I've been in Kentucky exactly 3 weeks now, and now I'm balancing TWO blogs! So please check out our human rights blog for more updates on what I'm doing.
So I often worry that my life is leading me in too many directions and it's never going to come together and make enough sense. But after some time feeling worried about this, I'm happy to report that it's still all coming together. This is truly turning out to be a sabbatical. My time here is going to help me develop my purpose in life -- somehow.
I was taking a walk today and started talking to myself in Thai, explaining to myself my utopia of education. Here it is.
All of us would start to learn at a very early age about health, law, and learning and teaching. These would be taught in a manner that started with our cultural framework, so as to facilitate an internalization of our ancestors' values. Maybe in kindergarten we would learn gardening and first grade house building, in addition to really simple health, law, and how to learn according to our culture's values.
We would progress towards learning international law, health practices in various other cultures, and other frameworks for teaching and learning. So the teacher has this responsibility to instill cultural values in kids, and then shows them other frameworks that allow for developing students' creativity and critical thinking.
All of this of course is done through participatory learning, place based classrooms, teacher-student, student-teacher relationships...oooh utopia.
I also chose these subjects as a focus because through personal experience I believe that we should all -- whether we have access to higher education or not, be well-enough educated in these areas to not constantly feel we need to rely on experts, some of which only get richer by advocating for our continued and increasing lack of knowledge. So if everyone were educated this way -- whether they could read/write or not, my ideas is that the current societal structures would break down ... from the grassroots on up. The trickle up theory. Just imagine if all of us were lawyers!
Yours, Vanessa.
Coming soon: crazy old activist teachers -- prairie monk, BB lake restorer, mountain forest woman.
