so hard to put imagination and creativity back to school. There is always so much to do in a day and the children have to go thru all the stuff and thinking about getting A+ before we have time to think about letting them imagine and be creative.
If we don’t change our school system, creativity will remain in the background while we trained our children on how to get A+ and answering questions mechanically. And Malaysia’s Global innovation score will always stuck at the mid range of 40.
(This blog is written as a response to 1 Malaysia Roundtable on Imagination summit floated by the participant)
