Aged 15, Shanghai students are on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths AFP/Getty Images

Late on the night of October 4, 1957, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was at a reception at the Mariinsky Palace, in Kiev, Ukraine, when an aide called him to the telephone. The Soviet leader was gone a few minutes. When he reappeared at the reception, his son Sergei later recalled, Khrushchev’s face shone with triumph. “I can tell you some very pleasant and important news,” he told the assembled bureaucrats. “A little while ago, an artificial satellite of the Earth was launched.” From its remote Kazakh launchpad, Sputnik 1 had lifted into the night sky, blasting the Soviet Union into a decisive lead in the Cold War space race.

News of the launch spread quickly. In the US, awestruck citizens wandered out into their backyards to catch a glimpse of the mysterious orb soaring high above them in the cosmos. Soon the public mood shifted to anger – then fear. Not since Pearl Harbour had their mighty nation experienced defeat. If the Soviets could win the space race, what might they do next?


Keen to avert a crisis, President Eisenhower downplayed Sputnik’s significance. But, behind the scenes, he leapt into action. By mid-1958 Eisenhower announced the launch of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (better known today as Nasa), along with a National Defense and Education Act to improve science and technology education in US schools. Eisenhower recognised that the battle for the future no longer depended on territorial dominance. Instead, victory would be achieved by pushing at the frontiers of the human mind.

Sixty years later, Chinese President Xi Jinping experienced his own Sputnik moment. This time it wasn’t caused by a rocket lifting off into the stratosphere, but a game of Go – won by an AI. For Xi, the defeat of the Korean Lee Sedol by DeepMind’s Alpha Go made it clear that artificial intelligence would define the 21st century as the space race had defined the 20th.

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The event carried an extra symbolism for the Chinese leader. Go, an ancient Chinese game, had been mastered by an AI belonging to an Anglo-American company. As a recent Oxford University report confirmed, despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.

Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.


DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, with South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-dol in March, 2016 Kim Hee-Chul-Pool/Getty Images

In an era of exponential technological growth, it’s easy to forget that behind every smart machine stands a bunch of very clever humans. Silicon Valley was built by those who grew up in the space age boom in science and technology education. Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.

In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.

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Six months after Alpha Go’s stunning victory, I went to Shanghai to see firsthand how China’s schools can give them the edge. In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science. Nowhere in the world made more of their kids’ talent.


At Wanhangdu Road Primary School a mural of a spacecraft urged students to “Come to participate!” and “March to the future!”. In a classroom on the second floor, thirty kids in matching sailor outfits joined in as seven-year-old Selena led a rendition of the school song. Then they jumped into the day’s topic: how could we use number lines to express fractions? In bursts of one to five minutes in length the young teacher ping-ponged students through a variety of short “I do, you do” activities designed to layer the learning of the concept throughout the class, ensuring the kids practiced as much as possible. This was the famous Shanghai approach. They called it mastery learning.

In the staffroom later, a group of maths teachers explained how it worked. Lessons lasted just 35 minutes in order to optimise student concentration. The activities were chunked into short blocks and a variety of media and approaches used to maximise student opportunities to gain understanding, which was achieved through drilling and repetition. Each class began with a few minutes of stretching, singing or dancing in order to boost brain-power.

Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group. This meant that they might teach the same lesson multiple times, getting steadily better at doing so throughout their careers. Lest this become dullingly repetitive, they were allocated 240 hours a year in which to improve their practice. The aim? Perfection.

Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big. The result: a proven approach for growing science and technology know-how.

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Bringing up smart kids isn't easy. Before going to Shanghai, I visited Seoul. South Korea was the original talent power and scene of history’s greatest education miracle. In the sixties its economic prospects were bleak. Ravaged by the three long years of the Korean War, it was relying on foreign aid handouts, while four-fifths of its population was illiterate. Yet in the fifty years that followed, Korean GDP grew 40,000 percent. Today Korean teens regularly come in the top five globally in the PISA tests – a man-made miracle, powered by a multi-generational effort to grow Korean brainpower.

“We don’t have any resources,” former education minister Ju-Ho Lee told me, “just our minds and hard work.” He wasn’t kidding about the hard work.

Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper. It had paid off. Today the country has the highest proportion of university graduates in the world, and Korea’s high tech economy is home to global mega-brands like Samsung, Hyundai and LG.

Yet despite the success, there was a growing sense that hard work had achieved all it could. “Koreans are not happy with it,” said Ju-Ho. A $20 billion industry had grown up around hagwons, private tutoring centres that prepared kids for exams. So intense was the competition that the government has imposed an 11pm curfew to stop kids working through the night. Worse, Korea’s teen suicide rate was the highest in the world. Over dinner, a successful entrepreneur in her 30s told me that the stress of school had been so great that her hair had fallen out. Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.

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Things are beginning to change. Policymakers like Ju-Ho Lee are concluding that although the pursuit of high test scores was vital to economic growth in the industrial era, today the approach is outdated. Skills that mattered for success in the high tech industries of the twentieth century now appear particularly susceptible to automation – with Korea already leading the world in the proportion of robots to workers in its factories. Becoming a science and technology superpower in the the twenty-first century meant evolving from a model in which the mastery of routine skills is the end of education, to one in which they’re a means to the end of creative inquiry. Here, too, China and Korea are thinking of the future.

Students pray for a successful result in South Korea's College Scholastic Ability Test. Rush hour was rescheduled and flights were grounded to aid concentration LEE JONG-DUCK/AFP/Getty Images

An hour west of Seoul in Songdo Future City, teacher Gwangho Kim had already eradicated rote learning from his classroom. A member of the Future Class Network, he was part of a thousands-strong movement of educators now preparing their students for a high-tech future. In his biology class high-schoolers were working in small teams to sequence DNA from blood samples found at an imaginary crime scene, developing skills of inquiry, research and collaboration. A student in a blue baseball jacket presented the findings of the study she had made of bacteria present in the foods of local convenience stores. “At the start, I just wanted to learn for my exams,” she told me, “but now I realise that this way we actually learn more.”

The attitude is spreading throughout East Asia. Back in China at Peking University Future School, I met Orestes Za, who’d stylishly chosen his English name after Aeschylus. Head of an experiment to imagine the school of the future, he’d created an institution organised into Harry Potterish houses of lions, dragons, hummingbirds, wolves – yet also self-consciously rooted in the tomorrow. Kids learned liberal arts and sciences, but they also developed grew their imagination, creativity and teamwork. As we toured the maker lab and in-school tech-hub, I saw a new vision that I hadn’t encountered elsewhere. Kids used touch screen monitors to edit film, whilst others carefully scribed Chinese characters in their notebooks.

A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.

Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.

Over a final lunch in Shanghai, Zhang Mingsheng, a former deputy secretary general of the city’s education commission told me that the old image of Chinese education was outdated. “Young people these days want independence.” He predicted that soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.”


Whether China can harness its deep-rooted education culture and implement its visionary policy for the development of the high-level skills while also maintaining an authoritarian social order – the well-educated teens of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement suggest otherwise – remains to be seen. For now though, China seems better-placed than ever to draw on the greatest pool of resources required for twenty-first century dominance: well-educated teen minds. It’s a lesson we once knew that could prove costly to forget.

“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point. In the digital age, making the most of our brain power matters more than ever. In the AI long game, China may have the lead.

Alex Beard is a former teacher and author of Natural Born Learners, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson