“Our mission is to inspire millions of bright young people to break away from standardized education, discover their intrinsic interests and talents, and take confident agency in navigating toward their unique learning and professional goals. Learning is a personal web, not a universal ladder.”
Read More“For the past four years, AltSchool has been building a technology-enabled network to empower and connect families, students, and teachers.”
Read More“We believe that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone.”
Read More“The [freespace] movement is an experiment in what is possible when a community shares the gift of physical space.”
Read MoreThe following is in response to Angela’s desire to know what Geoffrey Canada thought was the best way to dig kids out of poverty.
Geoff Canada : “I’ll tell you straight. I’m a father of four. I’ve watched many, many kids who were not my own grow up. I may not have the random-assignment, double-blind studies to prove it, but I can tell you what poor kids need. They need all the things you and I give our own children. What poor kids need is a lot. But you can sum it up by saying that what they need is a decent childhood.”
Here is a TED talk given by Geoff, which is mentioned in the book.
Beau Lotto says, "...your brain only ever makes small steps in its ideas. So whenever you’re in a moment it can only actually shift itself to the next most-likely possible. And the next most likely possible is determined by its assumptions. We call it the space of possibility. You can’t do just anything. Some things are just impossible for you in terms of your perception or in terms of your conception of the world. What's possible is based on your history. So what that means is, where does that leave us with creativity, which we have this concept that you’re linking two things that are very far apart? But if the brain never does big jumps, what’s really happening? And the idea is that, for the person being creative, all they’re doing is making a small step to the next most likely possibility based on their assumptions. But when someone on the outside sees them doing that they think, 'Wow, how did they put those two things that are far apart together?' And the reason why it seems that way is because for the observer they are far apart, they have a different space of possibility. And in their space of possibility they exist way over here. So creativity in this sense is only creative from the outside, not from the inside. For the person being creative they’re making a logical next step. The difference is that their space of possibility is different. They have different assumptions, different biases. In fact they might have a more complex space of possibility, because they have more complex biases and assumptions. Maybe they had a more open attitude to when they experienced other cultures, et cetera, and they assimilated more complex assumptions. So they have more directions in which they can move within their space of possibility. So we interpret that as them being creative by linking things that are far apart. But, in fact, it’s a logical process of making small steps, changing your space of possibility by identifying and then questioning your assumptions."
It is great to have the intention of helping people, but simply having the intention doesn't make the following action correct. We always need to carefully analyze whether our actions are accomplishing what we intend, and we must always ask ourselves if there is a better solution we are not seeing. It will likely take many steps and many failures before we get to the desired creative leap, but we must always scrutinize what we think is right, even those solutions which seem so obvious on the front.
Jamie Oliver's wish is for "a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity."
8:32: "What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK?"
8:53 "School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually -- have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances."
12:00 "We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period."
16:23 "Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah?"
16:47 "Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills."
19:15 "There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education -- there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well."
This is a great talk highlighting why we should care about how food affects children. Sam Kass says, "Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact." However, good intentions alone don't decide the effectiveness of our responding actions.
“If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
What if we took that program and trained a large number of people say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousness of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and lighthearted?
Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure you might label grass a ‘green’ and tomatoes as ‘red,’ just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is ‘no on home’ who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of our brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?”
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