Its time to stop blaming 2/3 of humans who are Asian for their consciously open minds and love of education.
Do Atlantic people's old populations still trust and celebrate capability of generating healthy innovative brains? What's clear to anyove visting Washington DC or Brussels is a dismal mismatch exists between the gamechanging future opportunities listed below and how freedom of next generation learning has got muddled by how old male-dominated generations waste money on adevrtising and bossing. Consider the clarity of Stanford's Drew Endy's Strange Competition 1 2:Up to “60% of the physical inputs to the global economy”7 could be made via biotechnology by mid-century, generating ~$30 trillion annually in mostly-new economic activity. 8 Emerging product categories include consumer biologics (e.g., bioluminescent petunias,9 purple tomatoes,10 and hangover probiotics11 ), military hard power (e.g., brewing energetics12 ), mycological manufacturing (e.g., mushroom ‘leather’ 13 ), and biotechnology for technology (e.g., DNA for archival data storage14 ). Accessing future product categories will depend on unlocking biology as a general purpose technology15 (e.g., growing computers16 ), deploying pervasive and embedded biotechnologies within, on, and around us (e.g. smart blood,17 skin vaccines,18 and surveillance mucus19 ), and life-beyond lineage (e.g., biosecurity at birth,20 species de-extinction21 ). | . notes on drew endy testimony on bio tech 2025 strange competition Natural living systems operate and manufacture materials with atomic precision on a planetary scale, powered by ~130 terawatts of energy self-harvested via photosynthesis Biotechnology enables people to change biology. Domestication and breeding of plants and animals for food, service, and companionship began millennia ago. Gene editing, from recombinant DNA to CRISPR, is used to make medicines and foods, and is itself half-a-century old. Synthetic biology is working to routinize composition of bioengineered systems of ever-greater complexity https://colossal.com/ 20 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34914 19 https://2020.igem.org/Team:Stanford 18 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/12/skin-bacteria-vaccine.html 17 https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/rbc-factory 16 https://www.src.org/program/grc/semisynbio/semisynbio-consortium-roadmap/ 15 https://www.scsp.ai/2023/04/scsps-platform-panel-releases-national-action-plan-for-u-s-leadership-in-biotechnology/ 14 https://dnastoragealliance.org/ 13 https://www.mycoworks.com/ 12 https://serdp-estcp.mil/focusareas/3b64545d-6761-4084-a198-ad2103880194 11 https://zbiotics.com/ 10 https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/ 9 https://light.bio/ 8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250116082806/https:/www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BUILDIN G-A-VIBRANT-DOMESTIC-BIOMANUFACTURING-ECOSYSTEM.pdf 7 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-econo mies-societies-and-our-lives 6 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/safeguarding-the-bioeconomy-finding-strategies-for-understanding-ev aluating-and-protecting-the-bioeconomy-while-sustaining-innovation-and-growth 5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2650-9 | AIH- May 2025.Billion Asian womens end poverty networking 2006-1976 is most exciting case of Entrepreneurial Revolution (survey Xmas 1976 Economist by dad Norman Macrae & Romano Prodi). In 2007, dad sampled 2000 copies of Dr Yunus Social Business Book: and I started 15 trips to Bangladesh to 2018- many with apprentice journalists. This is a log of what we found - deepened after dad's death in 2010 by 2 kind remembrance parties hoist by Japan Embassy in Dhaka with those in middle of digital support of what happened next. We witnessed a lot of conflicts - i can try and answer question chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk or see AI20s updates at http://povertymuseums.blogspot.com. I live in DC region but see myself as a Diaspoira Scot. Much of dad's libraries we transfreered with Dr Yunus to Glasgow University and enditirs og journals of social business, new economics and innovators of Grameen's virtual free nursing school. Bangladesh offers best intelligence we have seen for sdgs 5 through 1 up to 2008, Search eg 4 1 oldest edu 4.6 newest edu ; .620th century intelligence - ending poverty of half world without electricity -although Keynes 1936 (last chapter General Theiory: Money, Interest, Employment) asked Economists to take hippocratic oath as the profession that ended extreme poverty, most economists have done the opposite. What's not understandable is how educators failed to catalogue the lessons of the handful who bottom-up empowered villages to collaboratively end poverty. There are mainly 2 inteligences to understand- Borlaug on food science -arguable the forst Biointeligence rising ar1950 on; fazle abed on everything that raised life expectancy in tropical village (zero-electricity) asia from low 40s to 60s (about 7 below norm of living with electricity and telecomes). Between 1972 and late 1990s, Abed's lessons catalogued in this mooc had largely built the nation of Bangladesh and been replicated with help of Unicef's James Grant acroo most tropical asian areas. What's exciting is the valley's mr ad mrs steve jobs invted Fazle Abed to share inteligences 2001 at his 65th birthday party. The Jobs and frineds promised to integrate abed's inteligence into neighborhod university stanfrd which in any event wanted Jobs next great leap the iphone. The Valley told abed to start a university so that women graduates from poor and rich nations could blend inteligence as Abed's bottom of the pyramid vilage began their journey of leapfrog modles now that grid infrastructures were ni longer needed for sdiar and mobile. Abed could also help redesign the millennium goals which were being greenwashed into a shared worldwide system coding frame by 2016. There at Abed's 80th birtday party , the easy bit was checking this mooc was uptodate. The hard bit - what did Abed mean by his wish to headhunt a Taiwanese American to head the university's 3rd decade starting 2020? |
It is time for the UN and other international bodies to move beyond a singular focus on enrollment numbers and grapple with the problem of quality in education. A child’s potential is truly unleashed only when he or she learns to spot and seize the opportunities his or her parents never had.
DHAKA – As the World Education Forum meets in Incheon, South Korea, it is time to confront some unsettling facts about the state of education in the world today. More than 91% of children of primary school age are now enrolled in school, but progress on educating the remaining 9% has slowed to a near standstill. The numbers have barely moved since 2005, and girls are still disproportionately left behind.
Worse, the headline figures do not describe the true depth of the problem. In poorer countries, even children privileged enough to have access to a classroom often do not receive a good education. According to UNESCO, of some 650 million primary-school-age boys and girls, an estimated 250 million will not learn to read or count, regardless of whether they have gone to school.
Moreover, in many parts of the developing world, state school systems are leaving tens of millions of children behind because of poverty and discrimination. These children’s true education will be that of the soil or the streets. They will grow up working as smallholder farmers, sharecroppers, and wage laborers, and will struggle to send their own children to school.
It is time for the United Nations and other international bodies to move beyond a singular focus on enrollment numbers and grapple with the problem of quality in education. In September, my organization, BRAC, joined a collaborative effort, led by Hillary Clinton and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, that puts more girls in school while addressing the problem of quality for both genders.
As part of that effort, BRAC, which is already the world’s largest private secular education provider, plans to invest at least $280 million to reach 2.7 million additional girls and train 75,000 teachers by 2019. We call on others to make similar investments.
All too often, poor countries’ approach to education remains stuck in the colonial era, favoring rote memorization over true learning. Schools do little to impart the life and work skills needed to prepare young people for the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. Children are awarded higher grades for writing sentences exactly like the ones they see in textbooks than for coming up with ideas of their own.
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This is an approach that fails to foster curiosity, self-confidence, and independent thinking. It is also especially ill-suited for children from poor backgrounds, who find much of what they are taught in the classroom to be irrelevant to their daily lives.
I was pleased when, in May, a panel tasked by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon came up with a post-2015 development agenda that included quality education, not just universal access, as one of its recommendations. Setting targets based on quality rather than quantity will be difficult but not impossible.
Basic outcomes of literacy and numeracy are imperative. But so are standards for social and emotional learning, which stresses the importance of recognizing our emotions, learning how to deal with them, and fostering empathy for others. These skills, known as “emotional intelligence,” are just as important for children in poor countries as they are for children in rich countries.
In conflict and post-conflict environments like Afghanistan or South Sudan, a safe and peaceful future will depend on a new generation being able to heal its emotional and psychological wounds, just as it did in my native Bangladesh after our Liberation War in 1971. Even in countries not scarred by war, navigating one’s way out poverty requires emotional intelligence, in addition to problem-solving skills and critical thinking.
Given recent cuts in aid for education, some might object that focusing on quality and emotional intelligence are luxuries that we cannot afford. This is not the case. In Bangladesh, we have found a way to bring quality education to the poor, with schools that cost just $36 per student per year. With community support, local women are trained to teach children to think for themselves. One-room schools operate out of rented and borrowed spaces to save costs. A majority of the students in every classroom are girls.
We need to promote universal standards for education, not just universal access, for both girls and boys. A child’s potential is truly unleashed only when he or she learns to spot and seize the opportunities that his or her parents never had. This is the standard we should set, and it will be a great moment indeed when it is universally adopted.