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New Adler Yang Documentary!

Hi friends of AERO!


My name is Adler Yang. A 20-year-old independent researcher and AERO rep. for Taiwan. The mission of my life is to discover the root causes of the meaningless/unneeded sufferings of humanity, and to construct the foundation for a world of sustainable, healthy, and sincere peace.


Driven by witnessing my best friends and cousin losing their hope, health, passion, and talents throughout meaningless schooling and broken parenting,  I devoted most of my life up to today to re-create an ideal cradle of our society. Every year since 2009, I've revised my approach to better address the problems of our education system, which includes main projects such as an award-winning documentary ' If There is a Reason to Study', an intergenerational education union CrE'dule in 2010, a strategic plan for education reformation in 2011, an international online magazine  Awakening founded in 2012–which later became a lab for educational/social change experiments, a campaign in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong to 'Design Your Own Education' since 2013, and an 'Education Bypass Surgery' since 2015.


I would like to invite you to join my premiere screening for  If There is a Reason to Study on July 26 1:00pm at the Museum of Chinese in America, NYC, hosted by the 38th Asian American International Film Festival. This is a film that I started making since I was 14, tracing my best friends for 6 years from an alternative junior high school until they entered conventional high schools and colleges, examining how the emergence of standardized testing shifts their life values and pursuits towards the opposite of their initial believes, and what impact it had on their potentials, passions, and future pathways. 


This film has so far been reviewed as the "most important documentary on Taiwanese education in the recent years" by the 2014 South Taiwan Film Festival, and has been invited to 6 other film festivals from Indonesia, Hong Kong, and China before the editing was finalized June 2015. I haven't made a version tailored for the Western countries' audiences, but I would like to hear your feedback if you come to see it!


Screening information could be found here.


And if you'd like to know more about me, here is a glimpse of what I'm doing now and in the future:

The Bypass Surgery's theory of change in a nutshell, includes

  1. Connecting teenagers with societal needs, resources, and network, in order to alleviate students' dependency on the resources and connections in specific universities. By doing so, we are lowering the importance to compete for a prestigious university, and therefore unleashing the freedom for the young people to explore the world, understand their true selves, and equip real world skills that addresses societal needs.
  2. By immersing teenagers in a community with pioneers dedicated to solving social problems, we’re also creating an environment where learning is “problem-oriented” rather than “job-oriented”, redirecting the pursuit of learning from “competition” to “contribution”. As we acknowledge that by virtue, all jobs are created to address societal needs. By reversing teenagers’ energy from the competition of resources to the exploration of problems and solutions, we’re not only preventing alienation, but also redirecting teenagers from a production line toward a saturated social pyramid, to a new world of sustainability and peace.

In the next ten years, I'll be conducting field studies in the richest and poorest, the 'most developed' and the 'least developed', even maybe the safest and the most dangerous societies to re-examine our world system as whole. As ivory towers around the world has invested enormous effort in fixing our system but unable to create fundamental change, I believe it is crucial to constantly re-question and investigate the phenomenons we face by getting our hands dirty in the real world, rather than interpreting problems based on the theories/ideologies developed in the past in air-conditioned lecture rooms.


As part of the "Education Bypass Surgery" movement, I'll be writing a book to examine a question: Are teenagers and children incapable by nature, or immature by nurture? This book is aimed to discover the common factors that brought birth to impactful and responsible young global citizens who contributes to collective wellbeing by fulfilling their passion, talent, and purpose.


If you would like to be in touch or meet up with me, I could be reached at: adler.yang [at] thesouledu.org
Looking forward to hearing from you!


Sincerely,
Adler Yang