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>> My wife Jenny and I are expecting our first child.
It's made me think about the future more than I had before.
What's that person's life going to be like?
What kind of technologies are going to rule his or her life?
So let's think about technology.
What's it for?
It's for helping us live healthy, happy,
productive lives, right?
So what kind of technology actually does that?
It seems to me that a lot of the gadgets
that we call technology are actually anti-technology.
Instead of helping us, they make us more anxious,
sick, or distracted.
Sometimes they kill people.
Sometimes they cause conflicts.
Often they're terrible for the planet.
They claim to solve one problem
and end up causing a whole bunch of other ones.
That's not the kind of technology that we need
to build the world that we want and to solve the kinds
of problems that we all care about
and that have brought us here together today.
We need technologies that are simple and elegant.
Technologies that bring people together, empower them,
and help them move forward together.
I want to share a technology like that with you today,
called the university of life.
I'll give you a definition of a university of life
in a second, but first I want
to tell you a few experiences I've had with universities
of life in universities of life,
and you can think about similar experiences that you've had.
I've got one of my first glimpses of a university of life
when I was a kid in Alaska.
When I was in sixth grade,
my family decided to move to a new village.
Ouzinkie, the place I'm pointing to on the map,
it was one of the potential places.
My mom and I went to check it out.
We met all of these kids,
and it happened to be the annual spring cleanup day.
So we grabbed some garbage bags and went out with a team
to see what we could find.
After a couple of hours, we'd been drenched by the rain,
but we also were proud of ourselves,
we got a great haul of cans and bottles and candy wrappers,
even a few old tires, and we felt great.
We went back to the school,
we had a big potluck with everyone in the community,
met the parents and grandparents,
I shot some hoops with the kids,
and just like that, I was in love.
When my family had to decide whether we going to move
to Ouzinkie or move somewhere else,
I cried at the idea that we would even think
about moving anywhere else.
Who wouldn't want to be a part of a community like that?
That rainy day I had discovered a university of life.
Years later, one of my students, a woman named Jessica,
helped me understand even more deeply the power
of a university of life.
We had just gotten back from a spring break trip
to Costa Rica, and we were at a reunion dinner
with the whole group, and she made the comment
that she had learned more in the 8 days that we had spent
at this family farm, Finca Pasiflora in Costa Rica,
than she had learned in two years in college.
My first reaction was, excuse me,
I just had you in my geography class [laughter],
but she explained what she meant and I came
to really understand that she was right.
A few days of living and working, playing and exploring,
and reflecting at Finca Pasiflora had meant more to her
than anything she'd ever experienced.
She felt more empowered, more enlivened,
with a greater sense of direction in her life
than she'd ever felt before.
Certainly more than in any library or lecture hall.
At Finca Pasiflora, she had discovered a university of life,
and was wise enough to point it out to me.
I'm very grateful because I had been taking groups
of students back there ever since,
and I get to go next week.
Lucky me. So what is a university of life?
It is a place where people voluntarily share their time,
labor, resources, and knowledge for the collective good.
Universities of life can take place anywhere, anytime.
They can last for a few hours or a few days, a few weeks,
or very much longer, it all depends on the selflessness
and the dedication of the people involved.
You just heard Spud talk about the co.space,
I would call that a university of life as well.
So, now I would like to tell you about some folks
in Sri Lanka, who I think are among the best in the world
at creating universities of life.
They've become my professors,
and I bet they can become yours.
Their story begins in 1958 with a young teacher named Ari.
Ari was teaching at a private high school
in the capital city of Colombo in Sri Lanka
and found himself frustrated.
His students who came from wealthy,
urban families seemed to think that the people living
in Sri Lanka's back country were backwards and unimportant.
Ari worried that when his students became the country's
leaders they would ignore the needs of the poor.
And so he decided to create an educational experiment,
in order to teach his students a lesson.
He enlisted the help of villagers in Kathaluwa,
a very impoverished place on the outskirts of Colombo,
and the villagers helped his students design a work camp
that would take place during the school break.
The students and the villagers worked together
to construct buildings and sanitation systems.
They taught each other the skills that they knew,
they joined in meditations and reflections and celebrations.
They called their work camp, Shramadana,
which means gift of labor,
that's what their work was all about.
Everyone contributed what they had
for the well-being of all people.
What they were doing caught people's attention.
This was unprecedented.
People, or urban, wealthy kids did not go
and work with poor villagers in Sri Lanka,
no one had seen this before.
But they struck a nerve.
It made sense what they were doing,
and soon Shramadanas started popping up all over Sri Lanka.
Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians came together,
basically every kind of person came together,
they built roads, water systems, irrigation networks,
bridges, community centers, preschools, community gardens.
You name it.
Hundreds or even thousands of people came together
to join in Shramadana.
They came to call the movement, Sarvodaya,
Gandhi's word for the well-being of all people,
because that's what they're work was all about.
Today, the Sarvodaya Movement is thriving
in 15,000 villages throughout Sri Lanka.
Ari, who is now in his 80's,
is one of its most revered citizens.
Here you can see him advising Sri Lanka's president.
So, what's so magical about this movement?
Why have so many people, including me,
jumped at the chance to be involved?
Shramadana workers decide together what needs
to be done, by consensus.
So everyone feels that his or her idea has been heard
and that the work being done is their work.
At this Shramadana, we decided
that the preschool needed a new paint job.
Once the work begins everyone joins in, regardless of age
or gender or abilities.
The preschoolers themselves painted chairs
and helped carry the furniture in and out.
This elder didn't let being deaf stop him
from teaching the rest of us how to mix paint correctly
and put it on the walls.
Everyone contributes what they have,
whether it's a special skill, resources, food,
muscle power, or enthusiasm.
There is no working for people,
only working with each other.
Everyone is a learner and a teacher at a Shramadana.
If you have a special skill, you don't keep it to yourself,
you teach other people so that they feel empowered also.
Their motto is, we build the road and the road builds us.
It's not about just getting the job done,
it's about teaching each other
that you can solve your problems for yourselves
if you work together, and that you all grow as one.
Of course, working makes people hungry,
and it helps that Sri Lankan food is delicious.
If you come to a Shramadana, you bring food,
you help prepare it, and you eat it all together.
After the meals, people take time to join in conversation
about how the work is progressing,
and also about larger issues facing the community
and the nation.
Because they've been working together and eating together,
all kinds of voices are heard that are lost
in other settings, the voices of the young, the old,
the disabled, the poor, women,
and minorities all are heard and respected.
It's no wonder that so many different kinds
of people keep coming back for more.
Every step of a Shramadana is infused with a great spirit.
People join in meditations and reflections at the beginning
and the end and throughout,
that celebrate our shared humanity and the universal values
of peace, justice, and cooperation.
Everyone calls each other brother and sister,
regardless of what you're religious identity is
or whatever background you have.
The last component is fun.
Isn't that a fun picture?
She's awesome.
With the paintbrush.
Fun is sort of the last component and the first component.
Every part of a Shramadana is focused on fun.
Work is not drudgery.
Work is something fun to do together.
When you're done, you laugh and you chat,
while you're working, you take a break if you need to,
kick a soccer ball around if you need to, that's fine,
that's good, when you're done with the work day,
you join in singing and dancing and telling more stories,
you celebrate your new friendships
and your sense of empowerment.
This is, this is good stuff.
These Shramadanas are the most elegant universities of life
that I've ever seen, or participated in.
They are community development at its best.
People realize, clearly, that if they come together,
they can solve their problems themselves.
And that working together is actually fun.
It's education at its best.
Every part of a person, body, mind, and spirit is nourished.
It's peacemaking at its best.
When people work together, share ideas together,
eat together, and meditate together,
all those artificial boundaries that are the cause
of our conflicts just melt away.
Again, these people can be our professors.
What more could we need for our lives?
For our communities and for our country?
Now it's worth thinking
about what a university of life is not.
It's not about quick-fix technologies
or labor-saving devices.
Just the opposite.
It's celebrates work.
It reminds us that our ability
to work together is what makes us civilized humans.
Universities of life are not about national plans led
by charismatic leaders, they're not about corporate profits,
they don't, they're not
about the government bailing you out.
They're not about do-gooders from somewhere else coming
and telling people how to live.
They are community-conceived
and community-driven development.
They remind us that small is beautiful.
At a university of life,
it doesn't matter what degree you have.
It doesn't matter who you vote for.
It doesn't matter how much money you make.
It doesn't matter how many followers you have on Twitter.
And it doesn't matter which sacred text is your favorite.
You are there and so you are valued equally.
And you show what you believe by what you do.
And you do it not for a gold star,
but just out of the joy of giving.
Finally, a university
of life rejects the individualistic philosophy
that tells us we have to compete with each other
for a limited number of good grades
or good jobs or good lives.
Using it we see, clearly,
that the good of the individual is embedded
within the good of the community.
That the good of every community is bound
within the good of its nation.
And that the good of every nation is bound
within the good of the whole.
In the end, we all rise or fall together.
So, how can we use this amazing technology
to improve our lives and to help us build the world
that we want?
When we find ourselves in ethnic, religious,
or racial conflict, it can show us our shared humanity.
When we find ourselves impoverished or hungry,
it can teach us how to feed and care for ourselves.
When we're lonely or depressed,
it can help us meaningfully connect with others.
When environmental threats loom, it can help us adapt
and thrive together.
When our politicians face gridlock,
it can remind them of their shared obligations
and shared faiths.
When our organizations need to grow,
it can help them find new partners and new ideas.
When our workers need a break from the daily grind
or to learn how to work better together,
it can rejuvenate them.
When you are striving for the life
that reflects your greatest potential and highest ideals,
you can find your path at a university of life.
Just think of the possibilities.
Think of what we might achieve if we use this technology
to its greatest capacity.
I think there are no limits.
This is the technology that we need.
It's simple, elegant, robust, and sustainable.
It is human.
Gadgets come and go, but universities of life are ours,
to create anytime, anywhere.
They are what can help us build the lives, the communities,
the nation, and the world that we want.
We can turn this planet, our home,
into a university of life.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]