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| Patrick Stringer, commissioner to Korea for Victoria, Australia |
"It is not uncommon in Australia for you to have debates with your lecturers and interactive arguments with others, while that is not done in most places in Asia," Stringer said. "This is a great environment for teaching, for learning and for new discovering. That's one of the reasons why Melbourne has such a great reputation in the world as a student city."
Melbourne is the capital city in the Australian state of Victoria and the nation's biggest university city having 10 universities including the University of Melbourne.
It was named the world's second student city in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Best Student Cities 2015, an annual publication by QS. The city was also named the world's most liveable city according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2015 Global Liveability Ranking, scoring a perfect 100 in the education sector.
He attributed the good record of the city to its creative learning environment which is more open than Korea's.
"I think the creative environment encourages people and gives them a permission to fail so that they are happy to explore something," Stringer said. "In Melbourne, teachers challenge students to be creative, give them the tools to think and research in a different way."
In this environment, Australian people came up with many new ideas including Wi-Fi and black box.
"Some people say, which I agree to some extent, that what Korea lacks is maybe kind of fresh ideas. It's a little bit to do with the education system," Stringer said. "Many Asian education systems are based around what is called rote learning; I'm not saying this is good or bad."
Victoria attracts more than 160,000 students from all over the world every year and about 4,300 Korean students had enrolled in Victorian institutions as of 2014.
"I think for Asian students, in this case Korean, one of the attractions of an education in Melbourne is teaching methods are more about innovation and more about exploring new lines of thought," he said.
