World School Rankings: Culture is influencing more than most are willing to admit

 

Recently I was reading an article about ‘International League Tables’ related to the performance of students in school systems across the world.

At the moment it is true that Asian students typically outperform students from Europe and North America.

BUT: this is even true when students from those high-scoring nations relocate to ‘local scoring’ nations and enter their school systems. These students will typically still out-perform the students who were born in that country!

The chairman of the Sutten Trust Educational Charity, Sir Peter Lampl said: “The strong performance of some Asian countries could reflect cultural differences, adding that Chinese students often outperformed their classmates in Britain too”.

So it is obvious that it is not a matter of the school system that is deployed, it is a matter of the cultural system either causes the school system to be successful or unsuccessful.

Cultural is a MAJOR driver of success of children in school. What most educators don’t realize is that culture is a much stronger driver than most are willing to admit or are aware of…

The first thing that is important to notice is the difference in cultural motivators and demotivators that cause kids to put effort, energy and focus into their studies. These cultural Motivators are captured in “The Three Colors of Worldview” Model developed by KnowledgeWorkx. Please read up on “The Three Colors of Worldview” to get a deeper understanding of these powerful forces. It might well be a life-saver for your career as an educator, especially if you are currently taking your passion for education across cultures.

The other major intercultural issue related to this story has to do with a number of the “12 Dimensions of Culture” that scaffold any educational system and the parents/pupils that engage with that educational system.

It would probably be interesting for you to familiarize yourself with all 12 of these dimensions, but I would strong recommend you look at some key dimensions that drive Asian kids to do better than kids in Europe and North America.

The key drivers for success in education in Asian communities are a strong “Directed Destiny Orientation” as well as a strong  “Community Accountability”. These dimensions influence the way people engage with the world around them how willing they are to follow instructions/orders from others and how they handle a key question in life: ‘Who am I first and foremost accountability to, and what does that do to my motivation and the way I prioritize things in my life?”

Educators would gain deeper insights into the challenges of education in our globalized world by learning about “The Three Colors of Worldview” and the “12 Dimensions of Culture”!

The Hunger Games… an Inter-Cultural Reflection

 

The first book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy was put to film was a great box-office success, but the movie “The Hunger Games” left me with mixed emotions...

While watching the movie I learned a few more things about one of our Inter-Cultural Intelligence Development tools called “The Three Colors of Worldview”.

It is obvious in “The Hunger Games” that the regime of president Snow is a totalitarian dictatorship that rules in a classical Power-Fear manner.

He knows how to control the masses and the hunger games as well as the decadent, disconnected from reality, focused on insignificant things life-style of the people in the capitol causes one to think of Rome during the times of Nero.

President Snow has an interesting exchange with Seneca, the man in charge of the games, when things run out of hand a little… The dialog is captured in the clip below:

President Snow is linking Hope and Fear and says that too much hope will destroy fear. This is SO TRUE! The reality is that too much hope will ignite a fire and in the case of the Hunger Games it eventually results in the death of President Show and district 13 becoming the victorious rulers of the nation.

What is important to notice here that too much hope is not only going to destroy fear it is also a very difficult thing to manage from an individual, corporate and national development perspective.

The simplified version of that is: “What if, I give you 100,000 USD today and you are earning only 1 USD per day at the moment?” How would this impact you? You have never had $ 100 K! It represents over 270 years of your income… You would not know what to do with it. You would not have gone through a process of deciding how to ‘make room’ for $ 100 K in your life!

This is true with many things in life but it is especially true in terms of things like “The Arab Spring” or the trilogy of “The Hunger Games”

On the flight from Dubai to London one of the cabin crew from Egypt recalled in interesting situation. A few months before the Arab Spring started in Egypt he was at a soccer match with his friends (all university students). The Arab Spring in Tunisia had overturned the government. The Egyptian cabin crew member and his friends were discussing “What if?” But he mentioned to me that he told his friends: “Even IF we were going to be successful in overthrowing the government of Mubarak, and we would oust the dictator, then what? What would we do? How would we move forward into a better future for all Egyptians?”

This is THE most important question to ask for any Power/Fear environment, may it be at home, in a religious institution, a school a society, a corporation or a country!

IF people are not allowed or are too scared to think through the consequences of their rebellion, then what? What is going to happen after they are successful? .

Even if you are ‘in charge’ of how much hope you inject into the system, you need to allow the recipients to make room for the consequences of that hope into their lives. This is true in simple things like hiking up the pocket money of your children, getting additional funding for a small/medium enterprise development project, a project to improve the lives of the laborers in your mine, to the potential overthrowing of a dictatorial government.

One of the most powerful things we teach in our Inter-Cultural Intelligence development programs is: “You are not just responsible for the release of the right message, you are also responsible for the response it triggers!”

Hope is indeed one of the most powerful antidotes to fear, but you better know what to do with it. You better have a plan of action once fear is tossed overboard and hope fuels the fires of the future.

Harvard asks dozens of students to leave for cheating: Community or Individual Accountability

 

In a recent incident of mass cheating at Harvard it became obvious that students felt they had to ‘work together’ to be successful in their academic pursuit.

What is interesting is that the students were pushed into collaborating, displaying Community Accountability, while Harvard continues to uphold that the measurement of successful academic pursuit can only the done in an individual accountability manner.

The article shows how archaic the academic world is and how they are not aware that the world is full of collaborative effort and collaborative pursuit of results, sometimes even to the point where fierce competitors collaborate to save cost on product design.

What makes the situation even more comical is that Dean Michael Smith is quoted to say: “This is a time for communal reflection and action.”

Is Dean Smith not aware that that is exactly what the students have been found guilty of, communal action??

Maybe it is time to reflect on the fact that Harvard business school is zealously holding on to individual accountability while the world has been embracing community accountability for quite some time.

I am not saying one or the other, or even balance between the two. To thrive in the Globalized world of today you need to start looking at these issues through the lens of Polarity management. Community Accountability as well as individual account ability are both 100% relevant and important!

Harvard: If you want to prepare students for the globalized economy out there, you better teach them about community and individual accountability, otherwise your students will become less and less valuable in the globalized markets of our world!

To learn more about “The 12 dimensions of Culture” visit the following link: http://www.knowledgeworkx.com/blogs/knowledgeworkx/item/133-12-dimensions-of-culture