Reimagining Schools in a Hyperconnected World
Before March 2016, I would never have thought of myself as having any connection to the word ‘education’ in a professional sense.
Something happened that spring. On the surface, it was triggered by my eldest son’s time to start primary school, and our family’s move from California to Beijing. However, these two pivotal moments awakened something in me, helping me to see the links between many of my random and seemingly irrelevant experiences with education and making them suddenly relevant. This random list of experiences includes my own memories as a student, ten years working at McKinsey, recruiting and training college graduates, supporting career development for youth, three years as a minor social influencer (my husband and I have a WeChat blog with 700K followers), receiving multiple inquiries from young people confused about the future and, of course, my experience as a mother.
Education had long been a major source of entanglement for me. Everyone around me, (both in China and the US), complain about the problems and challenges around today’s education. And yet, although their complaints all seem to make sense in some way, it is hard to derive anything concrete from them, let alone come up with concrete alternatives. In that spring, these ‘connections’ that occurred to me seemed to have suddenly switched a light on, allowing me to see education in a clearer way.
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Yinuo Li is the co-founder of ETU Education(in her personal capacity), and she is also Director of the China Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Yinuo used to be a partner at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in both Beijing and Palo Alto, California.
Yinuo is a sought-after speaker on topics ranging from industry perspectives to strategy, organization, talent recruitment and development, and women’s leadership. She also serves on the final selection committee for the Rhodes Scholarship, and was named World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader in 2016.Yinuo has a B.S. in biology from Tsinghua University in Beijing and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from UCLA.
Huazhang Shen has been a serial entrepreneur in IT space, and most recently is the founder of Magnet, an IT platform that enables community communications. Huazhang has a Master degree from California Institute of Technology and B.S. from University of Science and Technology in China.
Xiaoyue Guo is the principal of ETU School. She is also one of the founders of Social Venture Partners (SVP), which is affiliated with the Leping Social Entrepreneur Foundation. Xiaoyue has years of rich experiences in education, and has dedicated her career to exploring personalized education in China. Among many of her accomplishments, Xiaoyue also founded the Lexing Youth Experiential Learning Center in 2015.