[IAEP] Its.an.education.project Digest, Vol 4, Issue 8

[Walter Bender]

> Again, the culture at Bill's school is radically different from 99.9% of
> all schools in Nepal. The culture here is very conservative and hierarchical.
> We aren't going to change this over night or even in several years.

I wonder. Albeit with some external intervention in the form of
mentoring the teachers, in both Pakistan and Nigeria, some "very
conservative and hierarchical" classrooms did change--not overnight,
but within *weeks* of the introduction of Sugar. Maybe the secret
sauce is to provide support to the teachers for engaging the children
in a new approach to learning: the "hard stuff" on Alan's diagram.
Sugar itself cannot do this itself, but a community that forms around
Sugar can!! In both Peru and Uruguay, the education bureaucracy is
trying to establish such a mentoring network. Maybe this is the
liability of being a small trial as oppose to a massive deployment. If
I am correct, this would suggest that we should accelerate our efforts
on building a social network for teachers. The network is the thing
that is different this time: let's exploit it.

-walter