Gandhi Village & City Montessori

[chris macrae]

GVM started about 1925 after Gandhi's last forum at the quakers house in london- since his conversion from a london barrister of law in south africa 1906, gandhi's peace revolution was predicated in change next gen's education system first then spend last 25 years of his life engaging elder's british constitution's reformation(something my grandfather spent last 25 years of his career on to)

.small may be beautiful but in large newly independent developing nations, open education entrepreneurship is absolutely critical. this is our #1 finding after launching search for net gen's entrepreneurial revolution curriculum at The Economist in 1972- coming soon: why is this finding so future shocking

[e-mail] Foundation of Unacknowledged Giant DC 301 881 1655

 urgent millennials journalism project= world record book of job creators

online library of norman macrae-- 

Oddly after independence, bureaucratic indian government throttled education- whether village montessori still scales anywhere today in india is unknown to me: what is known is that fortunately a father and wife team started up GCM -  city montessori in Lucknow aroun 1960- now the world's largest schooling system run by one family _Mr and Mrs Jagdish Gandhi and their daughters Sunita and Geeta and ... www.cmseducation.org 

and to see village montessoris thrive go look at anyone of the 40000+ vilage schools connected by BRAC in bangladesh - the open education infrastructure secret of bangladesh's race tp end poverty

This thread serves to curate various obeservations from Lucknow and BRAC

[chris macrae]

Sunita Gandhi correspondence Oct20

A way to address the individual child in the schooling process based on the premise of competition with oneself, not others

 

Yes, there is one education person in the DC area who is doing quite a bit of dedicated work in the field of education and peace. He is Andrew Kutt, Principal and founder of the Family Oneness School, in Chevy Chase, MD. (www.onenessfamily.org). I think very highly of him.

 

I am briefly sharing herewith something which I have been developing for the last nearly 7 years which is quite exciting as a way to address the individual child in the schooling process based on the premise of competition with oneself, not others. It would be nice also if we could continue the process of innovations and creative thinking begun at the recent conference Global TIE (www.globaltie.net).

 

After working for 10 years with the World Bank and having traveled to and studied educational systems in over 30 countries, I believe small changes at the margins of education are not adequate to get the results we seek from it. The assumptions on which current education is based will have to be challenged. If the 20th century was the most brutal and the most murderous in human history (as per Dr Kofi Annan), how can the 21st century be different? What will trigger the changes? Why? Indeed, 'If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.'

 

Education is the primary sector where a change in direction is needed and which will bring about huge dividends. It is good that this year's Nobel prize went to Mohd. Yunus. I am also intrigued, however, that education has never really featured heavily in these and other awards except when in 2002, CMS became the world's first school to receive the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. Indeed, if the future is within the four walls of a school, then why is it that schools typically do not assume their rightful role. What are the contraints?

 

Governments have become gatekeepers to the old in education with their narrow definitions and requirements of curriculum and teacher training based on the old premise. Every new teacher wants to perfect the old and do it better than others. Innovations are added to a core which is dysfunctional in its design. The state and national boards define human excellence in limited terms. Back end, the job providers do not feel education is meeting their present needs and hire increasingly for attitude which is also a random by-product of an educational process directed to material goals. Teacher unions dominate teacher mindsets. Indeed, where does one begin the process of change? If the top down processes, such as goverment policies are hard to change and will take time, can we explore some other ways to begin a process of change?

 

If we think of schooling as a tunnel of learning in which a child enters at some age and then emerges from at some other age, say from age 6 to high school, can we organise education differently within this tunnel of learning so that the outcome is different. First, therefore, we must define the outcome from education, as to what human and other outcomes we expect to see for each child, for example, is he a conscious and caring individual, is she able to appreciate beauty in all its forms, are they aware of the ethos in which we can see all individuals as part of one human family (away from flags, foods and festivals of a multicultural education that at best prepares children for tolerance but does not build the love which is necessary, recognising that we are infact part of one ethos and one world and appreciate this unity in diversity), ability to take ideas from inception to completion, overcoming difficulties along the way and becoming resourceful as human beings, ability to work in teams and also take on leadership roles, peer mediate and conflict prevent and resolve, be able to see the end at the beginning, and also empowered with right attitudes...this all along with core academic skills...which too need to be defined more precisely based on what the workplace new requirements are in the 21st century taking into account the need to create leaders and job providers, creative thinkers, social transformers and the like, and not followers, job seekers and limited thinkers.

 

In 1994, I came up with a model of education which is promoted through the Council for Global Education, www.globaleducation.org -- which provides a new basis for education that redefines educational content (and therefore educational outcome) to include four essential building blocks: Universal Values, Global Understanding, Excellence in All Things and Service to Humanity. It redefines, for example, global understanding to mean developing a love for all human beings, to recognising the oneness of the human family that goes beyond the 3 F's (flags, foods and festivals that we teach currently to develop understanding of diversity). It redefines spiritual and moral values to a consistent vision of values, the universal values that transcend cultural and religious differences, to focus on addressing the all pervasive spirit of each and every child, to nurture the human being to its highest and noblest form, to recognise the need for endorsing the desire of every individual to make a contribution and to serve through the educational process and beyond, to preserve the natural empathy that children have, and finally, to redefine what excellence means through educational process so that every individual is considered as valuable to a family, a society and the world and one who can provide value to each and therefore is already potentially capable. It means recognising that every student and those back benchers can each be a Mahatma Gandhi, if we could only see with those eyes and expect the highest from human potential, to redefine educational excellence as competition with oneself and not others.

 

At a certain moment in history, education must also act as a powerful instrument of profound social transformation and that time has now come. The very definition of what it means to educate has to be rethought and schools must have a new and expanded role. It will, as William Butler Yeats once said: "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

 

Since teachers rely so heavily on assessments and materials, I decided to focus my attention on these two aspects, which are doable immediately. It is for me a way to change the equation from underneath a teacher by making a programme for learning that redefines excellence. These new assessments and materials are based on a new premise, that of competition with oneself. These are completely values consistent with the new model of the four building blocks of education, endorsing these aspects in more than a few ways, but addressing the building block of Excellence in All Things squarely.

The project began as an experiment in Iceland at my charter school, Aslandsskoli, there. After developing it there and pilot testing it, I brought it to India where my parents' schools have served as a big laboratory for the same. The results from these assessments and materials which have been implemented for now 2.5 years have been outstanding. I am in the process of updating our website to share this in a proper way with others. This might take me another week to ten days but will be available in a more detailed form on www.gemsedu.org which also has the link to the work in Iceland.

 

Recently, the UK government has taken an interest in this new set of assessments and materials which I call GEMS (which stands for the Global Education Model of Schooling) with the premise of -- every child a GEM! They called a meeting of a hand-picked group of head teachers/principals at the UK's Department for Education and Skills, the DfES, at its Innovations Unit. This meeting on the 22nd of September was extremely successful and all the six participating schools have decided to undertake a pilot of the programme starting in January and completing in June. If there are significant improvements in student attitudes and skills, I believe there will be parties interested in taking this on to a bigger scale. In the meantime though, my dilemma is how to raise the funds to underpin this work with research from the beginning so that both control and treatment groups can do a survey before and after the pilot that takes into account both qualitative and quantitative aspects, and there are other costs related to running the pilot which I am not passing on to the schools because I want to do this so very much. I am also looking to find those individuals who can help me to figure out how to scale this up, so that masses in India and worldwide and begin to take this on as I believe this will lead to widespread change in the way we perceive education, inside out.

 

It is lovely to know about your father and I hope to study more on his life and to meet you dear 9 year old daughter one day.

 

With kind regards,