The Institute for Humane Education is seeking a program director to lead the pilot and rollout, including development, implementation, scaled growth, documentation, and evaluation of its Solutionary congresses, which bring students together in teams to create viable, innovative solutions to pressing, real world issues in ways that are just, humane, and sustainable to all people, animals, and the environment. Learn more: http://bit.ly/1pQk6YS
Month: July 2015
Brooklyn Free School has spots for Pre-K, Kindergarten, & High School students!
Enroll today for the 2015-16 school year!
- Committed to diversity and equity in education
- Democratic decision making and problem solving
- Independent, PreK through 12th Grade School
- Focusing on social and emotional development
- Student centered learning and self directed student initiatives
- No mandatory homework, grades, or tests
- Extended day program available for Pre-K until 6pm
Pre-k open house Wednesday, September 2 at 9 AM
Visit brooklynfreeschool.org for more information!
New Adler Yang Documentary!
Hi friends of AERO!
My name is Adler Yang. A 20-year-old independent researcher and AERO rep. for Taiwan. The mission of my life is to discover the root causes of the meaningless/unneeded sufferings of humanity, and to construct the foundation for a world of sustainable, healthy, and sincere peace.
Driven by witnessing my best friends and cousin losing their hope, health, passion, and talents throughout meaningless schooling and broken parenting, I devoted most of my life up to today to re-create an ideal cradle of our society. Every year since 2009, I've revised my approach to better address the problems of our education system, which includes main projects such as an award-winning documentary ' If There is a Reason to Study', an intergenerational education union CrE'dule in 2010, a strategic plan for education reformation in 2011, an international online magazine Awakening founded in 2012–which later became a lab for educational/social change experiments, a campaign in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong to 'Design Your Own Education' since 2013, and an 'Education Bypass Surgery' since 2015.
I would like to invite you to join my premiere screening for If There is a Reason to Study on July 26 1:00pm at the Museum of Chinese in America, NYC, hosted by the 38th Asian American International Film Festival. This is a film that I started making since I was 14, tracing my best friends for 6 years from an alternative junior high school until they entered conventional high schools and colleges, examining how the emergence of standardized testing shifts their life values and pursuits towards the opposite of their initial believes, and what impact it had on their potentials, passions, and future pathways.
This film has so far been reviewed as the "most important documentary on Taiwanese education in the recent years" by the 2014 South Taiwan Film Festival, and has been invited to 6 other film festivals from Indonesia, Hong Kong, and China before the editing was finalized June 2015. I haven't made a version tailored for the Western countries' audiences, but I would like to hear your feedback if you come to see it!
Screening information could be found here.
And if you'd like to know more about me, here is a glimpse of what I'm doing now and in the future:
The Bypass Surgery's theory of change in a nutshell, includes
- Connecting teenagers with societal needs, resources, and network, in order to alleviate students' dependency on the resources and connections in specific universities. By doing so, we are lowering the importance to compete for a prestigious university, and therefore unleashing the freedom for the young people to explore the world, understand their true selves, and equip real world skills that addresses societal needs.
- By immersing teenagers in a community with pioneers dedicated to solving social problems, we’re also creating an environment where learning is “problem-oriented” rather than “job-oriented”, redirecting the pursuit of learning from “competition” to “contribution”. As we acknowledge that by virtue, all jobs are created to address societal needs. By reversing teenagers’ energy from the competition of resources to the exploration of problems and solutions, we’re not only preventing alienation, but also redirecting teenagers from a production line toward a saturated social pyramid, to a new world of sustainability and peace.
In the next ten years, I'll be conducting field studies in the richest and poorest, the 'most developed' and the 'least developed', even maybe the safest and the most dangerous societies to re-examine our world system as whole. As ivory towers around the world has invested enormous effort in fixing our system but unable to create fundamental change, I believe it is crucial to constantly re-question and investigate the phenomenons we face by getting our hands dirty in the real world, rather than interpreting problems based on the theories/ideologies developed in the past in air-conditioned lecture rooms.
As part of the "Education Bypass Surgery" movement, I'll be writing a book to examine a question: Are teenagers and children incapable by nature, or immature by nurture? This book is aimed to discover the common factors that brought birth to impactful and responsible young global citizens who contributes to collective wellbeing by fulfilling their passion, talent, and purpose.
If you would like to be in touch or meet up with me, I could be reached at: adler.yang [at] thesouledu.org
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Adler Yang
Heart Attack Report
By Jerry Mintz
Surprisingly it didn't quite dawn on me at first. But in retrospect it is easy to see that your life can end in a flash. At the time I knew it was a heart attack, but maybe because I walked into the hospital I didn't realize how serious it was. It was a 100% block of the artery from the heart they call the "widow maker." If I had been in on a jet in the middle of the Pacific or in the rural part of a developing country it might have been a different story.
The first lesson to take from this is to call an ambulance! Instead I had someone drive me to the closest hospital, but it turned out that they didn't have the ability to do catheterization. So they had to take me by ambulance to another one. That half-hour extra could have been crucial, as a 1 1/2 hour window is the current gold standard.
So I was in the hospital three days. Ten days later I had a stress test that indicated that my heart was operating below proper efficiency, although I was cleared to do about anything I wanted.
But the most important thing that happened at that point was that an AERO reader sent me two books by cardiologist Dr. Joel Fuhrman. The key one is called Cholesterol Protection for Life. Furman practically guarantees that you won't have another heart attack very soon if you follow his regime. It means practically a vegan died (occasional fish and eggs), lots of leafy greens, no grains but oatmeal, low salt, no added sugar, no oils! I took the whole situation as a challenge and started following the diet, along with regular gym workouts and lots of high-level table tennis. But I still had to take four of the five medications the cardiologist insisted on, including a statin and Plavix. The latter is supposed to prevent the stent from clogging.
For the first two months my legs got pretty tired after an hour of table tennis. But eventually I got my stamina and energy back.
One thing that worried me is that the damage of a heart attack can make your heart much less efficient, enlarging the heard and sometimes eventually requiring a pacemaker and leading to heart failure. This actually happened to another player at my league who now has a pacemaker.
After four months I lost 15 pounds, my blood pressure was 110 over 70, and my total cholesterol was 116!
And when they did a follow up echocardiogram, the cardiologist said the heart efficiency had gone up above the danger level.
I've been exploring the possibility of stopping the statins since the cholesterol is so low. Statins are known to have long-term side effects. The cardiologist said I could try it for a few weeks and see what happens to the blood numbers.
The support that I've received from readers all over the world (25 countries!) has been very important for me, and has helped a lot with my recovery.
So that's about it at this point. We're working as hard as ever in the office. They say I can fly wherever I want and I've been invited to speak at a few places.
And I'm now quite sure that I'm mortal! So I don't want to waste any time!
