Below is a link to Hans Rosling’s TEDIndia talk showing the rise of Asian development over the past 150 years. I’ve chosen to link indirectly to his talk at TED.com through the Gapminder website here, so that maybe you will spend some time at the Gapminder site. You will not be sorry. The irrepressible and ever-engaging Swede proves time and again that the effective visual display of statistical information is essential to understanding not only where we have been but also where we may, in fact, be heading, if, that is, we are able to avoid catastrophic war in the next 40 years. War is always the fly in the ointment.

In this lecture/presentation Rosling “… graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US.” I guarantee that if you spend time with Rosling he will not only make you laugh, but will also inform you along the way as his animated graphs kick into gear giving new, bold views of our world.

So the problem that I had was that the world view my students have corresponds to reality in the world to the year that their teachers were born.

That’s Hans Rosling and why we should be paying attention to him.

On TED’s list of favorites Sir Ken is at the top of page one. I found him vastly entertaining but, in the end, not all that informative. There was not much there that I didn’t already know. It was a great cheerleading session, though I didn’t walk away from it feeling as if I had a more accurate (or a map that would lead me to a more accurate) picture of the world. One reason may be that I despised school from the first day I was forced through the first grade doors, right up until the last day of high school, which I almost didn’t complete. School for me was, generally, a huge inconvenience and a colossal waste of time. Not all of it, mind you, but the overwhelming majority of it was. I believed then that I knew more than most of my teachers, and upon reflection decades down the road, I generally feel the same. For every good teacher I had, there were at least a handful of clinkers (burnouts in the darkest sense of the word). And the social unpleasantness of life in a feed lot more than counterbalanced the good that it served. I was almost never engaged, since I was mostly fearful of being beaten (by teachers, not so much the students), which taught me a lot about how to deal with fear: it didn’t seem to have any effect on whether or not I was smacked around, so it was better not to sweat it. I feel that if I had been allowed to follow my own path w/support – and that’s a biggie – I would have been a lot more effective human being. The problem is always resources and monies, and far too many adults who should not be permitted to step into classrooms to do anything more than to change light bulbs, and only when children aren’t present. I feel quite sure that if I’d been allowed to go to the library everyday and spend hours in the stacks, I would have received a much better education.

As I watched Robinson I felt that he was preaching to the choir. He preached well, but I’ve either heard or thought it all before. He was a very clever presenter, and I probably learned more about how to work a crowd than I learned from any of his ideas. There are so many jewels that are never polished and will remain unpolished in the majority school model, that it is hard to see how anything can get any better. But still we must ask, how can we change that? How can we change parents, administrators, funders, legislators and down-the-road employers? How do you change to a model that would support such fundamentally radical change? And how do you change the incredibly low societal expectations of what schools are for. There are lots of flying acronyms these days – PYP, MYP, IB, AP on and on – representing programs, which are trying to standardize excellence. And in many cases they do. But it is still only the minority who are served. The larger question seems to be how to develop across-the-board and radically new social expectations that are not based on such obsolete linear paradigms . (Perhaps we are far too big and far too many to have any hope of ever achieving anything substantive outside of privately funded institutions, which, unfortunately always pitch the field in favor of those who can afford it. And there we are, right back to ‘privilege.’ Any attempts at legislation that tries to level the field will always be harangued as being ‘devilishly’ socialistic.) It is far too easy to tell us where we need to be, though, obviously, it is nearly impossible to tell us how we can possibly get there. And education is just part of the dilemma. A big part, yes, but only a part. We can’t do anything until we learn to see it all differently than how we see it now. I wanted to hear Sir Ken tell me how we can do something about it – how to see it with a new eye – but, alas, he didn’t. But it was all presented very well. Good entertainment.

But one presenter I recently watched, and who actually has two talks available on the TED website, is a man named Hans Rosling who, in his presentations Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen and New insights on poverty and life around the world did present me with a more accurate way of seeing the world. I will not even try to explain it. Just go and have a look. The man does wonderful things with shapes and numbers, sets them all in motion, and allows us a new look at things. Then travel over to his website Gapminder.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels. We are a modern “museum” that helps making the world understandable, using Internet.

Poke around awhile and have a look. There is much to keep you here. But to get a more engaging look at China, be sure to check here. It will not disappoint.