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Good morning.
It’s hard, isn’t it? Speaking after Dona Adozinda.
Especially about education.
But I’d like to start my presentation to you guys
by borrowing from a great Brazilian poet.
“My body, of 1.63 meters, is my size in the world.
My body, of water and ashes,
that makes me look at Proust, Almodovar, Guti Fraga, and feel unified.
My body, that has a nose like this, one mouth, two eyes,
and a certain way of smiling, of talking;
that my mother identifies as being her daughter’s;
and that my three children identify as being their mother’s.
A body that, should it stop functioning, will cause great distress in the family;
without it there is no Samara de Sá e Benevides Werner;
without it there is no Samara Werner.
And a few small things that have happened on the planet
will be forever forgotten.
I chose to start my presentation
by paraphrasing Dirty Poem, by Ferreira Goulart,
because it speaks of the human uniqueness, of our “being-in-the-world”.
We are all different.
"I’m an organized guy".
"I rule!"
"I live in Bom Sucesso".
"I live in Vargem Grande".
"I’m pretty focused".
"I think of myself as a very unique and original person".
"I live in the Rocinha favela".
"I like to study".
"I am otaku, I like rock ‘n’ roll and going to church.
I’m a mix of everything.”
"I like to travel to different places.”
“I’d like to ask myself:
why am I like this Sometimes?”
"I live in Morro do Turano".
"I’m na adjective: Rayane Moura".
Well, we are unique beings, each of us is different.
These are young people from a public school in Rio de Janeiro,
which is the NAVE Program, Advanced Center of Education,
which I coordinate, and which is trying to make a difference in the area of education.
So why, if we are unique beings,
does school treat every one of our children and teens as if they were the same?
And by doing so kills their potential and creativity?
This is a question we should all be asking.
All the previous talks were about education, in some way.
All of them, Eduardo Moreira,
Ronaldo Lemos, when he spoke of LAN houses,
so, everyone spoke a little about how the world is transforming.
And if we look along history,
we'll see that it’s not too different, that a lot has not changed.
Eistein, for instance.
Was it different back in his time? Was school different?
He was not initially spotted as a genius.
The director of the high school he went to told his father:
“He’ll never amount to anything.”
And we’re talking about the greatest physics theorist of all time.
Let’s imagine that Einstein travelled through time,
faster than the speed of light,
what would we ask him?
“Dude, what’s the brilliant mind pill?”
“Ah, if he did sports too”.
"What he thought of the future".
"To Einstein? He’d have a hard time studying me”.
“If he had time to have fun”.
“Why he wore that hair,
that spiky thing, a bit weird”.
Well, I too have a question for Einstein, it’s my turn.
"Hello, Albert," I talk this way because
we're on a first-name basis
since I was only 11 years old.
“Take a look at the school from your time”.
"And now take a look at the school from our time”.
Any similarity is not mere coincidence.
Little has changed.
And this is why we are undergoing a crisis in the area of education.
Let’s move a bit forward in time.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mafalda, in the 60s, 70s,
by Argentinean cartoonist Quino.
What does Mafalda say about school?
Well, this is a little bit of what I have come to tell you.
The world is undergoing a profound transformation.
The relationships with ourselves
and others are changing at an infinite rate.
Technology is everywhere,
Ronaldo showed how it's pervading the ghetto, 90 thousand LAN houses.
That is, the world is constantly reinventing and transforming itself.
What about school? Where is this school?
A text that circulates in the web, I’m sorry for not citing the author, says:
‘A doctor and a teacher slept for 100 years”.
I don’t know if you know that.
“They wake up and, when the doctor went into the hospital
and entered an operating room,
he looked at all those machines and devices,
all that technology, and robots performing surgery.
He was like 'Wow!' He left the hospital and went back home.
The teacher went into a school, into the classroom,
and started teaching, with a blackboard.”
This is what our school looks like, today.
And this school is not forming our young people and children
to make Brazil work, to have ideas
so that we can have more to show the world.
So, I looked for another historical reference
that shows this very well --
a time of great enlightenment, and many discoveries.
Let’s see…
Looks familiar?
This is Michelangelo’s David.
When he finished sculpting David, Michelangelo said:
“Why don't you speak?"
He was a genius, a genius of sculpture and painting.
The issue I want to raise, though, is why Michelangelo used marble
to sculpt his works.
Does anyone know?
It was not because marble is a noble stone.
It was not because marble is white.
But because marble was abundant in Florence, at the time of the Renaissance.
It was the raw material of that time.
So, the raw material that we have today,
increasingly present in the daily lives of every one of us,
when we look at the LAN houses,
when Helder comes here and says:
‘look, please don’t use iPods or cell phones
or computers, because it'll be a problem',
he's talking about technology, everyone here is connected.
So, this is our raw material.
And why aren’t we using it properly?
Using this raw material to educate the future generations?
This is a grave issue.
Why, when we talk about technology at school today,
are we talking about a computer room that is an appendix.
The lab that’s only to print out a text,
and even access the internet, to search for knowledge.
But we are not talking about new technology
entering the process of teaching and learning.
I know that education has many issues,
but these issues cannot stifle the great gap
the great distance that we have today,
between the school we have and the school we want.
So, I’ll just move forward,
I’m running out of time,
and my goal here is to call attention to this issue.
Because when I talk about technology in education,
especially in the educational arena,
people ask:
‘No, but we have problems with teachers,
salaries, infrastructure... technology is not a priority.'
That’s not it, guys, things do not compete.
Teachers are extremely important,
they'll always be, and their role will change.
Everything is imoprtant,
really, in education, it's not about priorities,
education itself is a priority.
So, I’m gonna show you an experience that
answers the question that TED posed,
What does Brazil have to show the world?
Well, we built, in Rio de Janeiro--
let me show you some images --
the NAVE, Advanced Center for Education,
which is a completely different school.
This is a project by Oi Futuro,
in partnership with the state of Rio de Janeiro,
so it is a public school,
which is bringing into the classroom,
into the daily lives of these children,
everything that is forbidden at the other schools.
I’m talking about games, iPods, cell phones.
They’re not only using these things as a media,
but transforming themselves through this new network.
Because this is their reality in their lives out of school.
School has this wall that separates it from society.
Let me show you some more images from Nave, so you can see it.
This is inside the school.
Here, they’re playing electronic fussball.
All these people here,
like what’s happening here today,
went to Nave to speak, to talk to students--
public school students; they went there to exchange.
There's Mark Warshaw, who’s one of the creators of Heroes.
We also had Glenn Entis,
one of the great creators at Dreamworks.
And these guys came to me, after their presentations were over,
after they had had their dialogue with students, and said:
‘Samara, I’d never had such intelligent questions.
Not in all the lectures I have given around the world!”
So, that’s it, we have a potential.
Brazil is creative, we have a creative youth,
only we’re not giving opportunities
for these guys to develop,
because we are not paying attention to our school,
and education is essential.
I’m going to show you a little bit of what they think,
and of how they live today, so you can feel this difference.
"I play all kinds of games".
"The King of Fighters, Tekken, Tekken I, Tekken II, Tekken III".
"Counter Strike".
"Pitfall, Street Fighter, a fighting game, Mortal Kombat, Captain Commando".
"We enjoy things however we can".
"I love Orkut and MSN".
"I prefer Orkut".
"MSN".
"Facebook".
"The Internet as a whole".
"There’s this guy called André LaMothe
who invented the concept of ‘sprite', stuff like that".
"I prefer games".
"I’d like to ask him how he came up with the idea to create the ‘sprites’,
because it’s a pioneer thing, that no one had ever thought of’.
"Innovative".
"You deal with it all the time,
this technology thing, you deal with it all the time,
it's already a part of man’s daily life.”
“What today, in the world, can make a child or teenager, a boy--
whether he’s from the countryside or from a large urban center--
stand still for 6 hours, in front of something?”
"Standing still sucks".
"Imagine competing with a school where the teacher speaks,
and asks everyone else to be quiet in the classroom,
to hear something that you did not ask to hear,
that does not fit your reality,
but that you have to learn now because someday it’ll be useful”.
“Let’s play?”
Professor Antônio Carlos Gomes da Costa, a great Brazilian educator,
once told me something I’ve never forgotten.
And I hope you remember it too:
He said “Samara, if every Brazilian cared for education
the way they care for the national soccer team
and their team’s position in the champioship,
we'd have so much more to show the world”.
So, I think this should be remembered,
and here I am, calling everyone to think about education differently.
And, just to wrap up, I’d like to show an assignment
that these boys made in Nave,
thinking differently and daring a bit more, in education.
They created a Twitter account
studying several times simultaneously,
Cleopatra, Julius Cesar, Richard the Lionheart,
and how they’d communicate in 140 characters and with today’s language.
I’ll leave you with that.
Do I have to read?
So, there you have it!
Well, this is it, and I’ll leave you with an idea, since this is a place of ideas.
“What would you do to solve Brazil’s biggest problem,
which for me is that of education?
So I’ll leave you with this sentence, in the midst of so many other ideas which are coming up here.
Thank you!