Translator: Beatriz Ventura Reviewer: Claudia Sander
Imagine, for a second, that today is your birthday.
But it isn't a regular birthday.
It's your 90th birthday.
How do you feel?
What's on your mind?
What notions and sensations do you have?
I'm sharing with you my grandfather's story,
who lived till 93.
My grandfather came from humble origins,
he started work on a factory floor.
Throughout his life, he achieved what many would call a successful story.
Up to the age of 90 or so, as you see in the photo,
he'd read the newspaper daily and go to his company every day
to stay informed about everything going on in the world and in the company.
I remember one day, when he was about 88,
when he arrived home with a eureka expression.
He had just read about a new technology,
and had decided, then and there, that it was time to start a new business.
At 88.
Obviously, with his advanced age he couldn't start by himself, right?
So he found another partner,
a much younger man of about 70.
(Laughter)
And together they started a company that still exists today.
Dreaming and wanting to make dreams come true
is part of human nature.
My grandfather, unlike our rational minds,
dreamed like a young person of 20, 30, 40, 50, or 10.
He dreamed about his future and how to somehow leave a legacy.
When I was young I had a dream too.
My dream was to save the whales.
How? With a little boat like this.
(Laughter)
Greenpeace. That was my dream.
However, as time went by, that idea matured
and I realized that boats and inflatable dinghies of air and plastic
might not go well with harpoons, water jets and iron material.
Like the Titanic.
And, little by little, my dream transformed
until I found myself in environmental education.
And that's where I met John.
John was studying in a school on the outskirts of Boston,
in the United States.
It was an area associated with violence,
drugs, crime, and poverty.
Since I was teaching at several schools with a lot of students,
John was, at first, just another child.
Until one day, he misbehaved like any other child.
And I had to talk to him.
However, when I looked into the eyes
of that six-year-old child, I got a fright.
Stamped on his face were the marks and heavy wrinkles
from the pain and suffering of an adult.
At that moment, I thought, "Gosh, what am I going to do?"
Because it didn't seem right:
a six-year-old kid, already with that grown-up, suffered face.
But he didn't have a look of resignation.
He had a strong look of a warrior
that said, "I'm not invisible."
At that moment, a project crossed my mind
that I had to fulfill, the whales I had to save. What about John?
I asked, "How? What do I do as an educator?"
And when I look at education today
I see it as a Formula 1 race.
The minute the child sets foot in school
you put the helmet on and say, "Look ahead, don't look to your side.
And run, run, run, because you must be the first one to cross the finish line."
If you're not the first one to win, you're the first loser.
Right? You didn't really win the race.
In real life, not all of us have access to a Formula 1 racing car.
Let's face it, it's not enough to be a racing car,
it must be a Williams, a Ferrari, a Mercedes;
a super cool car to win the race.
But, in the backstage of life, what do we have?
A super turbined donkey.
(Laughter)
But we have faith; faith is huge.
We say, "Go on, kid. You can do it.
Run against the racing cars and you can win.
Go, go, you can do it!"
And even before the race starts, he's already lost.
Nowadays, education is based on the following:
the bigger the income, the better the performance.
Today, education is structured towards that.
It perpetuates social inequality.
And you'll think, looking at this graph,
"No, that's probably just in developing countries."
No, this is the graph of a first world country.
And the same way that it happens in this country,
it happens in many developing countries, both rich and poor.
This is the reality that invades every educational system today.
Most of us will look and say,
"Well, I'm not really on the right side but not exactly on the left either,
I'm somewhere in the middle."
And our lives move on.
But not for the Johns.
Where is John's school?
In all likelihood, in the lower left-hand corner.
What's the school's performance?
Bad.
Chances of going to a good college?
Low.
The chances of a good professional career,
without going to college, and without having good grades?
Low.
What are the choices left for John?
[I just want a decent chance]
When we close our eyes to the social disparity,
and accept that status quo,
little by little, we lose those Johns
to a life of resignation and despair.
Some of you might say, "But I know this guy
who got good opportunities in life through a lot of studying."
And, in fact, it does happen. These are solitary heroes.
Because most kids that are on the left-hand side of the graph,
remain inside the vicious circle of poverty, violence, and crime.
And that's one of the things that really bothered my dad.
My dad was an idealist.
As a young man, he dreamed of democracy,
of a world where people could be themselves,
because he believed that every human being had the potential,
the potential to do amazing things.
But the reality he faced was different.
In the work market, people are more concerned about punching in to work
and following instructions, rather than thinking by themselves.
And back then, he said, "There's something very wrong with education.
We aren't raising people to think, we're raising robots."
And, since it couldn't be different, he dreamed as well.
Despite being a businessman in the industrial area,
he dreamed of quality education for all.
He always said, proudly -
here he is at the Marquês de Sapucaí "sambadrome" -
he loved Brazil, he always said,
"I'm a Brazilian."
And he would make a point of bringing business people from around the world,
Chinese people from all over the world, to visit the country he loved.
And he said, "Education is the project of a nation."
And he loved Brazil so much, and sometimes we forget
how wonderful this country is.
A place where people from every belief, race, and culture
have the privilege to call it home.
At the end of the day, that's all we want in life:
a place where we can feel surrounded by friends,
where we can feel good, fulfilled and appreciated.
But, suddenly, we have a child.
And the Formula 1 comes back to mind.
And we don't stop there, we get worried.
Not only about if our child will be alright in life
but we worry about our neighbor's child.
"Will my neighbor's child be better than mine?"
Then you find out that his child only learned to read at the age of nine.
The first thing you think, "Phew, one competitor less."
And it doesn't stop there.
We say, "God, that poor child.
He was born slow, what will become of him?"
So slow in life that they become people like this.
Does anyone know him?
Albert Einstein.
That neighbor's son, remember? Who learned to read at the age of nine.
Like Einstein, there have been several geniuses
throughout the history of mankind.
Geniuses that at some point in school
were considered unfit to learn,
incapable of doing certain things,
or at some point were condemned by society of being incapable.
And for some reason they managed,
and through much dedication, effort and discipline
they suddenly became geniuses.
Sounds contradictory, right?
As soon as the child is born, we always search for that little genius.
"Wow, a two or three-year-old boy already doing that."
But no. The common traits in geniuses involve three things:
discipline, practice, and persistence.
Science shows us that, in reality, a genius is not simply awakened.
There is an inherent genius in all of us.
But, whether it manifests itself or not
depends on how much each one is willing to work
for it to flourish.
When we opened the Sidarta Institute, in 1998,
we started with the belief
that being a genius is intrinsic to every human being.
We needed a way for this potential to flourish.
But not only looking inwards.
Because we already have many people who only see themselves.
What we need is people compromised with a greater well-being.
That's how we built an education based on principles.
What principles?
First: theories don't replace life experiences.
An education for life.
If I ask each of the audience members,
"What was a defining moment in your education?"
How many of you will say,
"It was in that classroom where I sat down and paid attention to class."
Or you will say, "No, it was that experiment which I did and tested,
it didn't work out the first time, so I tried again and suddenly - eureka!
it worked and I understood it."
Usually, that's what marks people.
The moment when you did it, did it again, widened that concept,
and somehow it made sense to you.
And when things make sense to us, we want to share it with others.
There is no use in keeping these ideas to ourselves.
We need to see beyond.
And we also need to have that disposition to give our very best to society.
So a human being doesn't become a world citizen all of a sudden
at the age of 25, without ever having done anything before.
We need, the second the child becomes aware of himself,
to start exercising citizenship,
so they will really see themselves out of the world
and contributors to a greater well-being.
As they go through these life trials,
little by little they will understand how things are connected.
What one person does here affects another person over there.
That we're just a small drop in the immensity of the ocean,
and this ocean is part of Mother Nature.
And step by step, they will realize we are all one,
and they will acquire that wisdom
to recognize unity in diversity.
And something very interesting happens
when you educate following these guidelines,
when these principles pervade the work of every educator.
Recently, we opened up a new space
where these young people can share their dreams,
or to have the opportunity to experience those dreams.
I'll share with you some examples.
What comes to your mind when you think of the school occupations
that occurred recently?
A 17-year-old girl saw this
as an opportunity for transformation.
What bothered her was, "Hey, these children just want to study,
they have no chance to do so."
She said, "I go to school.
I want these kids to get the same pleasure from learning as I did."
What did she do?
She talked to the kids who were occupying the schools.
And as she talked to them,
she felt what her mission was.
She said, "I'll engage in this cause and help them achieve their dreams."
And she started a sequence of missions,
in a structure of games which is the language of young people,
to prepare a documentary that culminates in the construction
of an educational center planned and created by the kids themselves.
A 17-year-old girl trying to achieve other young people's goals.
And what about this? Another project.
What comes to mind when you think about the water crisis and parsley?
Well, to a group of three 11-year-old kids
the water crisis created a certain discomfort.
"Wow, there's a water shortage? We must do something."
They didn't care if they couldn't play with water in their backyards.
No. To them, the most important was,
"What can we do to save water?
Because the world is suffering from this."
Moreover, they found out
that parsley has a phytotherapy component that is antibacterial.
I didn't know that it's good for colic, for a lot of stuff.
And to them, parsley is something everyone has at home.
This was great because they wanted to do a project about parsley and water,
which was to develop a technology to reuse the water
for the maintenance of medicinal gardens.
A sustainable vegetable garden project.
Now they're using sensors and circuits
to build this self-contained system.
But the best part of the experience was the effect it had on the children.
When I asked them, "What did you think of the experiment?"
the first thing they said was, "I'm happy."
Because we had struggled a bit.
The project dismantled itself on the eve before its submission.
They had faith and said, "We believed we could do it, and we did.
So we’re feeling very accomplished,
because this project isn’t for us, it’s for everyone."
From what they said you realize
that children have the ability of seeing beyond.
It's a matter of encouraging them.
And as we open the door
to develop the dreams of these children, something happens.
Ideas boil up, dreams emerge...
and projects come together.
These are kid's projects,
from primary to high school,
that flourish as you allow them more space.
What we are really doing here
is education at the service of human diversity,
not the domestication of the human mind.
We believe
it's very important to stimulate that
especially because we're retrieving the real meaning of the word "to educate":
to bring out, to lead, to guide.
To bring out what?
That brilliance of the human being.
And to lead where? To a better well-being.
But what we need the most, right now,
is what Antônio brings us...
In a second.
"Grandma, I didn't have courage to climb the tree,
but now I "encouraged" and I did it."
The thing we need the most is courage.
Courage from all sectors of society.
Because, as the African saying goes,
"It takes a whole village to raise a child."
It requires the engagement of teachers and the parents.
It requires a society to understand that college entrance exams are not an end
but a means for these children.
Only then will we be able to gradually transform
the present educational system.
We're talking about the retrieving of the word "education."
The focal point must be, "How do I extract the best from these children?"
We must say "enough" on this race in education.
We need to say "enough" in these attempts to power up donkeys,
and return education to what it really is,
which is a place to transform these kids' dreams into reality.
I would like to end with something I wish I had said 20 years ago,
"John, you are not invisible.
How about we pick the very best in you,
find out the best you have in you,
and transform all this
into something much, much better."
Thank you.
(Applause)