Ma prefers his status as a "teacher".
Deng Shuanglin, reporter of "China Entrepreneur"
Editor|Li Wei
Photo photography | Deng Pan
Today, Jack Ma is back, as Teacher Ma.
According to information released on the WeChat public account of Yungu Education on March 27, Alibaba founder Jack Ma discussed the challenges and opportunities brought by the new round of technological change to education at Yungu School on March 27.
Ma Yun believes that ChatGPT technology has brought challenges to education, but ChatGPT technology is only the beginning of the AI era, "We must use artificial intelligence to solve problems, not controlled by artificial intelligence, although human physical strength, brain power is not as good as machines, but machines only have 'core', and people have 'heart'." ”
On September 10, 2019, 55-year-old Jack Ma announced his retirement on his birthday and has been traveling to different countries to learn agricultural techniques. Although he no longer appears in public, there has always been a legend about him - since this year, Ma Yun has been "bumped into", competing with the "boxing king" at the gym in Bangkok, Thailand, in early January, and drinking Coke in cloth shoes in Melbourne, Australia, in February.
Now, Ma Yun has finally appeared in Hangzhou. In fact, on March 26, some netizens broke the news that they "met" Jack Ma in the Wenyi Road tunnel in Hangzhou, and the people accompanying him were Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, and Shao Xiaofeng, senior vice president of Alibaba Group.
Ma Yun returned to China and chose Yungu School as the first stop for his public appearance, which is enough to show the importance he attaches to education. Yungu School is a private school jointly invested and founded by Jack Ma and Alibaba partners in 2017, including kindergarten, primary school, junior high school and high school. Jack Ma's original intention in founding Yungu was to explore a path of educational reform and innovation with local characteristics.
Ma Yun has many titles in his life, and Ma Yun still prefers his status as a "teacher" to his business success, and he has expressed more than once that "teaching is my favorite profession".
Before starting his business, Ma Yun worked as an English teacher at Hangzhou Dianzi University for 6 years, and Ma Yun has never been far from the education industry after starting his business. In 2015, he founded the Jack Ma Foundation in his personal name, focusing on supporting rural education and inspiring more and more outstanding talents to devote themselves to rural education.
Jack Ma's idea of "teaching and educating people" has also profoundly influenced Alibaba's employment system. Internally, everyone used to call Ma Yun "Teacher Ma", and Ma Yun also emphasized in public, "Ali has 200,000 employees, and I have taught countless young people." "Jack Ma exists like the homeroom teacher of Ali's huge class.
For more than 20 years, Alibaba has always adhered to the inheritance of vision and mission, and the partnership mechanism has maintained Alibaba's talent iteration, solved the inheritance and handover of the company's management, and made "good generals like a tide" a reality.
Ma Yun has said many times that his biggest regret is that he has only been a teacher for 6 years. Later, he made a decision that four years ago, on September 10, Teachers' Day, his 55th birthday, and the 20th anniversary of Alibaba's founding, officially announced his retirement as chairman of the board of Alibaba Group.
In his speech that day, Ma Yun repeatedly choked: "Today is not Ma Yun's retirement, but the beginning of the inheritance of the system." He made it clear that he wanted to start a new life, return to education, and do what he loved.
Principals should have an entrepreneurial mindset
Jack Ma's return to education is not just a personal hobby, but a deeper consideration.
Ma has a view: a principal may affect 100 teachers, and a teacher affects at least 200 students.
In 1999, when Ma Yun first started his business, he could not write programs and almost completely did not understand the Internet, but Ma Yun believed that the responsibility of the founder was to organize people who understood and make interested people more interested.
"So in fact, the principal is the real leader, and being a principal is not only responsible for the students, but also to let the teacher see hope and help the teacher succeed." The principal is not good, and the teacher cannot be retained. If the principal does not support the teacher, the teacher cannot teach well. ”
He believes that today's technological changes and social changes will be most affected by education in the future. Today's education system was established in the industrial era, and it is training talents for the assembly line of the industrial era and the finance, service and manufacturing industries in the industrial era.
"In the past 20 years, people have become more and more like machines, but in the next 20 years, our machines will become more and more like people. If the digital age no longer needs to send the same talents to the assembly line, then what should be considered in today's education is also what today's principals should consider: what kind of talents should we cultivate? What kind of methods are used to cultivate talent? ”
Ma Yun believes that the principal must have a view of the future, have a global view, should be the chief designer of the school, and see the development of the next 20, 30 or even 100 years.
"Although I have been away from education for many years, in recent years, I have felt more and more the urgency of educational reform, and education reform must be carried out. The challenges we face in the future are not only the challenges of one country, but also the challenges of humanity, and the challenges that everyone will encounter. Ma Yun said.
He believes that principals must not only be teachers, but also entrepreneurs and must have strong leadership. "Entrepreneurs grasp the direction of the future society, see the future, integrate resources, merge mechanisms, and organize talents. Being a good principal is not based on power, but on vision, pattern, responsibility, and sense of direction, which is a concrete measure. ”
Use artificial intelligence to solve problems
Ma's choice to appear at Cloud Valley School at this moment may also have a lot to do with the recent explosive change in the wave of technology such as ChatGPT.
In today's discussion, Ma Yun said that technologies such as ChatGPT have brought challenges to education, "We need to use artificial intelligence to solve problems, not be controlled by artificial intelligence." ”
ChatGPT is not the first artificial intelligence technology in the field of education, AI painting, AI experimental robots, AI piano education, etc. have been very common. The development of technology has brought educational anxiety, and related companies have begun to explore the application of new technologies.
NetEase Youdao announced that ChatGPT homologous technology will be applied to learning scenarios such as AI speaking teachers and composition correction; iFLYTEK announced that it will create a Chinese version of ChatGPT; Gaotu will introduce ChatGPT homologous AI technology and launch postgraduate planning and Q&A products.
Over the past 23 years, Alibaba's development has benefited from the transformation of Internet information technology. Jack Ma's return to education is also to transfer the overall perspective based on the development of science and technology to the education industry, and he has emphasized on countless occasions that the new round of technological change will bring great challenges and opportunities to education.
Since its inception, Cloud Valley School has also been exploring how to provide future-oriented education for children in the era of rapid development of artificial intelligence. Today, Jack Ma is in Cloud Valley, and the topic of technological change is still discussed with campus leaders.
He believes that the industrial age is knowledge-driven, a competition of knowledge; The digital age is driven by intelligence, a competition for creativity and imagination, a competition for leadership, responsibility, and independent thinking.
In May 2018, at the celebration of the 110th anniversary of his alma mater, Hangzhou Normal University, Ma Yun said that a person with a big pattern knows how to follow his own path and also knows how to pave the way for others.