Charles Chen Yidan, the co-founder of Tencent, the Chinese internet maintaining company with a market cap of $500 billion, become in New York the day gone by to talk about the first-ever Yidan Prize for Education. Chen, forty-eight, stepped down as Tencent’s chief administrative officer in 2013. He stated he determined to commit himself to educational philanthropy after reflecting on his vital relationship with his illiterate paternal grandmother, who took care of him while his mother and father toiled in their jobs at a Shenzhen financial institution. “She endorsed me to take a look at,” he said through a translator. “She left a seed in my heart.”
In 2016, he installed the Yidan Prize and endowed it with $320 million to be provided in perpetuity. The prize, $7.Seventy-five million breaks up among winners, or “laureates,” is the most valuable in education. Billionaire Eli Broad created the Broad Prize for Urban Education, which ran from 2002 to 2014 and gave away $1 million a year in university scholarships to high school districts inside the U.S.
That showed advanced academic achievement for low-income college students and college students of color. The Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize, base inside the U.K., awards $1 million every 12 months to a terrific instructor. And the Qatar Foundation gives the WISE Prize for Education, well worth $500,000, to a character or institution that has made “an awesome, international-class contribution to training.”
One of the 2017 Yidan laureates, Vicky Colbert, 65, also won the WISE Prize in 2018. She changed into touring New York yesterday with Chen, and as she defined her nonprofit company, Fundación Escuela Nueva, Chen regarded on attentively thru thick black-framed glasses. Colbert, a native of Colombia (her Colombian mother married an American named Colbert, who died when Vicky become 12 days old), speaks ideal English. She said she changed into stimulated by her mom, a trainer who commenced numerous instructor training colleges.
After incomes a sociology degree in Colombia and studying comparative training at Stanford on a Ford Foundation grant, Colbert got down to try to enhance performance in Colombia’s 34,000 suffering rural colleges. They took a conventional trainer-centered method that she believed did now not gain students, mainly in small faculties in which children of many a long time studied in a single schoolroom.
“I desired to introduce self-paced gaining knowledge of, personalization and dialoguing,” she said. “Children can examine a lot from each other, and after they exit inside the community.” That method is not new, she explained. John Dewey and Maria Montessori advocated it in the early twentieth century. But Colbert stated that after she started out operating on education within the Nineteen Seventies, most effective elite personal faculties had followed a revolutionary education theory.
Colbert served as Colombia’s vice minister of education, which helped her kick off her first pilot mission with government money. She based Escuela Nueva as an NGO in 1987. Since then, her approach has unfolded throughout rural Colombia, in which she stated the colleges started outperforming their city counterparts inside the Nineteen Nineties. Escuela Nueva has multiplied past Colombia to 16 nations and has applications running in Vietnam and Zambia, where it’s operating in partnership with a U.K.-based totally NGO that supports ladies’ training.
Along the way, Colbert has racked up several accolades, inclusive of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, which got here with a $1.25 million funding in Colbert’s corporation, the Clinton Global Citizenship Award, and the Kravis Prize. She was nominated for the Yidan Prize by way of a legitimate at the World Bank, which has supported Escuela Nueva’s work.
The Yidan Prize is run with the aid of the Hong Kong-based Yidan Prize Foundation. Chen splits his time between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, wherein Tencent is based. Though the BBC has cited him as a billionaire, he refused to talk about his net worth or his financial holdings with Forbes. He did verify that he nonetheless has a stake in Tencent and surpassed an enterprise card with the Tencent company emblem above his call.
The Yidan Prize selects its laureates with the help of a worldwide board of directors, an advisory board, and 3-person judging panels. One panel gives an award for academic improvement. The 2nd panel acknowledges terrific contributions to schooling research. The judges encompass Andreas Schleicher, director for education and talents at the OECD; Dorothy K. Colbert gained that prize.
Gordon, the previous director-preferred of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT; and Steve Cohen, govt director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The judges fielded nearly 1,000 nominations for the inaugural prizes, which had been presented in a ceremony in Hong Kong in December. Half of every $3.Nine million prizes will help the laureate’s undertaking and the other half of the character laureates for use at their discretion.
The research prize went to Carol S. Dweck, 71, a Stanford psychology professor who has pioneered the idea of a boom mindset in schooling. In Dweck’s words: “In a boom mindset, college students remember the fact that their abilities and competencies may be developed via attempt, desirable teaching, and endurance. They don’t necessarily suppose everybody’s identical or every person can be Einstein, but they believe everybody can get smarter if they paintings it.”
One of the most important schooling decisions you may ever make to your children is determining what primary faculty to send them to. There’s no brief and clean way to determine which school is “first-rate,” it depends on what you want out in their schooling, and additionally the temperament and getting to know your children’s fashion. Let’s look at several essential concerns.
Class Size Matters
Class length is continually troubled. Lots of oldsters assume that smaller is usually higher, but this isn’t the case. It all relies upon on how your youngster’s research and which could benefit them. Some kids thrive in bigger instructions, whilst some do higher whilst the instructor to kid ratio is smaller.
School Philosophy
Each school has its own technique for schooling, and it’s expressed in its “faculty philosophy.” There are masses of ways of coaching and coping with training. Some colleges organization exceptional-elderly youngsters together so one can study from every different. Some follow the traditional version of clear practice and grading alongside strict lines. Others offer college students lots of freedom and examine them more openly.
