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 (27,115 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 (17,386 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 (6,479 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 (68,263 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 (4,430 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 (6,802 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 (6,225 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 (3,703 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 (6,299 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 (12,729 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 (147,930 reads)

of people while improving the caring and quality of our many institutions. This emerging approach to leadership and service began with Greenleaf. The term servant-leadership was first coined by Greenleaf (1904–1990) in a 1970 essay titled "The Servant as Leader." Since that time, more than half a million copies of his books and essays have been sold worldwide. Greenleaf spent most of his organizational life in the field of management research, development, and education at AT&T. Following a 40-year career at AT&T, Greenleaf enjoyed a second career that lasted 25 years, during which time he served as an influential consultant to a number of major ins... posted on Jun 4 2013 (121,404 reads)

social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts. Our garbage mingles with New Jersey garbage in our local landfill, and it would be hard to tell which is which.  As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the busine... posted on Mar 4 2014 (20,196 reads)

build is upon us. In his 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (public library), Mandela speaks to the conditioning that produces both love and hate: No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. He echoes Bertrand Russell’s timeless philosophy of education as the foundation of the good life and writes: Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that... posted on Dec 6 2013 (40,598 reads)

scholar” from the south-side of Chicago. It’s a rare juxtaposition, but simply uttering those words makes you realize that Derrius is a rare individual. Still in his early 20s, Derrius is proud to relate his “hero’s journey” (a journey he is still very much on), and hopes that his many experiences will inspire others who face their own uphill climbs. From his bio: “As a product of the Illinois foster care system and the south side of Chicago; higher education did not seem like a feasible possibility for him. More accessible were the fleeting opportunities of the urban streets.” When Derrius was four years old, his father was murdered, and t... posted on Dec 28 2013 (27,067 reads)

Google maps to connect urban landowners with urban farmers. But this is just scratching the surface, an entire alternative agriculture system is emerging that's based on local production, processing, and distribution. 19. FarmHack FarmHack is an open-source, online platform for peer-to-peer innovation targeted toward developing tools and systems for resilent, sustainable agriculture. 20. MOOCS and Online Learning Platforms Technology-based decentralization of education promises to be a game-changing, disruptive force for the future. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS) have the potential to be great equalizers, decentralizing education to the... posted on Apr 7 2014 (183,240 reads)

but they went a step further and made the man a cake. Caring citizens offer tea to British riot police [London, England, 2011] A Ukrainian protester plays piano on a barricade in front of the riot police line, Monday, Feb. 10, 2014 October 2013, Pakistan – Muslims form Human chain to protect Christians during Lahore mass Bogota, Colombia – A demonstrator embraces a riot police officer during a student protest against government plans to reform higher education. An African-American minister, Shun Abram, confronts a Klu Klux Klan protestor calmly, strongly, and peacefully. Riot police walk in the street as Coquitlam-raised Alexandr... posted on Sep 17 2014 (98,296 reads)

The Morrisons both work in straw bale construction, and run the website Strawbale.com. Tiny house living probably isn’t outrageous to single twenty-somethings. But is it possible for a family? Across the country, in snowy Minnesota, Kim and Ryan Kasl have two young children, 6-year-old Sully and 4-year-old Story. The family of four is in the process of transitioning from their 1,900-square-foot home into a 207-square-foot tiny house. Ryan is embarking on a career in education administration, and Kim home-schools both their children. She also blogs about her family’s tiny house experiences. Both the Morrisons and the Kasls can bear witness to the challeng... posted on Feb 12 2015 (25,635 reads)

world may sound slightly dismal from certain vantage points. In the United States, a large amount of money is devoted to incarceration compared to education. California spends $47,421 per inmate, as opposed to $11,420 per student. The latest report from Alliance for Excellent Education states, “The nation could save as much as $18.5 billion in annual crime costs if the high school male graduation rate increased by only 5 percentage points.” But I would like to invite you to our little world in a suburban city within the Los Angeles County. We are like a community within a community. This is our public school adventure…. Wisdom from 10-Year-Olds I am someo... posted on Feb 27 2015 (19,181 reads)

do Shakespeare’s plays tell us about how to run classrooms in an unequal society? The school as factory was a predominant metaphor for education in the middle of the last century. Schools were to churn out young people ready for roles as workers and consumers. In current debates, the laboratory is the model, with successful education defined as controlling variables to produce desired outcomes. In Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty, Jay Gillen, a Baltimore public school teacher, vividly shows the limitations of both models. In each, authorities define successful outcomes in ways that reduce learning to a matter o... posted on Mar 10 2015 (15,558 reads)