The World is Your Classroom
The World is your Classroom . . .
This sentiment is meant to inspire a love and life of learning, of exploring and discovering and asking endless questions. It is meant to motivate those kids who feel trapped by four white walls and a wooden desk. It is meant to broaden teachers’ creativity and remind them that learning is not confined to their domain, but that they simply set the stage.
Inspire. Motivate. Broaden.
But for some, this sentiment is their only reality. They learn on the mountain-side because there is no classroom. They crouch on freezing cement slabs because there are no desks. They teach under the midday sun because there are no fluorescent lights to illuminate their textbooks.
And the beauty is that for all the lack we find in this Pop-Up Model, this world classroom model, for all of the structure we wish we had, it works. It inspires, it motivates, it broadens.
While their counterparts sitting around the world dream of the day they take on the world outside the walls, our students wait for the day the world rebuilds their walls. Because as much as they deserve the opportunity to learn from the world, to dream bigger and go further than their classroom can offer – the reality remains that they also deserve a classroom.
Yet that truth will not stop them. They will not wait idly for someone else to build their school, build their future, build their dreams. They will capitalize on these moments on the mountainside when someone showed up to hand them the world, to build desks out of knees and dreams out of nightmares.
Our Pop-Up kids are among the most resilient you will ever meet. They are not paralyzed by injustice, nor defeated by oppression. They are moving forward, learning what they can where they are. And we show up to love them - who we can, where we are.
What is your Pop-Up difference?
At EDGE we are hugely grateful to those who have supported these world classroom, Pop-Up Love dreams. We are thankful for organizations like TentED who show up to help build walls and love kids as their investment in a future peaceful Iraq. TentED is making it possible for more than 100 kids to have educational programming every week who would otherwise spend their days wishing and waiting for a brighter future. Now they don't have to wait, they are seizing every opportunity and believing there is better for them now.
Without friends who are committed to Popping-Up, this work would not be. These kids would not have a new chance to dream, a new chance to learn, a new chance to be.
Pop-Up somewhere this week. Love who you can, where you are. Inspire. Motivate. Broaden.