Anne Johnson responding to: Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movment

Lessons about teaching and learning:

• Learning improves life 
• Learning is functional
• Learning is problem-solving
• Find the right individuals to activate learning/change - in this case Bunker Roy found grandmothers to be the most powerful change agents
• Use the tools that best allow the individual to learn - puppets, sign language
• Learning does not require a certificate or official permission from an institution and/or another individual 
• Certificates and diplomas signal one type of learning, but expertise/knowledge/motivation exists without these 
• Solutions lie within the community if you recognize and tap talent/knowledge/individuals - recognizing talent and accessing it
• Decentralize and demystify "education"
• Seek individual who want to work hard and accept challenge - not those seeking money

I am discarding the prompts for the moment and responding from a personal perspective, because Bunker Roy tapped into something that really forms my philosophy of education and takes me back to the initial reading you gave us about education and economics.

 I think about my life and what education has meant to me.  I grew up in a tiny town in a two bedroom rent house in a family of five.  Neither my mother or father graduated from college.  Throughout our childhood years, my parents would say, "When you grow up and go to college . . . "  We certainly lived the reality of limited education: a job that required my father to travel for as much as six weeks at a time,  hand me down clothes, and one pair of shoes at the beginning of school year with the hope that we didn't grow too quickly.  "When you grow up and go to college" was not about the certificate or diploma for my parents.  It was an economic reality.  Go to college so you will have opportunity, you will have a good job, so you will be able to do the things we could not.  They understood education allows a person to have a better life (financially - I would submit that there is something pretty wonderful about the world and family I grew up in).

And they were right . . . my husband and I have enjoyed the benefits of our educations and the opportunities that it has brought us.  We lived in Africa for seven years and once again the outcome of limited education reveals itself all too clearly.  Babies who do not survive childhood because there is little understanding of simple sanitation practices, immunizations, and nutrition.  Nations whose citizens are poorly prepared to practice democracy when it is adopted as their new form of government.  Mortality rates significantly higher than those of developing nations.  The list is endless. 

Knowledge in any form is a powerful tool.  Knowledge without purpose or direction?  Knowledge that benefits only self?  I'll keep thinking on this for days to come.