Yesterday, some of the Designing Leaders crew attended a one-day seminar called “From Things to Services – The Rise of Service Design and Social Innovation in Asia Pacific,” sponsored by a community of practice that is helping to shape design thinking in Asia. The first session had to do with education, and one of the speakers from Malaysia made a very good point about the challenges of developing the skills for design thinking in employees, clients, or university students whose primary and secondary educational environment was a little more authoritarian and stifling.

Years ago, while I was teaching for a semester in Singapore, I had the opportunity to learn a lot about their educational system. My course was part of a master’s degree program, so my students had all completed their bachelor’s degrees, some in Singapore and others in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other places. I learned about their undergraduate programs and also observed what was going on at my university, and it was interesting to see the differences from the Western (or at least, the American) system.

Many of the things I learned or observed could also be found in the US, of course, but there we hope some of these are exceptions, whereas in many Asian countries they tend to be the rule. And while the educational practices I learned about might be appropriate for the ethnic, political, or social background of the students, I could see a negative effect on creativity and innovation.

I realized early on, of course, that Singaporeans are very pragmatic. Whether this creates a certain educational style, or is the result of it, I do not know. But for many students there seems to be less interest in actually learning, and more interest in passing the test, getting the diploma, and going to work. The time in school is viewed by many as simply job training, or even worse, as just checking off an item on a list so you can move on to a job. The comments sections of different news sites are filled with people criticizing the importance that “paper qualifications” play in the job market, with no recognition of the value of the education itself. As a result, there is not a lot of questioning by students in the classroom, nor is there time spent thinking about issues beyond the narrow confines of the syllabus. There is memorization and regurgitation, and for many, that is all.

The faculty, in many cases, encourages this. They lecture for the entire class and when exam time rolls around they expect students to simply repeat what they have heard. Recent grads have told me some professors just read out of a book…the same book the students already read on their own. This is not usually the case at the graduate level, though one of my peers once remarked that he could do his whole class online without any class meetings, because he did not expect his students to say anything original in class discussion anyway. Personally, I have always been a believer that your students will meet your expectations, no matter how high — or how low — they may be.

I should point out that the students in my class were not like this themselves. Either they had outgrown that frame of mind, or they had good instructors in their past, but for whatever reason I was blessed with 24 inquisitive students who, after a few weeks, were not at all shy about sharing their views, even if they contradicted mine. That is what education is supposed to be about, not memorizing stuff and then spitting it back out on a test.

Another aspect of education in many countries here is a vast distance between teachers and students. I noticed that undergrads passing by would avert their eyes so as not to make eye contact with professors. I later learned that there is almost a sense of fear, and often a sense of combativeness, when students deal with teachers growing up, and for many that feeling continued in university. Relations between students and teachers that have gotten so bad that, when a professor was stabbed by a student (who then committed suicide) a few years ago, the comments on the online news stories almost uniformly suggested the professor must have done something wrong to provoke the student, and possibly even attacked the student first himself. Bad relations between students and teachers limit the opportunity for mentoring and certainly do not help learning.

Once again I will point out that my students weren’t like this. We had a great relationship, and they would often come to my office to chat about things from class and beyond. Among the things they shared with me were their experiences with teachers in university and in secondary school, and that is where I got my first sense of what things were like. Also, no one stabbed me.

How does this affect creativity and innovation? Well, obviously, people who are trained not to question anything have a hard time developing new ideas. How do you come up with something new if you have repeatedly been told to focus only on what already exists? Students who have their interest in learning beaten out of them (not literally, but it felt that way) are less likely to be creative in their work. Students who are taught to fear their teachers will have trouble later developing a good working relationships with leaders and authority figures, like, for instance, their managers. It is hard for you to guide them if they are not prepared to do anything besides salute smartly and carry on.

Singapore has been making changes in its educational system lately, though some parents tell me they have simply been adding to existing work instead of rebalancing and changing expectations. People in other countries have told me they have seen little change in their systems, with the exception of Hong Kong, which has actually dropped a year of secondary school and added a year at university (which is great for university students, but which means less education for those who do not go on to a uni). In order to be innovative as we grow our organizations and adapt to change, however, we need to encourage even greater interest in learning, even more questioning and challenging of conventional wisdom, and even better social skills on the part of students. Maybe you cannot teach creativity, but with a proper education, you can provide a strong foundation for it.