Chilean Way
Spanish version (link)
After a month living in Berkeley and attending the largest public university in the United States, U.C. Berkeley, I think I’m one step ahead of answering a question I’ve had for a long time in my mind, what makes Chile and the United States so different in terms of creating new companies and technologies?
The answer is obvious if we try to answer it in practical terms like the amount of investment in Research and Development with respect to the GDP of each country.
You can clearly see the difference, more than five times the United States exceeds in terms of GDP to Chile. A problem that is more than known, where you can continue comparing private investment and many more indices.
The answer is obvious from this point of view, but there is something in this response that does not convince me at all, does this mean that if we increase investment, we will necessarily generate more companies, more innovations, a greater impact from Chile to the world?
There must be something else, I just can’t feel comfortable with this.
The first thing that caught my attention the first day of classes at U.C. Berkeley was to see one of the main streets of the university full of people and tables where students invited others to join their clubs. Here they were from fraternities to science clubs recruiting students with enough motivation to be part of them.
Something I did not understand, being a student at one of the best universities in the country and Latin America, I had never seen anything like it before. The motivation of the students to work from the university in different projects external to the responsibilities that the university demands of them was something extremely surprising and difficult to imagine in Chile at this scale.
After talking to many students and knowing what they were doing there, I directed my first class. As a student in Chile for more than 16 years, the dynamics of the classes were obvious to me, a teacher speaking and the students listening, with very little participation from them.
The class started completely different than expected, for that class we had to read a case of Snapchat and its market strategy versus Facebook, we were divided into groups of 10 people and we spent approximately 40 minutes discussing in those groups which was the strategy that should take Snapchat, and then discuss the answers that each group had completed, where each one of the members contributed to the discussion. A completely different start of classes.
Although this class had a special dynamic at the time of teaching, the reality was not very different in more methodical or technical courses, here the discussion among the students about the topics that are being learned are the basis of the methodology of learning that is lived in this university.
The participation of students in classes is the basis of how the education model works.
From my own experience, I know that these methodologies have been tried to be incorporated into the study curriculum in Chilean universities, but after much effort, these have not had the expected results. So, what are we doing wrong?
At that time, it was clear to me, the students and their motivation for learning are what allow these methodologies to turn out perfectly. The way of thinking of the students is completely different from the Chilean one, most of them give their all to be able to learn as much as possible, while a Chilean student tries to get a grade. Something that I think is not completely due to the students, but rather to the educational model in which we have grown over the years.
The students build the university in a cooperative and learning environment.
The difference is clear and has effects on how the companies are structured, while in U.C. Berkeley students focus on learning, in the future they will continue to do the same, taking those available resources to the maximum potential, motivated to build something better from the area where everyone has knowledge.
In Chile, students are motivated almost exclusively by the grades they will obtain, producing that in the future when they enter the labor market they only strive to just do enough. Clearly it is a generalization, but I think I am not wrong in saying that there is a culture of doing what is right and necessary.
So, what can we do? There is no clear answer, in my opinion I think the key is in education, we should move from a way of thinking focused on getting something in return if we do the things that should be done, as is the case of obtaining notes by basically knowing by heart what the books say. Change to a model where learning is the focus, where you can make the most of the resources each student has, with the main objective of changing the mentality of Chileans.
A change of mentality from education can be the key to a better future for Chile.
I believe that fostering this change, among many others, can generate a real contribution to Chilean society. Clearly it is an open question and that can’t be answered from a single perspective, but from my point of view the mentality is the basis of how a society behaves.
