doing what the machines were supposed to be about—freeing us from labor.   RW:  If we were freed from labor, then what would we do with our time?   AA:  Grow consciousness.   RW:  And what we’re doing now is watching TV and YouTube, and so on.    AA:  Exactly. This is the unfortunate thing. It’s a fulfillment of the old Protestant saying that idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. We haven’t used education for raising the human spirit. We’ve been using education as training to prepare individuals for businesses and careers, even as teachers and philosophers.   RW: In other words, ... posted on Nov 12 2013 (29,017 reads)

sit cross-legged in a circle, surrounding a baby clad in a onesie with the word “Teacher” on the front. Over the course of a year, students learn to label the baby’s feelings and to interpret his or her actions. They learn to look beyond language to identify underlying emotions, whether joy, fear, frustration, or curiosity. In so doing, they learn to understand their own emotions and those of others. They’re in a program called Roots of Empathy, part of a growing education trend broadly referred to as “social and emotional learning” (SEL), where children—and often their teachers and parents—learn to manage emotions, and to develop the s... posted on Jun 25 2014 (17,680 reads)

life – in some ways, she says, feeling more at home than she ever did. School ended, but Melching stayed, teaching English at three different cultural centers to cover the rent of her $40 room. “It was enough to keep me there,” she remembers with a laugh. 40 years later, Melching’s story continues in Dakar. She is the founder and executive director of Tostan, a nonprofit organization turning top-down development on its head. Tostan uses a three-year, non-formal education program that puts African communities in charge of their own futures. Called the Community Empowerment Program (CEP), Tostan is taking a holistic approach. One of Tostan’s most nota... posted on Oct 5 2014 (28,498 reads)

life – in some ways, she says, feeling more at home than she ever did. School ended, but Melching stayed, teaching English at three different cultural centers to cover the rent of her $40 room. “It was enough to keep me there,” she remembers with a laugh. 40 years later, Melching’s story continues in Dakar. She is the founder and executive director of Tostan, a nonprofit organization turning top-down development on its head. Tostan uses a three-year, non-formal education program that puts African communities in charge of their own futures. Called the Community Empowerment Program (CEP), Tostan is taking a holistic approach. One of Tostan’s most nota... posted on Oct 5 2014 (3,822 reads)

me, the process of education is intimately related to the process of healing. The root word of education -- educare -- means to lead forth a hidden wholeness in another person. A genuine education fosters self-knowledge, self-trust, creativity and the full expression of one’s unique identity. It gives people the courage to be more. Yet over the years so many health professionals have told me that they feel personally wounded by their experience of professional school and profoundly diminished by it. This was my experience as well.  It has made me wonder. Perhaps what we have all experienced is not an education at all but a training, which is something qu... posted on Jan 28 2015 (34,890 reads)

child psychiatrist and trauma specialist uses brain science to transform public education in high-poverty schools cross America. Watch a video about Dr. Pamela Cantor A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Pamela Cantor, then 53, received a call from the New York City Board of Education asking her to lead a team to assess the emotional impact of the attacks on the city’s public school children. As a child psychiatrist specializing in trauma for nearly two decades, she welcomed the opportunity. However, what she discovered from her team’s assessment surprised her. “From lower Manhattan to the Bronx, most of the children I met were traumatized less ... posted on Feb 4 2015 (38,204 reads)

idea how well it’s working out. I like the idea because it’s the federal government doing it, and the federal government has typically been really bad — I mean, they are the worst. If you think about it, it makes sense why. They are on the top theoretically in some ways — the 50 state governments and all those municipal governments under them. So, they are not in a position really to go micro. I understand that. But what they did with this Race to the Top program in education I thought was a really good idea. Again, I don’t know how well it’s going to work out, but they set up, first of all, a contest, which means that there are incentives that presum... posted on Mar 25 2015 (66,442 reads)

The Vatican II came out at that time. Pope John XXIII opened the window and all the changes started then. RW: People got very excited about that, didn't they? SD: Yeah. That was a great big change. He was great. I loved him. RW: And then it got closed down again. SD: The others came back in. So when I was a scholastic novice, I wanted to major in theology. They had theology courses, but they wouldn't let you major in theology unless you were a man or you were going into education, or you quit your program, so out of stubbornness, I started to be a cook for 3 or 4 months. RW: Basically, you dropped out of school? SD: Yes. And never in the history of the nuns, ha... posted on Apr 11 2015 (14,044 reads)

sit? How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. Where do we start? We said, oh, kindergarten seems like a good place. So we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. (Applause) So we started thinking, what could it... posted on Apr 15 2015 (29,673 reads)

Schwartz’s story take off on the Internet got me thinking about how much we are affected by experiences in school beyond our classes, extracurricular activities, and cafeteria gossip. Most kids deal with issues at home, illnesses, or disabilities that are invisible to others. These challenges affect every part of the learning process—including attention span, classroom behavior, and interaction with other kids. Every child has different needs, but the inflexibility of the education system in the United States often leaves behind those who don’t fit in. If you can’t learn to read the way reading is taught, you’re out of luck. Roadblocks like this hurt ... posted on May 28 2015 (27,072 reads)

adversity, these 23 female change agents are making a transformative impact on the lives of women around the world. We applaud them. While the equality movement is empowered by both men and women, this article highlights the extraordinary women doing extraordinary things for equality issues. Malala Yousafzai In 2012 at the age of 15, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head by the Taliban in Pakistan. The assassination attempt was a response to her stand for the right of girls to gain an education after the Taliban had banned them from attending school. She is now one of the world’s most iconic female change agents and in 2014 became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.... posted on Mar 4 2016 (17,346 reads)

Halpern is a public interest pioneer and an innovator in legal education. Author of Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom, he has made multiple big waves in the public sector – as the "father" of the public interest law movement, as a social entrepreneur, and as a pioneer in the movement to bring mindfulness to the law and social justice efforts.  The outer waves of social transformation that Charlie has supported have been enabled by his inner waves of personal transformation.  And those inner waves are supporting him on his latest challenging quests: working for the mindful transformation of the criminal justic... posted on Jul 13 2017 (6,458 reads)

takes a three-pronged approach to help every kid reach their potential. Elisabeth Stock has always been driven to work toward a more just world. It was what led her to volunteer as a teacher for the Peace Corps in West Africa in her early 20s, and it’s what ultimately motivated her to found PowerMyLearning, an educational technology nonprofit, in 1999. “I wanted to join the Peace Corps because I felt like there was this deep unfairness in society,” she says. “Is it just and fair that where you are born predicts whether you can reach your human potential?” The key to providing equal opportunity for everyone, says Stock, is through educa... posted on Jul 30 2017 (68,226 reads)

a third of those went to health care workers who were helping with the disaster recovery, a third to students who were reconnecting with school, and a third to entrepreneurs. An example would be a fisherman who was displaced because of the tsunami, now having to reconnect with the marketplace. It was almost going to be a one-and-done, but there was a good impact study that was done that said this made a huge difference. People with bicycles all of a sudden had better access to health care, education, economic opportunities. Unfortunately, the 230,000 people who perished in the tsunami — well, that happens every six weeks in sub-Saharan Africa based upon preventable disease, hun... posted on Aug 21 2019 (4,397 reads)

underlies all those. So I'm very excited to be in conversation with him. Lee Perlman is a lecturer at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a lecturer in Philosophy. He has been there for almost 35 years now, teaching in this remarkable little group called the Experimental Study Group, which is MIT's first freshman learning community. It was a community that was founded in 1969, and it offers a tight-knit, intellectual community that is about innovation and creativity in the educational process. And Lee has taken this experimental study group one step further by founding the MIT Prison Initiative. In that he teaches classes to a mixed cohort of MIT students and prisoners ... posted on Dec 28 2019 (6,765 reads)

November 5, 2019 Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’`s Tami Simon, I’`m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, includi... posted on Feb 9 2020 (6,199 reads)

(1977-1981). From there, he created Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs, an achievement that earned him the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 2011. Drayton, who is elegantly dressed and maintains an air of youthful informality at 76, is a person who speaks softly, but his speech is obsessively unique: he says the colossal changes we are living are creating two-speed societies. Compared to those of us who have received the necessary education to contribute to the development of today's hyperconnected world, and to bring about changes, those who lack the necessary skills are at risk of a bitter and dangerous marginalization.&n... posted on Jul 29 2020 (3,702 reads)

classroom is with me all the time, as it is for many other students of Elie Wiesel. And I think there are so many, not only pieces of content or teachings or stories that are very, very helpful and useful for us right now, but also tools and methods from religious traditions and wisdom traditions more broadly, that we can repurpose or refine or bring back to life or re-contextualize and use in ways that perhaps the authors of these ideas and tools would never have imagined. And so we know that education isn’t a guarantee of moral sensitivity, but he taught us that memory is the ingredient. And then there’s a lot more from, specifically, from religious traditions that I think ... posted on Feb 25 2021 (6,278 reads)

they, but he was not; he questioned the assumptions, traditions and conventions around him. For he was a poet and, like all good poets, his poems were dangerous. [Poets and their poems mirror reality and are therefore considered dangerous when they reveal what we wish hidden. Jabbar was arrested because of a poem. Mandelstam was killed by the Soviets. In this country, much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was not published for decades; it was seen as unseemly from a female poet.] His only education was the usual stern and brief religious instruction from the local mullah. Somewhere, somehow, before today’s mass media, he learned about other countries’ education for you... posted on Feb 1 2013 (12,679 reads)

an excerpt from his new book, psychologist Louis Cozolino applies the lessons of social neuroscience to the classroom. The human brain wasn’t designed for industrial education. It was shaped over millions of years of sequential adaptation in response to ever-changing environmental demands. Over time, brains grew in size and complexity; old structures were conserved and new structures emerged. As we evolved into social beings, our brains became incredibly sensitive to our social worlds. This mixture of conservation, adaptation, and innovation has resulted in an amazingly complex brain, capable of everything from monitoring respiration to creating culture. This added com... posted on Jun 2 2013 (147,793 reads)