Creating Tomorrow's Leaders Today: Lin Kobayashi at TEDxKyoto

At the International School of Karuizawa, International Educator Lin Kobayashi offers a new kind of global education to tomorrow's leaders.

Many people complain

that our current education system

is not preparing our children

for the real needs of society.

For instance, with Japan's aging
and shrinking population,

our children will have to learn

how to embrace diversity
and appreciate difference

in order to be able to live and work

with people from outside of Japan.

Also, in today's very complex,
ever-changing world,

it is critical
that our children learn

they're not just solving
the problems that they're facing,

but that they're able
to identify the issues

and set an agenda themselves.

Our children can no longer follow

what has been the status quo.

And for the next generation

not taking risks IS a risk.

It is essential that they learn
how to take risks

and learn how to overcome
difficult situations.

These are some
of the very obvious challenges.

There have been a lot of papers,
presentations and discussions

urging us to change the way

our children are
educated in this country.

And yet, there's been
very little concrete action taken.

We're trying to change that,

through founding Japan's
first international boarding school.

International School of Asia, Karuizawa,

or ISAK for short.

The first phase of the construction
of our campus is completed,

and we're scheduled to open our doors

to the first class
of students in 2014,

which is next year.

We are receiving a large number
of inquiries from all over the world

way before our admission season.

Over 1,000 inquiries
for only fifty seats.

Now:
How did I come up with

this crazy idea
of starting a school from scratch?

There were two incidents

that led me to get here
to set up this project.

The first turning point in my life

goes all the way back
to my high school days,

when I became a little suspicious
about the purpose of education

soon after I entered

into one of the most reputable
government high schools in Tokyo.

After one year, I quit.

And I was lucky to get a full scholarship

to study at an international
boarding school in Canada.

Not only was
that classroom experience

very different, engaging
and student-centered,

but I also learned so much
from my classmates,

who came from very diverse backgrounds.

One summer I ended up visiting
one of them in Mexico.

This was 20 years ago.

You can tell my age!

Her family took me
to a large slum area

just outside of Mexico City.

I saw a number of children
who did not have access

to basic education
or even to clean water.

I still remember that smell,
the heat and the sweat

from that afternoon in Mexico.

I realized, perhaps
for the first time in my life,

how fortunate I was
just to be able to go to school

or to be able to live
in a decent house.

And that experience led me

to the second turning point in my life,
which was my previous job

at the United Nations Children's Fund
--UNICEF-- in the Philippines.

As a Program Officer,

I was assisting
over 8,000 street children

to receive basic literacy education

or vocational training.

This itself was
a truly rewarding job to have.

I saw a lot of children
whose lives were transformed

because of the very basic education
that we provided for them.

At the same time, though,

living in a developing country,

I encountered such a huge
disparity in the society

and immense corruption.

You know, in my profession I was serving
a child who could not go to school

because she could not pay
ten dollars to buy a school uniform.

In my private life,
I was dining with my friends,

whose houses were twenty times
as big as mine

and who had three drivers,
four nannies, and five gardeners.

Educating the poor
is critically important,

but unless we educate leaders
who are socially aware

and are poised to take action
to improve the state of the world,

this inequality shall persist.

That's when I started to become
seriously interested

in educating the next generation
of transformational leaders.

The journey was not at all smooth.

One month after I came back to Japan

to work on this project, in August 2008,

financial crisis hit the world and Japan,

and it became extremely difficult
to raise any funds for any projects.

And after two years of struggle,

we thought we had started
to see some light.

And then, the Tohoku Earthquake happened

on March 11, 2011.

This project is over, I thought.

But the outcome was the opposite.

More and more people
started to claim

that we need to prepare our children
to be able to live anywhere on the planet,

stand on their feet,
and think outside the box.

The majority of our funding
was actually donated after March 11.

From nothing, we were able
to raise enough funds

to start up a school
from scratch,

which was 15 million US dollars,

or 15 Oku Yen in Japanese.

Looking back,

2010 was another big year for our project;

we had no money,
no people back then.

The only thing we could do was to offer
a little summer school in Karuizawa,

but it made a huge difference.

Talking about ideal education is easy,

but to make that into reality
is something completely different.

We need teachers and students
coming from all over the world

and they need to be
practicing and experiencing

what we believe to be an ideal education

in every single class, and
every single moment in their dorm life.

We were able to prove that we could
do this through our summer school.

I don't think we could have come this far

were it not for that very first
summer school in 2010.

Three years have passed.

This year, we had about 400 applicants
from 35 countries,

with almost no advertisement.

They all came through,
or mostly came through

either word of mouth,

or having read articles
about our project in the media.

What else was difficult?
(Laughs)

There were so many obstacles
and challenges that we went through.

Finding the right school site
under a very limited budget

was also a huge challenge...

because it took us so long
to find a school site in Karuizawa

and then--our school is called
ISAK for short--

and some of the board members
in the end started saying

that we should just go for ANY location
in Japan that had the initial 'K'.

That includes Kyoto, by the way.

Believe it or not, we actually went

to Kamakura, Kawaguchiko
and almost to Kyoto,

and then, as far as
to Kyonan Machi in Chiba.

By the time we found
our current site in Karauizawa,

we must've visited almost 20
different sites in Japan, if not more.

I'm very grateful for
and thrilled

to see an increasing amount
of interest, enthusiasm,

support, and momentum
that our project is gaining.

And I know that people are not just
supporting our single school in Kuraizawa,

but they're supporting
a larger movement

that our project might be contributing to,
or possibly be a vanguard of:

The movement that hopefully will turn
into serious educational reform

in a country that's been
waiting for it for decades.

Through running this project,

I have come to appreciate one phrase
by the French philosopher Alain:

"Pessimism comes from our feelings;
optimism from the will".

We face a lot of challenges
and difficulties

and it's natural--it's easy--
to be very pessimistic about it.

But the future is something
that we create.

And if we strongly
believe in this,

we can and should take action.

And it is precisely this kind
of very strong determination or will

that becomes significant power

that opens up doors to a future
that we can be optimistic about.

Thank you.

(Applause)