Education so much more than just learning by rote

They looked at a big yellow painting with strings of black pigment on it. Duan Qiaoyu, a 16-year-old girl at Beijing City International School (BCIS), and her fellow students couldn't come up with a single line of poetry about the painting. But after discussing the painting they came up with a decent poem about a broken fountain pen.

Last week was the first time Duan, from Taiwan, had taken a "Theory of Knowledge" (TOK) class, part of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program. And like many of the other students she felt the course was a welcome change from the usual routine.

"I did not know what to write about such an abstract picture until one of my partners associated the pigment with ink ejected from a broken fountain pen, which gave us a clue to the poem, and it took us a mere 10 minutes to make it up," Duan said. "It basically taught us to be good thinkers and questioners of knowledge."