Building Communities That Thrive.
All tagged education
The rise of the phrase ‘best practices’ ushered in an era of a common language around certain techniques, which has undoubtedly been extremely useful for many teachers and schools. But the way the phrase is used today promotes a way of thinking about education that does more to limit our teachers and students growth than liberate them to reach their full potential.
There is a famous study called the marshmallow test about how impulse control and delayed gratification can predict success later in life… the research around the marshmallow study treated this impulse control as an innate trait. More recently, the study was revisited at the University of Rochester to see if the context mattered. If impulse control can be learned, how is it done?
When you work at the program level for any length of time you feel a great joy, but you also get tired. You get tired because your work is essentially swimming against a much larger current, and no matter how hard you swim against a current, or how many people you get swimming with you, the current is not going to change. The river will flow the way it flows, and in American education, the direction of the current is a dangerous one.
Barefoot is a living testament to the wisdom and capacity of poor people. It’s a statement against those who think solutions need to be imported to places like these. I asked the Barefoot architect how he learned to design buildings if he never studied. “From each other,” he said.
