Today I came across a video ot Chef Jamie Oliver’s visit to a grade one classroom in the States (which you can see here). Students were surprisingly unable to identify basic vegetables and fruit, with one child guessing that tomatoes were potatoes.

Recently I came across the work of Zoe Weil, author, educator, and Co-Founder of the Institute for Humane Education.

For nearly 30 years, Weil has been a Humane Educator (integrating human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection in her teaching). 

She defines Solutionary quite simply, as someone who combines their talents and skills to solve a problem they care about. Here are three reflective questions she poses to young people (which I think are great for reflecting in high school, college/uni, and beyond!):

1. What issues do you care about?
2. What aptitudes and skills can you bring to those issues?
3. What do you love to do?

Weil mentions the key to all this reflection, is to recognize that "the place where those answers meet is where you find your life’s great work”. 

At a recent conference in New York, I spent a week exploring alternative education from an American perspective (a lot of talk about homeschooling, unschooling, “deschooling”, which I will come back to in a later post). A refreshing departure was a keynote speech by Sugata Mitra; he was the first at the conference to focus on ACCESS for students who don’t have the choice of any school at all!

Mitra is the man behind the “hole in the wall” experiments, and has gained popularity through TED Talks (such as this one, and this one). Essentially, Mitra placed a computer in the wall of a slum in New Delhi in 1999, where kids had never used a computer before. With an internet connection, Mitra left the computer for kids to play with. What he found was that groups of kids, within days, were able to learn impressive things on their own - from browsing to recording music, to googling their homework!