What Ricardo Semier talks about is firstly his success with running huge corporations in Brazil on democratic and radically new ideas and practices. He started this process 30 years ago – and recently he moved these principles to schools. Having had great results, this is now his passion in life: Liberate more children from an outdated schooling model.
What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?
His aim: How do we re-design a School for wisdom? Talking about teachers, he says: “the Little you know compared to Google, we don’t want to know. Keep that to yourself!” Instead, they decided to bring in people with passion and expertise and teach – apart from the basics – the most important things in life that we know nothing about and never learned in schools: “We know nothing about Love, we know nothing about Death; and we know nothing about why we are here.”
Do you think a model like that would work for our dyslexic children?
The best teacher I had was in primary school.
He beleived teaching people to learn was more important than teaching the carriculum. He let everyone learn at their own pace as long as they covered all the modules he set up he was happy. We also had our own research topics to do what we wanted.
My own pace let me deal with dyslexia and I excelled. I covered everything and at age 11 made it through big bang theory, first year university physics text books and year 12 chemistry.
At the end of the year my teacher was sacked for not providing kids with a proper education. Unfortunately most kids ran a muck and their parents conplained.