UN Commission on Pilot Projects in Education

Learning Environments

UN Commission on Pilot Projects in Education

Nairobi, September, 2021

Back in the 1980’s the movie Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford, depicted some daily life scenes in a downtown area in a futuristic megalopolis. If not for the streamlined overcraft-like police flying vehicles and a few high tech architectural spots, we would have believed that the scenario looked pretty much like any overcrowded city of the eighties swarming with peddlers, vendors, small stands selling goods to a large variety of customers poorly dressed showing the distinctive traits of hardworking immigrant men and women.

Tides of change don’t push toward Utopia at the same speed the large conglomerate of cultures, ethnicities, sectors and the infinite possible associations over the face of the earth. Some sectors develop fast, specially those owners of means of production and creators and manipulators of information technology. Others, as an historical constant, move slowly, or are reluctant to move in the fixed directions of the global decision makers subtle indicate and rule. Nomadism, from this perspective should no longer be understood as an early stage prior to the Neolithic revolution when agriculture brought forth settlement as a condition for cultural development and educational progress. Nomadism as a lifestyle and as a new trend seem to hamper scientific and industrial growth, which expand with and only with heavy long periods of sedentarization, construction and proper use of equipment, steady resources and fixed networks of suppliers and customers. However, after years of the so-called globalization ideology (another metastasis of mercantilism), vast sectors of the world still remain detached from the web out of indifference, scarcity of resources or as we observe in new cultural trends, as a way of making sense of life in small communities reconstructing painfully, but steadily, meanings for the present time.

This report does not pretend to enumerate spearheading projects in science and technology, i.e. the recent BIOSPHERA II Inter Planetary Training Station opened simultaneously in 15 countries at an enormous cost to provide cutting –edge education to the first batch of Earth Citizens bound to the red planet within three months. Much has been talk about it. Rather we intend to describe experiences in the Quest for Meaning in slow-peace educational frameworks.

Notwithstanding the innumerable creative initiatives in education throughout these two years our Office intend to evaluate, we highlight some educational efforts that address challenging cultural situations of the present time: Education amidst Violence ( Green Blasting Field); Education, Politics and Civilization (Edutax); Digital Traditions (Percepstore); Leisure time and fine-tuning the Common Sense (Blindfolded Navigators); Dynamic Families (The Heart Winner child); Ecology and Volunteerism (Earth Task Force); Research- Museums (True Stuff); Cognition (Elementary Zool) and distance education (Touching Dreams).

Green blasting fields©. A project for peace.

Colombia has been a South American nation crippled by war for the past sixty years. The peace process has gone from failure into failure at the cost of thousands of human lives, military and civilians not to mention the millions of Euros invested in it’s rehabilitation. Political, diplomatic, scientific, military, administrative missions and efforts have gone wasted. It’s the turn for a humble team of educators and volunteers to show that permanent changes expand from inside out.

A shift in the negotiation: At the negotiation table you would not find military nor political leaders but teachers, students, housewives, vendors and farmers. They have lived in oblivion while gunmen talk about peace for them but without them. A simple gathering forged the ground work for a civil pact . The plan, to put up an orphanage in the heart of a battlefield. A large extension of land donated by frightened owners who preferred to give it to the project since they would never bleach the bloodstained soil. An agreement with military, paramilitary and guerrillas to declare the area war free zone. Voluntary teachers and personnel would put up a farm, a ranch, a technical school and a large dormitory while little by little and with technical assistance, personal mines started to be removed from the fields.

Orphan children from all over the country and from some in neighboring ones as a sign of solidarity volunteered to live inside the campus. NGOs and fair-trade-commercial firms invested and established commercial links with the school, which has gradually turned into an oasis of peace.

Qualified children and youth are the members of the Supreme Council which –with the help of some selected and in low profile advisors- constitute the highest authority in the campus. After 10 years of work, 15 centers have sprouted in other critical areas becoming truly shield of peace, a vintage of reddish sweet grapes. What makes Green blasting fields unique is not the sophisticate technology nor the two week hour counseling session not even the fresh and agile management of the school, but the whole experience, the courage of standing in a bullet shower.

Edutax.© Education as a trade-off for development.

Applying for a telephone line is not a matter of filling out new subscription forms nor paying connection fees in installment bases in this Mongolian town of Walin-tin. Subscriber should take a course on civil training offered by the different districts in different schedules during the year. Users are taught from basic electronics to mass communication and how to follow emergency and rescue procedures over the phone. Water supply is conditioned to taking a 10-hour course in ecology, water resources management and irrigation techniques. A new mentality is being developed. If you are a citizen you should learn to live up to certain standards of civilization: respect, cooperation, co-responsibility. Services are not available for cash but through ongoing training. No education, no utilities provided. Delinquency rates have dropped compare to other years. Political campaigns are won in the local arena. Neighbors truly come to know their candidates and can certify qualified aspirants. Who is not honest and community oriented in the small community cannot go any further.

Taxes are traded by education. Enrollment going on…

Perceptstore©. Simulation Project for functional perception.

Despite national and international efforts to make basic education accessible to all peoples, large communities in some of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago still find education an unaffordable commodity. Poverty, far distances, budget constraints and an increasing elitist educational trend have left behind thousand of children, youth and adults in a deficient if not inefficient state of basic literacy training. An interdisciplinary group set to start an unassuming kind of approach that will not supplant but support literacy skills. Perceptore Project was aimed to recover, systematize, model and simulate perceptual knowledge stored and processed in the oral tradition of the peoples of Danhilin Island. For centuries, islanders have gone sailing and fishing aided by a fine sense of orientation, a naturally trained perception of wind speed, water salinity, current direction, cloud formations, wave patterns, fish behavior, moisture concentration and so many survival skills. Some other patterns guide them in selecting the healthy fish, cook the right herbs, identify the harvest season and perform the unique and outstanding ability to count with a extreme precision and at a glance, mangos in the trees. The Perceptore’s Project Team was initially composed by a group of social workers, physicians, biologists, oceanographers, physicists, computer experts, marine biologists, geologists and experts in linguistics and folk literature. Of course not all the members of the team stayed in the island at the same time but by short periods for the past 10 years. This international endeavor was even sponsored by a Computer software Corporation which supplied most of the equipment – including the costly simulator lab and the 50 virtual tech personal stations.

Multisensorial experiences were carefully measured and reproduced to create models and simulations that gave evidence of the cognitive processes folks perform to find their bearings. The results are in virtual format at the local library.

Children and youth have been able to access their parents and neighbors accumulated knowledge by using simulations. Results of the study are allegedly used as input in the AI Megalab at MIT.

Blindfolded Navigators©. A training on Resourcefulness

Overprotection of children spoils the fabrics. Seasonal learning centers in Beirut offer a package of courses, all of them hands on and interactive for the development of common sense and survival skills in children.

The Heart winner child©. Redimensioning children caregiving

Parents are made into believe that they are the bread winners and therefore the source of emotional stability and maturity in the family. A team of psychologists and teachers, defying the criticism of many parent’s councils and teacher’s associations, have decided to put up a school with a simple goal: reverse the care giving roles. Statistics show that the rate of divorces has increased in certain countries in such a rate that one can hardly find a family who has been stable and together from marriage. Alcoholism, drug addiction, workaholism are among the many factors that are eroding the grounds of emotional life in the family. Parents are in many cases not qualified persons to provide affection. Learning Environments were created to train children in how to deal with parents, siblings and relatives. Kids start the training by sharing experiences, observations on how their parents think, behave, act, react in different circumstances. From the onset of the course, children are asked to keep records of observations and write their insights. Kids have proved to be sensitive, generous and smart to discover the cause of certain family patterns and act in a more conscious, responsible and proactive way according to their principles and resources. Families enrolled in the program have reported wonderful results in communication and mutual understanding. You cannot cheat now a small counselor.

Earth Task Force©. ROTC in times of peace.

Smart countries invest in education…This was the slogan of the 2015 UNICEF campaign. For the first time in history, Greece educational budget was ten times higher than the allocation for the military forces. After reaching certain social stability in the past decade, the cradle of Philosophy and arts decided to take again the lead of culture and bet for meaning and peace. It was one of the most extraordinary decisions ever taken by any republic: a truly bet for the social betterment not for fear, and ambition or retaliation.

What will be the purpose of military recruitment? Instead of voting for the abolishment of military service, High school graduating students were offered the opportunity to join civil services. One of the branches is the Earth Task Force, an innovative and efficient proposal to educate the youth in human values and ecology. Students are assigned to different training camps in which they learned a constellation of unheard of subjects in geology, forestry, ecosystems, processing of industrial byproducts and the like. Those courses are coupled with physical training, hours of tree planting activities, cleaning, proper disposal of garbage and off doors interaction among others. Two more camps are to be taken before graduation at the University.

From the Ancient Chinese and Egyptian scientific memories until the last achievements in nanotechnology, children have been receiving a formal training in instruments, tools and creative workshops that put them in contact with the groundwork of the great scientists of all times. This initiative of the UN has been implemented so far in 15 countries so as to sponsor scientific work in children and youth..

Ethologists and experts in cognitive sciences have pool out human and technical resources to recreate and learn from non –human intelligences.

How to see the world from a giraffe point of view or from the fruit fly complex visual system is the matter of concern of this interactive research museum. Using sophisticated animations and virtual reality, visitors of the museum have almost real experiences of the world through the recreation of sensorio-perception of the world under the constraints and capabilities of selected animals. Top experiments are conducted in night vision, fly-eye imaging, task sequencing and shared- hierarchical roles in ants and bees.

Certainly not a revolutionary idea, distance education has become a more extended and effective alternative to the standard school setting. It was unthinkable that folks from remote areas in Pakistan were able to go through college level training on the web and participate in real time forums, interactive experiments, chat-rooms, and million of categorized resources at the click of a button and for a near to nothing fee.

Unlike information technology management twenty years ago, microprocessors have expanded their capabilities so that they may be connected to programmable electronic modules that may perform scores of preset or customized tasks. A Nigerian student may place samples of soil in cheap electronic containers, download the type of test needed, the explanation of procedures and come up with a complete analysis which will be the ground for decision making on subsequent crop selection. There is still a lot of work to do to in constructing Electronic Catalyzers and their correspondent sensors, but great progress has been done in this new field of digital chemistry.

Learning Environments Rafael Buitrago.

Education in the year 2021 October 1, 2001