ANDRIA HALL, CNN ANCHOR: There is a dramatic new approach to education in China. For centuries, Chinese learning depended on memorization. Now, as CNN's Lisa Weaver reports, there's a new emphasis in learning.</s>LISA WEAVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Thinking sometimes gets into a bit of a tangle in China, where students learn by rote memorization but don't always know how to apply all that knowledge. These university students in Beijing are subjects in a learning experiment. The goal: to add inspiration to what they're already good at: academic excellence.</s>JOHN BIGGS, THINKING CORNER PROJECT: The Chinese have demonstrated they're very good at producing those kinds of results. I think there's a danger that the creative element tends to get the cotton (ph).</s>WEAVER: The China division of Nokia, a cellular phone company, is sponsoring a project to encourage Chinese universities to start creative thinking clubs, mapping out the mind to find the path to a conclusion. The more unconventional, the better. "It's the free atmosphere," says Lee Oh Wah (ph), "that makes it easy to look at information another way." The idea is to break things down and divide the human mind into parts, like sight and touch, a sense of self, a sense of space, and lots of fun. A network of at least 10 Chinese universities are expected to participate in the project to train flexible minds for a global marketplace. At the end of the two-day exercise, reflection is called for to determine what sank in and to construct an outsider's view of the mind. New perspectives to lead to new insights. Indeed an alternative view of how it all fits together may prepare these students for success. Lisa Weaver, CNN, Beijing.
Chinese Trying to Introduce Creative Thinking Into Education