WHY WE EXIST
Our mission is to help the 2 billion kids in the world succeed in their future by helping them understand, and use in positive ways, their newly-arriving empowerment.
We support a civilization-level alternative in education: From the current “MESS” i.e. Math, English (or local language), Science, Social Studies—to an education based on Continuous Real-World, High-Impact Projects. We want to convince people, around the world, that this is a better, fundamental alternative to the kind of education offered almost universally to kids in the world today.
Our Core Principles:
STUDENT EMPOWERMENT
BETTERING THEIR WORLD
We know there is more than one way to educate kids.
Our goal is to help create an equally-valid ALTERNATIVE education,
— i.e. an education that Empowers Kids to Better Their World —
that becomes widely accepted and available in the world.
We do this because we strongly believe this alternative education is far better for tomorrow’s kids, and tomorrow’s world, than the education that is being offered to students–almost everywhere–today.
A small “umbrella of essentials” defines the kind of education we promote:
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Empowerment of all kids, through real-world accomplishment
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Enabling and encouraging all kids to Better Their World while they are still students.
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Helping all kids maximize their uniqueness, and acquire, to the best of their abilities, the universal skills of Effective Thinking, Effective Action, Effective Relationships and Effective Accomplishment
We DO NOT believe that any one approach, or school, or system, is “right,” or will “scale” in the same sense that a product can. In fact, viewing education as a “product” (or even as “products”) is something we think is wrong. Because education is so local, and individual, we need millions, or even billions of individualized and contextualized approaches.
—— The alternative we advocate is ——
from:
our current “academic education” whose primary end is to improve individuals (no matter what its bells and whistles),
to:
an Empowering, Real-world, High-Impact, Continuous Project Education whose primary end is to improve the world (and to improve individuals in the process.)
We believe that Math, English (or local language), science, and social studies (“The MESS”) is no longer the right foundation of – or primary organization of – education for all.
Rather, the universal skills of Effective Thinking, Effective Action, Effective Relationships, and Effective Accomplishment are the basic overarching and underlying foundations for life – and therefore for education. Further, each of those categories is composed of universal, acquireable, life-long skills that all individuals should strive to master throughout their schooling and life – applying those skills to activities that they are good at, that better their world, and that they love to do:
Some schools are cages and some schools are wings
–Rubem Alves (Brazil)
Schools that are cages make the birds forget how to fly. Caged birds are under control. Caged birds can be taken anywhere. Caged birds always have an owner. Caged birds are not birds anymore. Because they lost the essence of being a bird: they forgot how to fly.
Schools that are wings do not love caged birds. They love the birds when they are flying. Those schools encourage the birds to fly. They cannot teach them how to fly because this happens inside the birds when they are born. The flight cannot be taught. It can only be encouraged.
We want all kids to have wings, and to fly toward bettering their world!