A high school field trip in China that is hard to imagine in the United States.
My 16 year old daughter is in China for three weeks, traveling with 14 classmates on a language and cultural exchange. Their first week was spent in Qingdao, where each student stayed with a family that included a high school aged "buddy." On the second day of their stay, while their Chinese companions were in school, they took their first major field trip: the Qingdao City Planning Museum. According to one of the students:
Inside the exhibition hall, there was a huge non-scale model of Qingdao’s bay and the surrounding districts. A video played above, and some of the English subtitles continually described Qingdao as 'the blue dream.'...In the exhibition hall, there was also a 360° panorama of Qingdao. It was very similar to a virtual roller coaster...[A]...surprising number of local people [were] at the exhibition hall.
I have difficulty imagining a well-attended city planning exhibition in the United States (OK, maybe in Chicago). I frequently encounter adults who have no idea what city planners do, let alone teenagers. I am encouraged to know that Qingdao has a city planning museum, and it is both a popular destination and a place visited by school groups from other countries. China sends increasing numbers of students to U.S. planning schools to learn about our approaches to planning; perhaps we can learn something from China about planning education for lay people.
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