ALPHABET: Green Drinks January Film Screening

  • 11 January 2018
  • 19:00 - 21:00
  • Haworth Furniture, Shanghai

Green Drinks 85th film screening and our first event of the new year, ALPHABET, is a documentary that analyzes the modern educational system and argues that it squelches children's capacity for imagination, creativity, and independent thought.

Film screening will be followed by a short discussion with Lenora Chu, journalist and author of Little Soldiers. Light snacks, fruits and beverages will be served.

Event Itinerary

  • 18:30-19:00 Registrations and networking
  • 19:00-19.10 Event introduction
  • 19:10-21:00 Film Screening (113-minutes)
  • 21:00-21:30 Discussions / Q&A with Lenora Chu

About the Moderator - Lenora Chu

Lenora Chu is a Chinese American journalist and author of Little Soldiers, a nonfiction narrative about China's education system (HarperCollins 2017). The book was a New York Times' Editors' Choice and earned a rare five stars from the South China Morning Post. Lenora’s stories and essays have been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Cut / New York magazine, Business Insider, The Australian and CNNMoney. A former management and media consultant, Lenora is graduate of Stanford and Columbia universities.

alphabet - Film Synopsis

We’re living in times of sweeping changes, crises and disorientation. The financial system, energy, climate change: All the problems in these areas have one thing in common, they were created by humans.

Many were created by humans educated at the world’s best universities and institutions. Is this mess a side effect of their education, or the underlying attitudes and approach? Is the main problem the structure of our brains, and therefore the structure of our outdated thinking? We will never find the courage and inspiration to solve tomorrow’s problems by applying yesterday’s solutions!

Nowhere else is that fact so obvious as in our educational system, where the greatest opportunities and talents are eradicated by improper methods and forcing everyone into standardized molds. Rather than standardization and economic utility, creativity, diversity and sustainability must be the focus of new educational institutions! In the future, education must abandon yesterday’s sys- tematic preaching from on high and instead foreground the re- alization of potential and enriching students through diversity and variety.

And lastly: Who will start this process if we don’t?!

Event Details

11 Jan 2018 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Haworth Furniture, Jingan Kerry Center Tower 1, 32F, 1515 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai
Jingan Temple, Line 7 Exit 6
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