Several weeks ago, I was invited to UBC Alumni Affair‘s Campaign Launch Symposium (start an evolution), and it being presented as both interesting and mysterious, I decided to check it out. Although I didn’t stay for the whole event, Na’ama and I attended two symposium sessions together, and we also saw several other people including Aaron, AJ, Justin, and Kiran. Although both workshops were interesting, there’s only one that I’d like to discuss here today.
This session was titled UBC: Innovation Starts Here. It featured Brian Wong (UBC Alumnus; CEO of Kiip), Simon Neame (UBC Alumnus; Director of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre), and Paul Cubbon (Instructor in the Sauder School of Business). The session opened with each of the three speakers giving a little spiel about innovation (and how UBC has influenced it), and then they opened the floor to questions. Evidently, I asked a question. People who know me know that I would probably ask a question either about viruses or education. In this situation, there was only one option: Have you guys heard about the new, innovative Ebola-Rabies vaccine?!
Clearly, I asked no such thing. I decided to ask about education (after all, the Interuniversity Conference on Education was on my mind). However, seeing as the audience was mostly people who were successful at UBC (or so I presume), I decided I best not call out the education so bluntly. Instead, I worded it much more generally. It was something along the lines of: Suppose you have this thing that interacts with basically everyone. Almost everyone knows it is far from perfect, but they are content enough with it to avoid working towards improving it. How do you draw their attention to the problem? How do you get them to care about it enough to act?
After several seconds of what seemed to be intense thought by the three speakers, they each gave their answer to the question. The answer that stuck most strongly with me came from Brian. Paraphrased (I suck at taking notes, so I only wrote down key words), he said that this sounded like a problem of the status quo. Seriously Tyler? Why did this not hit you before?! It seems so obvious looking back, but it never really hit me that way, and now this puts a whole new light on the problem.
To tackle this problem, Brian made three main points:
- It must be shown that the current isn’t working
- It must be understood that the majority will try to maintain the status quo
- It must be shown how novel solutions work better
So thank you Brian for paving part of this long road towards better education. Although your answer isn’t a solution to the problem, it is definitely useful insight as to how to address the problem. To break the status quo will be no easy feat; it never has been. However, we must push for change–we cannot simply sit back and observe our future children torn, lost, and confused by the education system. Even if this change involves breaking what Brian has presented as the status quo, this change must be achieved. Together with ICE, which embodies the people and ideas concerned with this topic, I believe that this insight will help drive the educational revolution forward.
Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.
Walter Lippmann
Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.
Jerry Brown
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