Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Poverty is not a disability

Shukla Bose is giving a TED talk on teaching slum children one-child at a time. It's amazing how much children can learn. A lot of people would just laugh and say these children can't learn. In my personal experience, I have been told to my face by a Barang (a foreign white guy) that Cambodian children, most of them poor, can't learn because they didn't have proper pre-natal care. There might be some truth in it, but I take it as a projection of his lack of competence to teach well. Through out my teaching experience, I have learned that they CAN learn. You just need to know how they learn things and adopt your teaching style accordingly.

This video is worth watching: http://www.ted.com/talks/shukla_bose_teaching_one_child_at_a_time.html

I agree with her. Quality comes first, and scale (quantity) can come later. However, I don't like her not-for-profit way of deliverying the service. I think it's too dependent on donors' funding and not self-sustaining. The question is: how can we make this a social venture model instead?

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