Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Mave Higgins, and this is Solvable Interviews with
Speaker 1: the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's
Speaker 1: biggest problems. So my solvable is to redefine education and
Speaker 1: to create curriculum, better culgy and school cultures which will
Speaker 1: enable children to think and behave like democratic citizens and
Speaker 1: not just be looking at and technical education for the
Speaker 1: labor force, so that in the next ten or fifteen years,
Speaker 1: all the children of the world, actually, but let's say
Speaker 1: just India can learn to be learned, to be educated
Speaker 1: to be good democratic citizens. That is doctor Urashi Sani,
Speaker 1: the renowned educator and social entrepreneur. She's the founder and
Speaker 1: CEO of Study Hall Educational Foundation. Today's solvable is about
Speaker 1: social justice. It's about education that teaches us to think
Speaker 1: critically and become more engaged citizens. As you'll hear, all
Speaker 1: of these things are connected and they apply to every
Speaker 1: one of us wherever we live. Doctor Sannie's focus is
Speaker 1: in India. She grew up there and works there today.
Speaker 1: She believes that radically redefining education will enable young people
Speaker 1: to solve some of our most intractable problems. Gender inequality,
Speaker 1: class inequality, and extreme poverty. She is really thinking big.
Speaker 1: Across India, almost forty percent of girls that are between
Speaker 1: fifteen and eighteen years old drop out of school and college.
Speaker 1: Most of them do so not because they get a job,
Speaker 1: but because they're forced to take on household chores or
Speaker 1: they have to start begging. Child marriage is a major
Speaker 1: force taking girls out of school too. Indian girls account
Speaker 1: for a third of the world's seven one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty million child brides. The benefits of keeping girls in
Speaker 1: school are enormous, and not just for the lives and
Speaker 1: opportunities of those individual girls. It's tough though. While poverty
Speaker 1: in India is declining, tens of millions of people still
Speaker 1: live in extreme poverty, unable to access any education. So
Speaker 1: there's all that to face down. But the brilliance of
Speaker 1: doctor Sannie is that her work is much more than
Speaker 1: stamping out illiteracy and keeping girls in school. Doctor Sannie
Speaker 1: taps education for its potential to develop a social and
Speaker 1: political consciousness in students. Teaching girls and boys that no
Speaker 1: one person is more valuable than another and empowering them
Speaker 1: to live their lives differently is a solvable that crosses
Speaker 1: borders easily. It's universal truth. Doctor Sannie has been working
Speaker 1: for the rights of children and women for more than
Speaker 1: thirty years now. Starting with a tiny preschool in her garage,
Speaker 1: her Prema Schools have expanded into India's public schools, and
Speaker 1: by doing so, she now reaches about one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: girls in a thousand schools and around half a million
Speaker 1: people in total. So let's take a listen now to
Speaker 1: doctor or Vatti Sani in conversation with Ann Applebaum. Tell
Speaker 1: me what it is about this problem that made you
Speaker 1: want to solve it. I was raised in Puna, which
Speaker 1: is on the western part of India, in a middle
Speaker 1: class household, and my parents sent me to an English
Speaker 1: medium convent school which was one of the best in
Speaker 1: the country by the way, it had the best results,
Speaker 1: and I really did well. I finished a high school
Speaker 1: education and I did well, and within a year my
Speaker 1: father arranged a marriage for Melian. I was married off.
Speaker 1: So as I grew up, I was married, I had
Speaker 1: two children, and I really reflected on my education and
Speaker 1: felt that though it gave me many technicals skills in
Speaker 1: that instance, it was a quality education, but what it
Speaker 1: didn't do for me, and that was critical. It did
Speaker 1: not teach me that I was an equal person and
Speaker 1: that I had the right to use these technical skills
Speaker 1: for my own life to give me some control over
Speaker 1: my own life. I never thought to question my father
Speaker 1: when he arraigned this marriage for me and I was
Speaker 1: barely seventeen. And that's when I began to think that
Speaker 1: even though it was considered a very high quality education,
Speaker 1: it had really failed me as it failed thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of young women in India millions reely. And that's
Speaker 1: what started me off on the journey of looking at
Speaker 1: education critically and thinking that a great deal, that it
Speaker 1: needed to be redefined, that it wasn't doing the job
Speaker 1: that I think it could do. And I want to
Speaker 1: quote Pallyslavski. He's a dramatist and he said that the
Speaker 1: goal of education is not just to know, but to live.
Speaker 1: And so my education gave me skills, It gave me knowledge,
Speaker 1: it gave me information, but it didn't really give me
Speaker 1: important skills that I needed to live my life. And it,
Speaker 1: as a woman in India, most importantly, didn't teach me
Speaker 1: that I was an equal person, that I deserved everything
Speaker 1: that everybody else got. So that my brothers went off
Speaker 1: to engineering college and commerce education, and I was married off.
Speaker 1: There was no opportunity for me to really redefine or
Speaker 1: even drive me the driver of my own life, and
Speaker 1: my education did nothing to help me think critically about
Speaker 1: a system that would assign this role of this position
Speaker 1: to women and two girls. And that's what started me
Speaker 1: off on my journey, and that's how I founded my school, really,
Speaker 1: and within the school, the goal was that was really
Speaker 1: our lab to look at. Sorry, what kind of school
Speaker 1: was it? It was a preschool to begin with six
Speaker 1: children in my garage, and the goal was to see
Speaker 1: what children want to learn, what the children need to learn,
Speaker 1: and how do you embed curriculum, how do you embed
Speaker 1: pedagogical practices in people's lives and lives are very complex
Speaker 1: really that even though I live in my life as
Speaker 1: an individual, my life is embedded in a social system,
Speaker 1: which is embedded and impacted by a political system. So
Speaker 1: when you look at how people live their lives, you
Speaker 1: have to look beyond the individual to the social system,
Speaker 1: to the political system. And then education must help you
Speaker 1: address that. It must first of all take that into consideration,
Speaker 1: and they must teach us how to navigate that system.
Speaker 1: How to position yourself in the system. This is how
Speaker 1: we define the goal of education, that it must help
Speaker 1: us to ask and answer the question who am I?
Speaker 1: And how am I related to the universe and others
Speaker 1: in it? What is the universe like? What is my
Speaker 1: universe like? And not just my physical universe, my social
Speaker 1: my political universe? When am I positioned in it? How
Speaker 1: am I related to others in it? Am I at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ladder? Who has power? Who doesn't
Speaker 1: have power? So while we learn traditional subjects like mathematics
Speaker 1: and science and history and geography, they must enable us
Speaker 1: to answer these questions. And if they don't, that's a
Speaker 1: job very poorly done. And so for the last thirty
Speaker 1: three years, we've been trying to find a solution to
Speaker 1: this problem. I can't say we you know, we've cracked
Speaker 1: the problem, we found the exact solution, but we have
Speaker 1: found many solutions to address this. Tell me how you
Speaker 1: have gone about designing and writing new curriculum. Have you
Speaker 1: studied how it's done in other places? Have you worked
Speaker 1: out of your own experienced you consult teachers? So you know,
Speaker 1: I got my PhD and my master's in education from
Speaker 1: JUC Berkeley, which is a very diverse, very vibrant kind
Speaker 1: of university, and that's where I really gained the social
Speaker 1: and political perspective. In fact, a life changing event was
Speaker 1: when I read Paula Ferri. He's a great educator and
Speaker 1: philosopher from Brazil, and he really looked at literacy in
Speaker 1: a very different way. He said it was revolutionary, it
Speaker 1: was a humanizing force. He said that you read the
Speaker 1: world in order to read the world, which means that
Speaker 1: if literacy doesn't teach you how to read your own world,
Speaker 1: then it fails you. And that was a real aha moment.
Speaker 1: I said, Yeah, I have a first master's in philosophy,
Speaker 1: so I liked metaphysical questions anological question but this was
Speaker 1: really a way of marrying both my interests. And how
Speaker 1: did I go about it by reading many education philosophers,
Speaker 1: Christian Motiving one is it very great, and in philosopher
Speaker 1: vent the natric or John Dewey, Paula Frere, who was
Speaker 1: really very very influential in my thinking, and many others.
Speaker 1: But most importantly, how we developed this curricular by it
Speaker 1: was by watching our students very carefully engaging with them,
Speaker 1: and that was our whole direction to the teachers as well,
Speaker 1: that you must engage with students very carefully and learn
Speaker 1: from them how to teach them. So in all my curricula,
Speaker 1: I've built a curricula on a critical feminist pedoglogy and
Speaker 1: it's based on critical dialogues, which are again Parli Frere's term.
Speaker 1: And it has emerged from a series of critical dialogues
Speaker 1: with young girls, adolescent girls. And we've done that with
Speaker 1: boys now, and that's our method. We are way of
Speaker 1: developing curriculus a emergent one that it must emerge from
Speaker 1: grounded reality. It must emerge from students. Nobody consults students,
Speaker 1: and you know, you build, and we don't build anything
Speaker 1: in a lab. I write no curriculu sitting in my office.
Speaker 1: I will write them retrospectively after I have spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time working with students in the classroom. So
Speaker 1: in fact, the students are the authors. Partly they are
Speaker 1: co authors of the curriculum with their teachers. I never
Speaker 1: go in with a blueprint that oh, I go in
Speaker 1: with an idea. I go in with a theory and
Speaker 1: a philosophy, and after that it emerges from conversations, from
Speaker 1: actual work with children in classrooms. Can you give me
Speaker 1: some examples of how this is different from how girls
Speaker 1: or eardie, anybody would have been taught in India before.
Speaker 1: Of course, I went to school fifty years ago at
Speaker 1: the same time. Nobody ever ever, you know, it was
Speaker 1: the way good school, so I don't want to bash it.
Speaker 1: By the way, and the teachers they did what they knew,
Speaker 1: and the principal did what she knew. These were British nouns,
Speaker 1: and the teachers were Indian teachers, but they were guided
Speaker 1: by them. You know, they taught me. They never ever
Speaker 1: thought to ask me about my personal life. They never
Speaker 1: ever thought that that was relevant. They never ever thought
Speaker 1: to address the issue of how unequal things were, how
Speaker 1: an unequal the patriarchal social structure of India was. And
Speaker 1: so it didn't change my life. I had to do
Speaker 1: that myself. So how it's different is that we think
Speaker 1: that of course girls students, boys and girls both or
Speaker 1: in case you asked about girls, they you should welcome
Speaker 1: their lives into the classroom. For example, if we're dealing
Speaker 1: with a case of child marriage, a huge problem in India,
Speaker 1: by the way, which has a solution, I will tell
Speaker 1: them how my mind was really almost a child marriage, right,
Speaker 1: So I will tell them about what it felt like
Speaker 1: for me, and the girls immediately will talk about oh yes,
Speaker 1: and you know, Nandini was married off in fifth grade
Speaker 1: and nobody even told her that she was getting married.
Speaker 1: When she came home, she saw that there was some
Speaker 1: kind of a party happening, and so her mother told her,
Speaker 1: get dress, get dressed, She's what's going on? She's you're
Speaker 1: getting engaged today? And she didn't fitness high school and
Speaker 1: she was married off. So I asked them that, okay,
Speaker 1: so what is it like for girls after they get
Speaker 1: married then? And then they will tell you, Oh, they
Speaker 1: treat it like servants. They have babies very quickly, they
Speaker 1: have sex when they're not ready for it, and they
Speaker 1: have no power in their new households. Everybody they live
Speaker 1: by permission. Everyone tells them what to do, and their
Speaker 1: lives are pretty awful. Then don't their parents know this?
Speaker 1: Your parents know? That's so why did it just happened?
Speaker 1: Or because the social system is like that? I said,
Speaker 1: so let's look at the social system and why is
Speaker 1: it so cruel to girls? And do you know why
Speaker 1: can't it be changed? And do you think it. Can
Speaker 1: they say I should be changed? And can it? This
Speaker 1: is the art? But how it is human made and
Speaker 1: human beings can change it and you and I can
Speaker 1: change it. So that's how the conversation would go. And
Speaker 1: from there you bring in history, all history and even
Speaker 1: you know, feminist movements that have changed things. Also, how
Speaker 1: there are laws that came into being because people realize
Speaker 1: it's cruel to girls and why it shouldn't happen. But
Speaker 1: nobody follows the law because tradition and culture overrides it.
Speaker 1: And who makes tradition and cultures? We do? I think
Speaker 1: the goal is for them to understand that as citizens,
Speaker 1: you know, we the people give to ourselves, adopt and
Speaker 1: enact the constitution, right, so whose we the people? To
Speaker 1: help them think of themselves as we the people And
Speaker 1: it's very impowering. So through and nobody ever did that. Ever,
Speaker 1: no one does it in many schools the traditional curriculum
Speaker 1: and not just in India, by the way, I think
Speaker 1: everywhere does not think that it needs to include this
Speaker 1: in the curriculum. These kinds of dialogues, these kinds of
Speaker 1: conversation to set aside school space. When people talk of
Speaker 1: progressive education, how do we get more technology so that
Speaker 1: you can do better teaching of math and science. Heck,
Speaker 1: we've had better teaching of math and science in the
Speaker 1: last fifty years and has to change the world. Are
Speaker 1: we in a better place? Why do we not think
Speaker 1: that maybe we should drop fifty percent of what's going
Speaker 1: on in the traditional curriculum and include teaching for democratic citizenship.
Speaker 1: And it can be done while you teach math, while
Speaker 1: you teach science, while you teach history, and you should
Speaker 1: have a special space to teach it as well like
Speaker 1: you teach anything else. The pedagogy has to be a
Speaker 1: critical pedagogy. It must include critical dialogues. It must include
Speaker 1: enabling and encouraging students to bring their own experiences in it,
Speaker 1: to reflect critically on them, and then to show them
Speaker 1: that things can be different, to become solvers, to become
Speaker 1: problem solvers. Okay, so you have worked in your own
Speaker 1: schools and you've designed a curriculumal a curriculum like this,
Speaker 1: Tell me how you spread it to others? How do
Speaker 1: you convince other schools to adopt it? So what they
Speaker 1: have done in the last since twenty eleventh rarely that
Speaker 1: actually we were doing this and we video all these
Speaker 1: dialogues and somebody from UNICEF saw it and she said, hey,
Speaker 1: this is great, and we are working with these public
Speaker 1: schools with very poor adolescent girls and they could really
Speaker 1: benefit from it. Do you think you could turn it
Speaker 1: into a curriculum and help us contrain their teacher as it? Sure,
Speaker 1: and we did it for thirty eight schools. So we
Speaker 1: got their teachers, we helped build a gender lens in
Speaker 1: them personally, first all to look at their own lives
Speaker 1: and see how gender it impacted it. They were mostly
Speaker 1: female teachers, and then we taught them how to practice
Speaker 1: critical pedagogy in their classrooms, how to redefine their role
Speaker 1: as teachers so that they became advocates of girls' rights
Speaker 1: and help girls become advocates for themselves advocates. So we
Speaker 1: took it to thirty eight schools. They liked it, they
Speaker 1: asked us to take it to another hundred schools, and
Speaker 1: now we've taken it to over a thousand schools through
Speaker 1: teacher training and then a lot of offsite post training
Speaker 1: support of teachers. We've also built a critical room for
Speaker 1: boys now and so we're training men on how men
Speaker 1: female teachers as well, how to think about masculinity differently,
Speaker 1: how to see men as advocates for girls' rights, because girls'
Speaker 1: rights are human rights, and that's what we've been doing
Speaker 1: for the last year and a half. As well. We
Speaker 1: engage in large scale social campaigns, so that's girls and
Speaker 1: teachers and parents march in communities, you know, protesting against
Speaker 1: oppression of girls and women, and mobilizing public opinion for
Speaker 1: the girl's right to education and girls right to their
Speaker 1: own lives, against hid marriage, against domestic violence. And now
Speaker 1: recently the girls came up with this paternal alcoholism is
Speaker 1: a big problem. They said, that's the next campaign we're
Speaker 1: going to do, and we want fathers to engage in
Speaker 1: that as well. What about traditional civics education, in other words,
Speaker 1: teaching people this is how the court system works, this
Speaker 1: is how the parliament works. It's about pride, it's about country,
Speaker 1: it's about the history of democracy, the constitution and so on.
Speaker 1: How do you incorporate that kind of education into what
Speaker 1: you do. See that is part of the traditional curriculum,
Speaker 1: and of course we leverage that. Here's the difference, though,
Speaker 1: There are two ways you can approach it. One is
Speaker 1: where you explain the system as it is you take
Speaker 1: a technical approach where you describe the system, you explain
Speaker 1: how it works, and you said you should be loyal
Speaker 1: to the system and you should support it. Right. The
Speaker 1: other approach you can take is that you explain the
Speaker 1: system and you take a critical view of it, not
Speaker 1: just the political system, but also the social system. And
Speaker 1: you get students to understand that they are responsible for
Speaker 1: following this system but also changing it where it falls short,
Speaker 1: but most importantly for understanding that what does it mean
Speaker 1: to be a citizen? Right, and to explain that these
Speaker 1: constitutions are wonderful. India has a wonderful constitution, by the way.
Speaker 1: So to feel responsible to realize the constitution and then
Speaker 1: to be feel responsible to also change it, to participate actively,
Speaker 1: to understand power. That what the constitution has done is
Speaker 1: with its idea of equality, especially in very hierarchical societies
Speaker 1: like India and you know his historically even Britain and
Speaker 1: the US, that it has taught us that power should
Speaker 1: be equally distributed. That's the whole idea of equality. Now
Speaker 1: we all believe that equality, liberty, fraternity, these are the
Speaker 1: cornerstones of democracy. Right, who's following it? Our social structures
Speaker 1: following it, our families democratic, our schools democratic? Is power
Speaker 1: equally distributed? If it isn't, will isn't that a problem?
Speaker 1: And so would you do? Would you do to realize that? So,
Speaker 1: especially in the case of gender, it is so unequal
Speaker 1: that patriarchal societies have no place in a democracy daily
Speaker 1: They should not exist, but they do. They're firmly entrenched.
Speaker 1: So how do you come back that? How do you
Speaker 1: change that without having a war between the sexes in
Speaker 1: a peaceful manner, in a collaborative manner, Which is why
Speaker 1: we changed to boys as well. We said, hey, we
Speaker 1: need to get them to engage in this as well,
Speaker 1: and we need to teach them that patriarchy is not
Speaker 1: their fault, but it does give them more power, and
Speaker 1: it is very cruel to their sisters, their mothers, to
Speaker 1: all the women they love. So what are they going
Speaker 1: to do about it? What's their solution? Can you give
Speaker 1: me some examples students of yours who were who were
Speaker 1: motivated by the kind of curriculum that you taught them,
Speaker 1: things that they've gone on to do afterwards. They have
Speaker 1: become decision makers in their own families. They have been
Speaker 1: able to stop their own child marriages and others. They
Speaker 1: have become the drivers of their lives, and in several
Speaker 1: cases they become the heads of their families, and they
Speaker 1: have huge They have inspired a great deal of respect
Speaker 1: in their own families and in the community. And to
Speaker 1: give you a concrete example, when my students were in
Speaker 1: eighth grade, they came to me and they said that,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a great thing that this has happened,
Speaker 1: that we are changing. But do you know that many
Speaker 1: girls in our society and many people in our society,
Speaker 1: they don't look at life like this. So what can
Speaker 1: we do about that? I said, so, what do you think?
Speaker 1: So they formed a group called Nangana means a brave woman?
Speaker 1: What are your women really? And what they did was
Speaker 1: we video all our critical dialogue. They took those videos
Speaker 1: and they helped public meetings, They helped meeting community meetings
Speaker 1: in people's homes, invited women to that and then had
Speaker 1: the same critical dialogues with the women and why do
Speaker 1: you tolerate this? Why does a woman never retaliate when
Speaker 1: a man beats up? When our husband beats up? Is
Speaker 1: that right? Is that wrong? What can you do? And
Speaker 1: then the idea of the campaign really emerged from this work,
Speaker 1: right so, and this was really directed and spearheaded by
Speaker 1: our own students. In terms of the boys, that work
Speaker 1: is fairly recent, but even there, we had a focus
Speaker 1: group discussion with parents of the boys we've been working
Speaker 1: with for eighteen months and that's this is what they said.
Speaker 1: These are parents, mothers and fathers both, and they said
Speaker 1: that our boys have started helping with household jaws more.
Speaker 1: They have started advocating for their sisters, also advocating for
Speaker 1: their continual education and for a delay in child marriage.
Speaker 1: Boys have said that they will refuse to take DALDI
Speaker 1: in their marriages. So they have learned to assume leadership
Speaker 1: roles in their own lives and they walk alongside with
Speaker 1: the girl students for the campaigns. Most of us our
Speaker 1: alumni are now like twenty five, twenty six, the oldest
Speaker 1: one would be about that old. So so far, in
Speaker 1: their own personal lives and in their own local communities,
Speaker 1: they've been very effective. What do you say to the
Speaker 1: people who say, all, right, this is all very well,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're glad there's some of this in
Speaker 1: our schools, but in the real world of work, people
Speaker 1: are also going to have to learn math and science,
Speaker 1: and those things need to take up time in the curriculum,
Speaker 1: and they require really difficult and focused education, and they're
Speaker 1: not you know, we don't have time for all this conversation.
Speaker 1: We need to, we need to. We need to make
Speaker 1: sure that people are ready to live in this rapidly
Speaker 1: changing anywhere. Work itself is changing very quickly. We offer
Speaker 1: our own schools as an example. Our school has a
Speaker 1: retention rate of eighty eight percent, which is twice the
Speaker 1: national average. Students have higher achievement scores, and ninety seven
Speaker 1: percent of those who we retain go on to higher education,
Speaker 1: so we are not short changing them where technical education
Speaker 1: is concerned, and we are able to do this alongside
Speaker 1: when you build the capacity to aspire, when you build
Speaker 1: a self and teach girls that you know you have
Speaker 1: the right to do things for yourself. It's a real
Speaker 1: driver so that they work very hard at trying to
Speaker 1: succeed academically as well. And our results are very good.
Speaker 1: Our academic results, our achievement scores are very good, our
Speaker 1: transition rate to higher education is very good. So clearly
Speaker 1: there is a way to find the time if you
Speaker 1: think this is important. For example, in maths in seventh grade.
Speaker 1: We teach them proportion. We teach them how to derive
Speaker 1: area of a given room or any service. Here's what
Speaker 1: we did. We told our students, the middle class students
Speaker 1: back away. These were middle class students who live very comfortably.
Speaker 1: And we told them, okay, here's the thing. Let's buddy
Speaker 1: you with stuod girls and boys from very poor homes.
Speaker 1: We have schools that also work with poster and said,
Speaker 1: then why don't you do this? If they let you,
Speaker 1: can you go to their homes and measure their home
Speaker 1: and derive the area of it and also find out
Speaker 1: what is the square foot area per person in that home?
Speaker 1: And now I want to do the same thing, just
Speaker 1: to your bedroom. Find out what the area is and
Speaker 1: what's the square foot area per person in that So
Speaker 1: they did that, and then not only did they learn
Speaker 1: area and proportion, but they really learned how people live,
Speaker 1: and they learn to develop empathy and understand they severe inequality.
Speaker 1: That you had seven people living in a ten by
Speaker 1: twelve room, one room, and here was this boy living
Speaker 1: in a fifteen by ten bedroom all by himselves, and
Speaker 1: that was just his bedroom. And it was really an
Speaker 1: AHA moment. That I think will change the way he
Speaker 1: looks at class and poverty and will automatically start thinking
Speaker 1: of solutions. Then, so I think in terms of, you know,
Speaker 1: the solvable, that you can't have just a few people
Speaker 1: thinking of the solvable. You need to educate everyone to
Speaker 1: be thinking of solutions to the problems. But you're not
Speaker 1: doing that if you only have an education system that
Speaker 1: is training children to fit into the world the way
Speaker 1: it is and to work the system for their own
Speaker 1: personal benefit. To rise up the career ladder, that you
Speaker 1: have to have a generation of solution seekers, a generation
Speaker 1: of children who will look at problems they think of
Speaker 1: themselves as impacted by the social system, and even that
Speaker 1: they're not thinking that, they think it's some natural order.
Speaker 1: I know I did, and the sad part is, fifty
Speaker 1: years later, many girls still think. So. Do you think
Speaker 1: it's the curriculum that you've developed in the way of
Speaker 1: teaching that you've been that you've been practicing. Do you
Speaker 1: think this would work in other countries? Oh? Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1: The idea came from Brazil because it's a pedagogy. Really,
Speaker 1: it's not a curriculum as much as it's a pedagogy
Speaker 1: in terms of it's a teaching methodology, it's a way
Speaker 1: of transacting practice in a classroom, and so whatever the world,
Speaker 1: whatever the life, it can provide the content of education.
Speaker 1: How much can this be scaled? How many schools do
Speaker 1: you think you can affect? I'm not going to be
Speaker 1: the only solution provider, right that. I think there are
Speaker 1: several ways of scaling. One is, of course, in a
Speaker 1: brick and motor way that in a school by school
Speaker 1: by school by school, and you hope to reach many schools.
Speaker 1: So far, we've been able to reach half a million students, teachers, communities,
Speaker 1: and we hope to really meet ten million in the
Speaker 1: next five years. That's our goal, and we want to
Speaker 1: do it by building partnerships with other organizations who are
Speaker 1: working by trying to influence government right. We helped with
Speaker 1: policy briefs. We've written a policy brief help get them
Speaker 1: to see the importance of doing this and changing their
Speaker 1: curriculum right. And we help to campaign extensively in communities
Speaker 1: to change mindsets. And the campaigns are not just by us,
Speaker 1: thereby all the teachers we impact, so that it's an
Speaker 1: exponential growth. Just recently we were co facilitators of a
Speaker 1: workshop in Washington, DC, where we had forty organizations from
Speaker 1: all over the world and we work shared our voice curriculum.
Speaker 1: There was a great deal of interest and from Africa,
Speaker 1: from Latin America, and so it's offered free of cost
Speaker 1: on their technology platform which they can use and we're
Speaker 1: happy to help with training using webinars. So technology is
Speaker 1: the other huge game changer in achieving scale now so
Speaker 1: that it can be used to enable our reach to
Speaker 1: millions and millions of people. We video all our practices,
Speaker 1: so we not only offer print curricula, but we also
Speaker 1: offer dynamic videos which will show you how it's happening
Speaker 1: in the classroom. What can people listening to help spread
Speaker 1: these kinds of ideas and bring them to their own communities.
Speaker 1: For one, I'm hoping that they will look at the
Speaker 1: scope of education differently with a wider, deeper social and
Speaker 1: political lens. And of course we are very glad to
Speaker 1: share everything that we have learned over thirty three years
Speaker 1: which we have on the web, and we're very happy
Speaker 1: to do webinars and to share all our work with them.
Speaker 1: We're also very happy to engage in conversations with people
Speaker 1: who feel that this is an important work to do
Speaker 1: and would like to learn more or share more their
Speaker 1: own thoughts or have questions. We're happy to do that anytime.
Speaker 1: Our information is easily available, and what they can do
Speaker 1: is spread the word to other parents, other childre other
Speaker 1: teachers that this is the way the future of education
Speaker 1: should be. What a future that could be. Maybe you
Speaker 1: found yourself wishing that you had access to an education
Speaker 1: like the one doctor Sanny provides, not just learning math
Speaker 1: and literacy, but actually getting a social and political perspective
Speaker 1: on the world. I certainly did, and I also I
Speaker 1: loved hearing about the girls in her schools forming their
Speaker 1: own warrior women groups and holding community meetings like engaging
Speaker 1: older women and parents and boys. It's just so exciting.
Speaker 1: For more on Doctor Sanny, you can watch her ted
Speaker 1: talk or you can read her latest book. It's called
Speaker 1: Reaching for the Sky Empowering Girls through Education. Solvable is
Speaker 1: a collaboration between Putkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with
Speaker 1: production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth
Speaker 1: Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neil LaBelle.
Speaker 1: Researched by sher Vincent Engineering by Jason Gambrel and the
Speaker 1: great folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal
Speaker 1: Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carli Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn
Speaker 1: more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot
Speaker 1: org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.