Quality Education and Sustainability
Quality Education and Sustainability
Meeting kids and adults where they are to make learning fun.
This blog focuses on the role of quality education and sustainability at Mezzacello. The mission statement at Mezzacello is super simple, grow, maintain, sustain, and explain. Quality education is at the heart of explain.
you can’t do what you don’t know; you can’t be what you can’t see.
Annalies Corbin
I am super passionate about education. I also know that most people don’t know gravitate towards ignorance, but they often start there, by default. This is the way of the world around us.
Every human in this world starts as a blank slate. Quality education means we believe in these people as sources of potential genius and encourage them. To engage them to want to know more and reflect.
To quote my friend mentor and boss, Annalies Corbin, “you can’t do what you don’t know; you can’t be what you can’t see.” This is the model of teaching and learning here at Mezzacello.
The First of the Social Building Blocks in Sustainability
I think UN SDG 4 is supercritical. That’s because quality education is the lens for which all other goals should be viewed. It is the core of everything I believe about sustainability.
Without the ability to think critically, recognize patterns, or communicate clearly, the individual is at a huge disadvantage in any society. That is why I have placed hands-on Applied STEM learning at the heart of everything I do at Mezzacello around education.
It isn’t simply because I love STEM so much that it’s the only way I want to teach. It is because that’s the way children play and learn. They want to try new things and STEM gives them data, constraints, and knowledge on how to proceed.
Mistakes Will Be Made
Speaking of kids and learning, do you all remember how much fun it was to play as a kid? To not worry about what you were doing because everything was going to be OK and you learned from it. Having a safe place to explore play and learn with very low risk and no dire consequences is exactly the balance I want and seek at Mezzacello.
in the world today there are a billion kids who simply cannot imagine or even worse - risk - failing. But learning REQUIRES failure sometimes. How do we prepare for that?!
To model sustainability we need the grace to allow people to make inferences and then to be curious and test them. Then we can encourage them to understand what one thing is going to do or how it will impact another. That is quality education.
Fearless learning and the opportunity to do the learning and make an impact. Nobody wants to learn to do something just because they should or worse are required to. It’s far more powerful to give them tools, boundaries and trusting opportunity to do something and then ask them what would they do with it?
The Sustainable Sweet Spot
This is the sustainable sweet spot in a quality education. At Mezzacello one of the first rules kids learn is it’s OK to not know, but it’s not OK for the statement end there. The proper response is I don’t know yet.
See The Amended Equation for Sustainability
Curiosity is in the OS of every human on this planet. At Mezzacello we present sustainability as a mystery to be solved. To be solved and then extended and pushed out into the bigger world.
Life is just a series of related gardens with relationships, inputs and outputs and constraints. When you frame a quality education around that framework, the curious mind builds the lesson. We just serve as guides in that journey.
