The importance of helping children feel empowered
This TED talk features Kiran Bir Sethi, the founder of the Riverside School in India, a school focused on nurturing creativity in children and empowering them to be change agents. In this ten-minute talk recorded in November 2009, she shares a project she started in her own school to “infect” her students with the “I can” attitude. In this project, children were given experiential learning of a social injustice, invited to come up with solutions, and encouraged to take their ideas to the streets with the goal of creating change. Fueled by the success of this project, she extended it to children in the city, and then to several areas in India through the provision of a simple toolkit she designed, and a challenge to the children to find one idea, and take one week to change lives. Inspiring examples of different groups of children designing solutions to a myriad of problems and taking their solutions to their communities are provided.