Inspiring children to do good

Last week I commented on a post that focused on the website ted.com. This week I decided to go back to ted.com and see what I could find. The video that stuck out to me is the one I posted above. In the video Kiran Bri Sethi, an Indian school teacher, discusses a way to blur the lines between education and the real world. She suggests that if you teach the children through experience then they will comprehend what was learned and incorporate it into their lives outside of school. The first example she showed was having her children make small utensils all day. In her own words "they worked until their backs were broken, then they understood that child labor was unacceptable." The children took the knowledge that they had freshly obtained and translated it into their community. The children are shown advocating the importance of abolishing child labor to the adults in the community. Kiran Bri Sethi and her students decided it was time to show the rest of the schools and the rest of the community how much of a difference this type of learning can make. They marched into city buildings and took the town by storm. The city ended up closing down the busiest streets for a day each month in order to allow for children to play. The children were alloted an enormous amount of space to put on plays and use their imagination. Soon the community decided it was time to show all of India all of the power that this idea was made of. It was looked at foolishly by many school teachers. However, children embraced the idea of making a difference. In the end, all that was needed was the drive of the children. They held auctions, went door to door, and did anything that they needed to do to show that they could make a difference and would be heard. And they were. The non-believers were put to shame, they only had one question left. How are the students preforming on paper?

It turns out that the children that were involved in the program had better grades that those that were not in the program. Not only were they doing good, they were doing well. Which is just about all that a parent, educator, or citizen can ask of the children that are the future of their country.

Obviously, we are all in a class that integrates learning into our lives in a way that most of our other classes have not. So, we have all experienced a dramatic shift in types of education. How did this video make you feel? Do you think that this class, like the classes in India, blurs the line between an educational institution and the real world? Though, we are not preforming the same "do good" activities that the children in India are preforming, and I'm rather certain that Cedar Falls does not intend on closing down Hudson Road so that we can all bounce of a trampoline for the day, I still feel like the point of our hybrid classes are to learn more about how the real world reflects what we are learning.