TED Community » Chad Sansing

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I'm passionate about

Community-based education, Democratic education, Game-based learning, Inquiry, Reforming classroom practice

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Education, Games

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  A comment on Conversation: Who should decide what the purpose of education is?

  Jan 12 2012: I support Monika's work to use a per census formula to fund community-based education - a national policy that enables local control and trans-local learning models of how to make entire communities into "schools." Educators should take on the purpose of creating maker spaces that learners and mentors can use to set their own purposes for learning - sometimes the learning will seem very idiosyncratic to the learner; sometime it will have obvious and lasting value for the community. Regardless, the learning will always enrich the community through the lives of its learners and their attention to and ownership of their learning.
  
  We in the United States largely need state and federal money to keep up with state and federal mandates regarding staffing, scheduling, testing, and sanctioning; we could educate more meaningfully and rigorously for less if our communities take ownership of customized, democratic education for children and adults. We don't need a curriculum to identify what matters to us or to our kids, we don't need a test to tell us if our actual work is excellent or not, and we don't need practice picking answers when we could be identifying and solving the problems in front of us in our lives and neighborhoods.
  
  Thanks for sparking this conversation, Adam.
  
  Best,
  C