Recently I was able to visit the Green School in Bali, a school that’s been on my list and on my mind since I first watched founder John Hardy’s Ted Talk five years ago. The idea of a school based on green design principles, aiming to be off the grid, made of open air bamboo structures?! I was basically sold before you could say "John Hardy's sarong!" (the man always wears one!)
Hardy was born and raised in Canada, but was not quite satisfied with our schooling or our society. In his TED talk, he explains how he didn’t quite fit in conventional schools; his needs were not addressed by the rigid schooling he experienced. He moved to Bali in the 70s as a young man, and has been there ever since. After spending a good part of his life building a successful jewellery brand, he sold the company in 2007. Motivated partly by Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, Hardy set out to design and run a school that was based on green principles. The result is a beautiful school sprawling over 20 acres of land, about a half an hour from Ubud, Bali. In the following post, I’ve tried to capture my overall impressions from one of my visits to the school: what I loved, what intrigued me, and what was disappointing.
0 Comments
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.
If children have interest, then education happens. 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! Recently, civil rights issues in the states and here in Canada have caused me to think a lot about empathy. Why is it that some people seem to express and feel empathy more easily than others? Why do we tend to jump to a defensive stance during challenging conversations? Most importantly, what does this have to do with schooling?! For this last question, I turn to my favourite escape, a quote by a respected person: Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. Recently entrepreneur and researcher Vivek Wadhwa posted an insightful piece on Reinventing the Classroom for the digital age. He talks about the potential for a revolution in education: I am talking about a complete transformation of the way teaching is done, with the computer taking the role of the lecturer, the teacher becoming a coach, and students taking responsibility for their own learning. |
Categories
All
AuthorA passionate educator.. on a quest for a schooling model to love! Archives
August 2017
|