You suggest that hiring a local teacher would be more effective. I was never there, so I don’t know whether there is or isn’t a shortage of sufficiently qualified local teachers. If a country has a problem educating their kids, it probably won’t have many good teachers, because the teachers of today are the kids of yesterday… who had a problem to get decent education… so how many of them could have become good teachers?
That said, there still may be interventions way more effective than traveling there. Such as teaching by video. Or if the objection is that video education does not have the same (e.g. emotional) impact as a real teacher, then what about a remote collaboration with a local teacher? You two design the lesson together, or maybe you design the lesson alone, the local teacher actually teaches it. Kinda like using the video, except you use a local person instead of the screen. Or you could alternate the video lessons with lessons with the local teacher. Or you could explain the new topic, and the local teacher would do the exercises with the kids. Or you could teach the local teachers using the video. Or write a textbook for them.
Just trying to say that it’s not “either-or”, and some unusual approach may be the most efficient way. Maybe you should pay someone local to translate Khan Academy to their native language.
(I agree that the belief that the best way to help other people is doing nothing is suspiciously convenient.)
Certainly; it wasn’t my intention to make it seem like an ‘either-or’. I believe there’s a lot of room for imported quality teaching, and a fairly well-educated volunteer might be better at teaching than the average local teacher. I didn’t find how they taught there too effective: a lot of repeating the teacher’s words, no intuition built for maths or physics…I think volunteers could certainly help with that. Also by teaching the subjects they are more proficient at than the local teachers (e.g. English). I agree there is the potential to use volunteers in a variety of ways to raise the level of education, and also to try to make the changes permanent once the volunteers leave.
You suggest that hiring a local teacher would be more effective. I was never there, so I don’t know whether there is or isn’t a shortage of sufficiently qualified local teachers. If a country has a problem educating their kids, it probably won’t have many good teachers, because the teachers of today are the kids of yesterday… who had a problem to get decent education… so how many of them could have become good teachers?
That said, there still may be interventions way more effective than traveling there. Such as teaching by video. Or if the objection is that video education does not have the same (e.g. emotional) impact as a real teacher, then what about a remote collaboration with a local teacher? You two design the lesson together, or maybe you design the lesson alone, the local teacher actually teaches it. Kinda like using the video, except you use a local person instead of the screen. Or you could alternate the video lessons with lessons with the local teacher. Or you could explain the new topic, and the local teacher would do the exercises with the kids. Or you could teach the local teachers using the video. Or write a textbook for them.
Just trying to say that it’s not “either-or”, and some unusual approach may be the most efficient way. Maybe you should pay someone local to translate Khan Academy to their native language.
(I agree that the belief that the best way to help other people is doing nothing is suspiciously convenient.)
Certainly; it wasn’t my intention to make it seem like an ‘either-or’. I believe there’s a lot of room for imported quality teaching, and a fairly well-educated volunteer might be better at teaching than the average local teacher. I didn’t find how they taught there too effective: a lot of repeating the teacher’s words, no intuition built for maths or physics…I think volunteers could certainly help with that. Also by teaching the subjects they are more proficient at than the local teachers (e.g. English). I agree there is the potential to use volunteers in a variety of ways to raise the level of education, and also to try to make the changes permanent once the volunteers leave.