Empowerment Is Contagious.
When it comes to reforming education, everyone, every special interest group, and every politician seems to have an idea and a plan. For the most part, they are built on good intentions, but for one reason for another, they just don’t work out.
Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, had this idea about reform:
If learning is embedded in real world context, that is, if you blur the boundaries between school and life, then children go through a journey of aware, where they can see the change; enable, be changed; and then empowered, lead the change.
In an inspiring TED Talk, she explains that once the children are empowered, it directly increases student well-being. Children became more competent and less helpless. They became infected by the “i can bug.”
In a perfect world, we could leave education reform to the children whose spirits haven’t been broken by a system that says, “You can’t.”
ODYSSEYWARE’s online curriculum is just one step to empowering young learners to take responsibility for not only changing their own educational experience and their own lives, but for changing the world.