News

2008.0126

Nobel Prize Winner Shares His View of Education With NTNU

By Angeline Sun Campus Reporter Brainstorming for more creativity and imagination should be the focus for higher education, former Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) said during a speech at the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) this afternoon. "The world is changing fast.  It is more and more difficult to find the fine line between two different academic fields,” Lee said. The Nobel Prize winner made his remarks while he was speaking to more than a hundred NTNU staff, students and parents.  Nowadays, he said, machines and computers would easily replace manpower and accomplish a lot of production work for human beings, but, human brains’ creativity and imagination would be something that machinery will never be able to compete with. "Higher education is to guide students to come up with more fresh ideas instead of training them and making them ready for jobs,” Lee said. Lee said that training students to think independently and creatively is very important but this spirit has been long gone in Asia countries because it is Asian tradition that students must follow whatever their teachers ask them to do. "In Asia, it is not a good thing if a student thinks differently or acts differently than his fellow students.  This is not certainly right,” Lee said.  “Say, if you always follow what you were told when you are doing your research, you will definitely lose your creativity and imagination gradually.” The former Academia Sinica president said that this “Asian style” crammed education would be the terminator for students’ creativity and imagination.  “This is a serious problem that we should fix,” he said. A Hsinchu native who was born on Nov. 19, 1936, he earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the National Taiwan University in 1959, masters from the National Tsing Hua University in 1961 and eventually a doctorate degree from the University of California, Berkley, in 1965.  He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 and became the president for the Academia Sinica in 1993, a position that he possessed for 13 years.