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Our Story
In 2013, James Jobbins and his wife Sarah opened a single classroom in Shanghai for a small group of students. The idea was simple: bring children together around great literature.
2013A handout for parents
Before there was a website, there was a Word document for parents. The wordmark was lowercase and red. The tagline was Think more. Courses ran at two locations, Hongqiao and Sheshan, after school on weekdays and at weekends, with twelve students to a class. The subject was English Language Arts: literature, reading and writing, with spoken English throughout.
Its second page set out a purpose that has not changed since:
studio is both a means to an end and an end in itself. It serves to support and prepare students in their efforts to pursue an international education; and it provides – and hails – education for its own sake. studio courses nurture the skills and attributes necessary for success in tests and for admission to the world's best schools; and simultaneously thrills in inspiring great thinking and creativity in intellectual pursuits.
And it explained the name:
The name studio reflects a symbiosis of study and creativity. Learning at studio is infused with, and inseparable from, the creative temperament of conceiving, exploring, and trying new ideas.
Education 3.0
Studio is founded on the basis that every child can and should have opportunities to learn in an Education 3.0 environment.
That means not telling children what to learn but helping them learn to learn. It means helping children to think for themselves and to construct meaning in their intellectual explorations. It means children grappling with Why? and How? just as much as with What? It means children being given opportunities to share and collaborate, student to student, and being able to learn beyond what any given teacher can teach. It means children creating their own outcomes in extended projects and integrated productions, which are individually chosen and personally fascinating and engrossing.
The diagram from the 2013 introduction, redrawn. The three arrows mark where Studio works.
Learn to Learn
At the same time as being radically modern, Studio's courses and classes are academically rigorous, growing out of a great tradition, particularly in British education, of pursuing knowledge and academic skills vigorously, in the context of open, expansive enquiry. Educational outcomes for Studio courses are in line with, and extend beyond, the best elements of formal educational standards from England and America. At the same time Studio maintains a focus on developing intellectual and creative capacity, ahead of the limiting effects of test preparation for any particular examination system.
Studio's programmes go beyond memorisation, understanding, and the application of functional skills; Studio's programmes develop the higher-order thinking skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis — the essential elements of a flourishing intellect and of creativity.
2014The Studio Thinker Manifesto
In May 2014 the founder wrote a manifesto for Studio's students. It is reproduced here as written.
The Studio Thinker Manifesto
Education is my vehicle for the transformation of my soul. My Skyhawk, my DeLorean, my Yellow Submarine, my Shenzhou: it will carry me, propel me, support and steady me, as onwards I go, happily, towards my goal.
My learning will be my guide, my GPS, my augmentation, my map. I'll climb the mountain, from the caverns of the sunless sea, through the forests, through the clouds, over the rainbow, to the sights across the Vale and over the Water, over Windermere, West Lake, and the Waingunga Valley.
Down the paths of science and singing, dancing and design, maths and music, literature and language, computing and comedy; along the tracks of the arts performing, martial, and musical; by winding, magical rills and gorgeous, ragged ravines of miracles modern, ancient, futuristic; by engineering, bio-neuro-nano; by philosophy and physics; by thought, work and vision; down these paths and by these works, I will explore my world and express my soul.
I will create. I will create because I was born to; we, the linguistic people of the world, of the universe, the people charged with the creation of words for the thoughts, actions, and messages we breathe; we were born to create and generate and cultivate and nurture and build. And I will create: I will create in my studio and in my workshop; I will create atop the mountain, and in the fields, the hospital, the weather balloon and the circus tent. I will create as surely as I will breathe.
As surely as I will create, I will think. I will take the time to ride my horse in the dark and in the daytime, going nowhere fast – at times, for a time, for now, not forever! – and I'll gallop and canter and trot and walk and gallop again, as I think the thoughts of a Thinker unafraid of time taken for cogitation whimsical, cogitation magnificent, cogitation co-constructive: creative.
I will trudge on, I will soar; I will swim, crawl, jump and skip on, over, beyond what may come. With learning my guide, and education the vehicle for the transformation of my soul, I will learn by creating, and, by creating, learn the only lesson worth learning: that the gift given and the goal are the same: such splendours – what splendours! – that I have to give.
James Jobbins, May 2014
2014 – 2019Growing outward
Over the next five years Studio grew from one centre to several — Century Park, Huacao, Wuzhong Lu and Beijing Xi Lu among them — and organised what it did into four divisions: group classes in centres, group classes online, Global Learning study tours, and Private Client Services.
The learning areas grew to seven. SALA, the Studio Academy of Liberal Arts, taught science, philosophy, mathematics, anthropology and history. The Studio School of Speech and Drama worked with Shakespeare, poetry and prose. Kids Canon and Teens Canon read full-length novels and wrote essays and stories. Primary English, Early Years and Studio Ready served younger and newer students. Global Learning took students to England, Greece, Scotland, Alaska and Hawaii, and to Yunnan in China.
Online classes reached students in Melbourne, Boston, Ontario, Singapore, Beijing and Wuxi, taught by the same teachers who taught in the centres. The stated vision was to be a learning community for the world; the mission, to serve families by providing transformative education and through the cultivation of a learning community all around the world.
A flyer from 2018 put it this way:
Studio serves as a place where original, new ideas are brought to life; it is a site for exhibition among peers, productive critique, the freedom to try and re-try; it is the inverse of the gallery — a place of the unfinished, of the ever-growing, of the raw being refined.
2020 – presentCovid and after
With Covid, Studio went online for several months in both 2020 and 2022. Global Learning went into abeyance and the learning centres were reorganised; Wuzhong Lu and Beijing Xi Lu did not reopen.
- September 2022Studio reopens at Puming Lu.
- September 2023Huacao reopens; new locations open in Xuhui and Hongkou.
- September 2024Hongqiao reopens; a new location opens in Lianyang.
- 2027Global Learning returns, for the first time since 2020.
Studio came out of those years focused just how it started: literature, writing, drama and speech, in small groups at round tables.
Where we are now
Today Studio teaches at six locations across Shanghai, and online (and, from 2027, onsite in England), in seven learning areas.
A line from a 2018 document still holds: the learning journey at Studio starts at three years old and never stops.