Education innovation in the slums.

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html

Following watching a video on ‘Tedtalk.com’ by Charles Leadbeater : Education innovation in the slums I found his talk very interesting looking at the information he had gathered whilst researching education in the slums across the world.

Charles Leadbeater went to a place called ‘Monkey Hill’ in Rio which has one of the fastest growing young population in the world. At the age of fourteen you will find that the majority of children will drop out of school as they may find it very boring, they may feel that they have better things to do with their time or as in many cases they may go on to work in the ever growing drugs trade. In this video Charles Leadbeater shows us a fourteen year old boy who dropped out of school and went onto to work in the drugs trade within a short period of time he was turning over $200,000 a week. This just shows how appealing this terrible lifestyle can appear to be. 

CDI’s are being introduced gradually across slums in certain areas by various social entrepreneurs, CDI’s are community centres with computers that children can have regular access to. The idea is that these computers are there to make learning both fun and accessible. There are also some schools in the slums set up by nuns, but you will find that at least half of the children in these schools will have no parents, the majority of the rest of the children will probably only have one parent.

These schools do not follow a curriculum like we do in the UK, their schools are there teach they the basic life skills to stay alive, how to earn an honest living and very importantly making aids an important issue. One way of learning that is very different from schools in the UK is that the start of the day is opened with a question, task or game rather than diving straight into a school lesson. This firstly gets the attention of the children as it will involve discussing/playing/doing something relevant and interesting to them. This may not seem like it is part of learning but it can then develop into a project whether it be music/dance/art or many more.

One part of the video that did interest me, which I have seen on documentaries previously, is the learning bus. Asia is full of building sites and on each building site there are approximately 30,000 children, which is enough to house a city. On most of these sites you will find a bus which is actually a school, which gives these large amounts of children the hope to have an educated future.

Other than schooling there are success stories where children have gone on to learn a trade such as carpentry, you will see one success story on this video.

Given the situations that these slums are in I do think a lot can be learnt from them, obviously we are in a much better off environment but the strategies of learning could definitely be approached.