progressive education, through my experiences
As I stood on a roadside in rural Orissa, India, I finally learned what a powerful tool a syphon could be. A village 5 kilometres away has a 24 hour a day, 365 day a year, clean and piped water supply. The major cities in India don't have that. The town had built a water tank, and each household had tapped into that tank, to provide clean and safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. The occurrence of water-borne illness in the village dropped by eighty percent after the water tank was installed. Woman and children no longer needed to carry water for 6 - 8 hours a day to provide for their families. Attendance at school increased. Lives improved. It was a simple syphon, something I had learned about to empty a pool, clean a fish tank, and take gas out of a car's tank. Using a syphon as a tool to improve the lives of others made my learning real.
Often, education is compartmentalised into subjects at school. It is much more then that. It is the experiences that shape our lives. Schools have a responsibility to provide more then a classroom, more then highly qualified teachers, more then exceptional facilities. Schools must develop communities that provide for experiences that shape the lives of the students enrolled.