Motivation before content

Shield Xiao Dun has thought about education at scale. His first company, 17 EdTech, grew to 20,000 staff by meeting China's vast demand for better schooling, which far outstripped the supply of good teachers outside first-tier cities. A family in Tibet or Yunnan, he explains, could not buy what did not exist locally, and mobile phones and faster networks made it possible to reach those learners. His new company builds AI tutors that adapt to each learner. Asked what education should achieve now, his answer concerns the learner's state of mind.

I think the most important goal for education in this era is for someone to be motivated.

— Shield Xiao Dun, Wealth Office

He likens learning to a tree, with shared roots in literacy and numeracy and every leaf different, and expects assessment to move towards mastery and real-world output. He is sceptical of interviews as a way to judge ability, preferring to judge someone's output over time, which was too labour-intensive for schools before AI could assess essays and understand video. He expects recognition for self-taught learners to come from outside existing institutions, which face the innovator's dilemma. Access, in his view, should be equal even when needs differ.

Everyone's different, so they need different education, but the access should be the same. Everyone should be able to get the best access whenever they want.

— Shield Xiao Dun, Wealth Office

Scholarship as a long investment in people

William Louey has spent three decades building capability one person at a time. His educational foundation, established in 1995, has funded more than 60 scholars from underprivileged backgrounds at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford and leading British schools. Because the money is his own, he interviews every candidate himself, around 150 a year in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, and his criteria are that applicants are poor and have drive. He stays close to scholars and their families, attending weddings and birthdays, and says these relationships keep him curious and grounded. He describes his scholars as successors who can take over, and some now fund scholarships themselves. His approach to his own children is similar in spirit. He gives them freedom to choose their paths, and encouraged them to do something different before they found their passion.

Xiao Dun's own path shows what such support can do. William Louey paid for his schooling at Millfield and most of his Cambridge tuition and never asked for anything back. Xiao Dun describes education as the most meaningful way he could repay that opportunity, and technology as the way to extend it to as many people as possible.

Learning to steward

Several guests describe capability-building for heirs as practice with real money and real decisions. Elaine Chow suggests patriarchs allocate sums of 100,000 to 500,000 to teenagers, and one to five million to family members aged roughly 25 to 30, for philanthropy or investment, with a showcase of the results. There is no single recipe, she says, so children should be groomed early according to their gifts.

Kedge Martin describes a family that held quarterly philanthropy meetings at which even the youngest child chose a weekly project, perhaps £5 of pocket money for an animal rescue centre. Jamie Webb recommends that foundations give next-generation members a sum of money and a defined role, creating space for shared decisions. Both he and Martin favour small, early experiments over large and remote cheques, and both see emotion and personal connection as what sustains a commitment. Webb acknowledges that inheriting wealth, businesses and philanthropy can feel daunting for young people. He sees family values as a container for young people's choices, and describes an Asian philanthropic culture with a strong focus on education and closer partnership with government.

Philip Marcovici adds that preparation should reach every family member, women and men, including those who may one day inherit as widows. The next generation, he argues, should help shape a succession plan whose success they will ultimately determine, and when he works on family constitutions he interviews each family member individually.

Families teaching families

Marco Poon describes a form of education that sits between families. In Hong Kong he takes part in a community where family members, mostly second and third generation, discuss governance, tax, trends in charity and how to teach children about money. He attributes its strength to an existing family office community, strong academic research on family offices and Hong Kong's position as an Asian hub. Each family is unique, he observes, but they face similar challenges, and he takes the ideas he gathers back to his family and to his own household.

Whatever I learned, I try to implement back in the family.

— Marco Poon, Wealth Office

Poon's advisory business, JCP, helps families establish investment committees and trains them to make decisions within them, alongside education and succession planning. He also describes two routes to making successors battle ready. One is a period working in a third-party organisation, where heirs learn what a 9-to-5 job, pressure and chasing a sales order feel like. The other is a family-funded entrepreneurial project, which can extend the core business and train the family's people. Above all, he argues, the next generation should know the struggle of the one before it.

Nicolas de Santis offers a similar instruction to a 25-year-old heir. He urges young people to draw on the values that built their family's success, focus on value creation and study the areas that interest them deeply.

Across these conversations, education appears in three settings. Technology is reshaping the classroom, scholarships change individual lives and families teach heirs by giving them real responsibility. Guests see the same aim in each, which is to develop people who are motivated, prepared and able to decide for themselves.