After writing on Howard Gardner yesterday,I got so excited when I went back to the website of the Learning Revolution to read the Foreword and introduction of the new book: Unlimited.
I wished that our Mauritian educationists would read about the happeings in the world of learning as described in this new book by Gordon Dryden & Janette Vos.
How do we get our responsible parties of learning to espouse the new ideas and to join the band wagon to make our nation ahead of the heap? Does any one of you my blog readers have any ideas to propose?
Here is my last night’s interesting and somewhat lenghty reading:
The more the new technology soars,
the more the need for holistic balance
Even thirty years ago, most teachers were taught that intelligence was fixed and
could be measured from early childhood by standardized I.Q. tests.
Even today, in the country where I have spent most of my adult life, almost the
entire American schooling system is based around standardized tests of standardized
knowledge as if all children were the same. They are not.
Some of the world’s best neuroscientists have proved for over two decades that all
of us are smart in different ways. We each have a different learning style, a different
thinking style, and different ways of studying and working. So the school of the future
will be personalized for every individual learning style.
We also learn best in a happy, safe environment, with good diet and nutrition, in
caring, loving families, and in schools where lifeskills and holistic learning are even
more important than learning to master the new tools of high technology.
So capitalizing on the new world of instant information and interactive technology
is only one side of the path to a potentially unlimited future. Every good parent and
teacher knows the other side involves the whole person, in a caring home and a caring
community—with brain, mind and body acting together in balance.
At its simplest, you cannot learn well if you’re hungry or fearful. You cannot learn
well if your brain has been stunted from birth because you’re under-nourished. You
cannot benefit from a world of potential plenty if you live in a country with polluted
water, unsanitary sewerage, without adequate food, clothing and security; in world
where sometimes obscene wealth is surrounded by overwhelming poverty.
An over-riding message of this book is that all of us can also learn best when we
use the whole world as a classroom especially when that world is a welcoming,
caring, sharing one. But even in the world’s most affluent countries in North America,
western Europe, Australia and New Zealand many are handicapped by poverty,
emotional stress, bad nutrition and poor family environments.
We also all live in a series of interlocking eco-systems, where pollution, environmental
degradation and climate change are crying out for new solutions. We live,
too, in a world where a $600-billion-a-year pharmaceutical drugs industry is mistaken
for a real health policy. Often where inadequate schooling is mistaken for real-life
education. Where inefficient bureaucracy is mistaken for social innovation.
As we two co-authors have travelled to many parts of the world, we have seen the
positive, holistic alternatives that can match the new digital wealth-producing revolution
with an equal balance of social, emotional, mental and cultural enrichment.
â Children of poor parents in developing countries, like India, have filled schools
whenever daily meal programs have been introduced.
â Entire school-age populations have prospered as in Finland when the government
provides high-quality teachers and teacher training programs.
â The soaring world population, in over-crowded poor countries, is matched by a
growing environmental crisis and equally successful sustainable technologies.
â Small nations like Singapore, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and
New Zealand have shown that size is not important for national success.
â The enormous cost of the war in Iraq proves that money is not the problem. Nobel
prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that war will end up costing at
least $3 trillion.1 So even a tiny fraction of that, invested in the right way, would more
than solve the world’s problems of poverty, malnutrition, poor health—and provide a
decent basic education for all.
â Ideally, too, we now know that well-prepared parents are the world’s best first
teachers. A happy, healthy home is the world’s best school. A healthy, caring community
is the world’s best playground. A secure, ecologically balanced world is the
planet’s best classroom—that unlimited global classroom we all share together.
History’s newest revolution
and the seven keys to unlock it
All of us, together, are surging through the most profound revolution in human history.
Its impact is personal, national, global and, in many ways, unlimited.
At its core are seven catalysts, now converging and fusing to change the way we
live, work, play, learn, teach, think and create at any age.
This new networked age makes it urgent to rethink entirely what we mean by education,
learning, teaching and schooling. For education is changing more than it has
since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago and compulsory classroom
schooling 300 years ago. Now the world is your classroom and learning is lifelong.
Already two billion students spend four-fifths of their waking hours outside school,
in an iPod, YouTube, Google, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Skype and Sim-
City world so different from yesterday’s deskbound classrooms.
Business Week magazine says lifelong learning will soon be the world’s greatest
growth industry, with $370 billion a year in sales as millions learn online. And
Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts that before long all the world’s information will
be instantly available on pocket computers like the Apple iPod. Then students will
be able to find answers quicker than professors can ask questions.1
The keys to unlock the future are simple but revolutionary. Once unlocked, that
revolution has the power to unleash the combined talents of millions:
1. It’s PERSONAL: where information and learning programs can be personalized and tailored to your own passions, talents, interests and needs. And where you
can share your own talents and skills with millions—for both fun and income.
2. It’s INTERACTIVE: with new digital platforms and templates to make it easy,
simple and fun to learn by doing, playing, creating, producing and interacting a new
world of creative experiences.
3. It’s GLOBAL: the ever-expanding world-wide Internet owned by no one, used
by everyone; where the combined knowledge of humankind is now available to virtually
all at the tap of a digital keyboard or a touch screen.
4. It’s INSTANT: for the fi rst time in history, the ability to learn anything “just in
timeâ€, when you need it, as you need it, at your request, and in your own way.
5. It’s MAINLY FREE: or nearly so—one low-cost click-at-a-time. The World
Wide Web, browsers, search engines and digital platforms make it easy to access
much information free, and to download other information for a few cents. Even free
international phonecalls.
6. It’s EASILY SHARED: the new world of collaborative networks to share your
abilities with anyone, anywhere. To store free online and on community websites
your family photographs, videos, music and even your digital multimedia portfolios
to demonstrate what you know and what you can do.
7. It’s CO-CREATIVE: if we can dream it, we can now do it together with millions
around the world. Now we can merge our own talents into multi-talented global
teams, to produce new innovative answers to major global problems.
These seven keys have already unlocked new doors to transform industries, countries,
communities, commerce, communications and companies. They have the power
to reinvent every aspect of lifelong learning, teaching and schooling. But when these
“tipping points†link with other sweeping changes, the impact will be even greater:
â The neuroscience revolution: our new-found abilities to unlock the incredible
potential of the human brain and mind, and shatter many of the myths on which much
of “education†is based. That research shows that everyone can learn anything faster
and more efficiently. That learning starts in the womb and flowers through life.
â The genetic revolution: the knowledge that “all life is oneâ€: that all living things
are made from the same genetic code where we’ll soon have access to our own.
â The demographic revolution: in which, of all people who have ever lived
longer than sixty-five years, two-thirds are alive today—while two billion, mainly in
the poor world, are under age twenty. But now the wisdom of age and experience can
link, in new ways, with the soaring hi-tech skills of children and grandchildren.
â Above all, the new Open Revolution: at long last the chance to find a genuine
new way to reinvent society. Not only a choice between free-enterprise capitalism and
state-controlled socialism. But a new unlimited choice of cooperative enterprise and
collaborative co-creativity.
For global education the need has never has been greater.
â As Philippe Legrain summarizes it in Open World: The truth about globalization:
“One in five of the world’s 6.6 billion people live on less than a dollar a day almost
half on less than two dollars a day. More than 850 million cannot read or write. Nearly
a billion do not have access to clean water, 2.4 billion to basic sanitation. Eleven million
children under five die each year from preventable diseases.â€
But already the tools exist to share some of the world’s best and simplest learning
and health programs with billions of poor people: to provide them with most of the
unlimited opportunities that today only rich countries and people enjoy.
â Those wealthy countries are already spending billions on these new tools that
have the power to reinvent education. But most are “doing it wrongâ€.
Very simply, they are trying to patch the technology of the twenty-first century on
to a classroom system invented for a bygone age: a school system gradually conceived
after the invention of the printing press in Europe more than 500 years ago.
â Where kindergartens, schools, colleges, universities and organizations are “doing
it rightâ€, the results are remarkable. This book abounds with them. They start
with individual brainpower and the seven keys to unlock the future that are already
transforming nearly every other aspect of society. Together they provide the catalyst
to reinvent education itself: personally, locally, nationally and globally.
1. It’s PERSONAL
For everyone, everywhere, any time, in your own way
Two years ago, Time magazine named its Person of the Year simply: YOU.
Its cover subtitle puts it succinctly: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age.
Welcome to your world.â€2 That cover story simplifi es its main message: “This was the
year that the people took control of the media. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web
2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. It’s
a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making
them matter.â€
Time calls it a massive social experiment: “an opportunity to build a new kind of
international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but
citizen to citizen, person to person.†In some ways it’s a “new digital democracyâ€:
â Blogs or Web-logs: More than 100 million of personally-written websites flooding
the Internet for anyone to share not counting 72 million in China alone.
â Mobile phones: soaring to 3.3 billion in use around the world in 2008, predicted
to rocket to at least four billion before the end of 2009.
â eBay.com: the world’s biggest online auction site where 200 million registered
users each day trade goods and services worth $100 million: a new global community
“flea market†where anyone can sell to anyone anywhere.
â MySpace.com: a new online community of over 100 million active users.
â Flickr.com: which hosts two billion photos in the world’s biggest album.
â Facebook.com also with more than 100 million registered users by mid-2008,
growing by 25,000 a day, and 65 billion “page views†a month as friends share their
experiences, videos and photographs.
â YouTube.com the video-sharing phenomena where visitors to the site can
choose from 83.4 million video-clips. YouTube is the forerunner to a completely new
form of international online television. Only a few years back such videos would have
been shot by professionals on expensive cameras and edited by other experts. Todaythey’re even shot by young children, edited on home computers and viewed on a new
breed of digital pocket-phone-computers the size of a pack of playing cards.
No longer is education a one-way presentation process, with students as passive
receivers. Now you can co-create your own lifelong learning plan and keep on expanding
your individual talent with new skills throughout life.
2. It’s INTERACTIVE
Easy-to-use templates make it simple at any age
In yesterday’s world, one-year-olds loved to see and hear their parents read colorful
nursery-rhyme books.
Today’s one-year-olds still do. With the help of their parents, they can now also
flop their tiny hands anywhere on to a computer keyboard, and see shapes, numbers
and colors and hear them in eight languages: on BabyWow software, invented by a
parent for his new baby.
Yesterday, four and five year-olds loved to color-in scrapbooks, with crayons and
finger-painting. They still do. They can also now create brilliant and colorful digitized
artwork on such programs as Kid Pix Deluxe.
Yesterday, children went to the movies. They still go. They can also use Microsoft
Movie Maker and Apple iMovie software to professionally edit videos they have shot
themselves or in teams.
In many New Zealand public schools, six-year-olds, from their fi rst day in grade
one, start using video cameras to explore their world and record it. They quickly learn
to edit video and compose music.
In yesterday’s world, seven-year-olds lucky enough to live near the sea loved to
swim and build magic sand castles. They still do. They can also now download free
software from the Web to make their own three-dimensional animations.
Great teachers have always involved their students in interactive learning. Now we
can each use twenty-first-century tools to create an entire new world of interactive
experiences: our own Disneylands if we wish.
3. It’s GLOBAL
The Web owned by no one, but used by almost everyone
Better still, we can go on learning and sharing new skills throughout life: we can
co-create the future together.
Says Canadian researcher and author Don Tapscott in The Digital Economy:
“We are at the dawn of a new Age of Networked Intelligence an age that is giving
birth to a new economy, a new politics and a new society.â€
Says British scientist and author Matt Ridley, in his book, Genome: The autobiography
of a species: “I genuinely believe we are living through the greatest intellectual
moment in history. Bar none.â€
Says Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International and author of Birth of the Chaordic
Age: “The undeniable fact is that we have created the greatest explosion of capacity
to receive, store, utilize and transform information in history. There is no way to turn
back. Whether we recognize it or not, whether we will it or not, whether we welcome
it or not, whether it is constructive or not, we are caught up together all of us and the
earth as well in the most sudden, the most profound, the most diverse and complex
change in the history of civilization. Perhaps in the history of earth itself.â€3
Says Professor Michio Kaku, author of Visions: “Since the 1950s, the power of our
computers has advanced by a factor of roughly ten billion. By 2020, microprocessors
will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper, scattered by the millions into the
environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere.â€4
Says Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web: “The vision I still have of the Web is
about anything being potentially connected with anything.â€5
And from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, on its mission: “To organize the
world’s information and make it available to anyone.â€
But the new co-creative learning revolution will be equally astounding.
â The Hewlett Foundation, inspired by the life of Silicon Valley pioneer Bill Hewlett,
has invested $68 million charting precisely how it will come about: led by some of our
best universities in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. â The International Baccalaureate movement already provides a global curriculum
to 539,000 students, aged from three to nineteen, in 2,051 schools in 125 countries.7
â SUN Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy has set up Curriki as The Global
Education and Learning Network, to work towards a worldwide online curriculum for
K-12 schools.8
â John Seely Brown, former head of the Silicon Valley Palo Alto Research Center
that invented the personal-computer age, has spelled out how young students themselves
are already leading that revolution.9
And brilliant schools, like Singapore’s Overseas Family School, Britain’s Cramlington
Community High School, Mexico’s Thomas Jefferson Institute, and The Master’s
Academy in Canada, are pioneering new ways to globalize lessons.
4. lt’s INSTANT
Just in time, when you need it, as you need it
For most of the last century, the assembly lines of Ford and General Motors typified
the mass-production revolution.
Then Japan’s Toyota introduced just-in-time mass-production, with all the hundreds
of car-parts delivered each day as needed, where needed. Soon Japan and its methods
dominated the world’s car industry.
Then in the early 1990s a small band of computer-science students and graduates
started to use online digital and interactive technology to reinvent the entire world:
â Tim Berners-Lee invented the tools for the World Wide Web.
â Mark Andreessen and his fellow Illinois students linked with fi nancier Jim Clark
to produce Netscape, the world’s fi rst real browser—to instantly surf the Web.
â Then students Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google, with the incredible
ability to soon scan billions of Web sites and fi nd answers in under half a second. Now
with more than 300 million visitors every day.
â Atomic Learning,10 a company set up by ex-teachers, offers 35,000 instant, ondemand
personalized video tutorials to provide any subscriber with easy-to-followgraphic instructions to learn more than 100 computer programs: from editing video to
making three-dimensional animations.
But probably the greatest early impact has been with music: and the power to allow
fans anywhere in the world to download their favorite tracks, instantly and on demand,
from a variety of online libraries, generally for under $1 a track.
The most popular service is Apple’s iTunes, which by early 2008 offered a library
of more than six million tracks. That links directly to Apple’s other major twenty-fi rst
century innovation, the iPod. A brilliantly-designed personal music library, it’s also
only the size of a pack of playing cards, yet able to hold up to 15,000 personally-chosen
tracks on the most expensive iPod.
And if students can download their choice of music instantly on demand, why not
the same access to instant learning programs?
5. It’s MAINLY FREE
Or nearly free: often one low-cost click at a time
Imagine any sales manager twenty years ago deciding to give away millions of copies
of his company’s main product absolutely free. The result: probably instant dismissal
or referral to a psychiatrist. But that’s what Netscape did in 1994 when it launched its
fi rst Navigator browser. Within a few weeks forty million computer buffs around the
globe had downloaded it free. Soon Netscape was selling other advanced copies to
business. And when their company “went public†in 1995 it turned fi nancier Jim Clark
into an instant billionaire. It also made multimillionaires out of Marc Andreessen and
his fellow young Illinois college developers. Since then that’s been one of the keys to
the Web-based revolution: give away instant service free—and sell the extras.
But the new ingredient: sell those extras “one low-cost click at a timeâ€â€”on some
sites as low as 5 cents a click—just like Google does with its sponsored advertising
links. Millions of people can now turn their own highly-specialized talents into saleable
products or services. They can give away millions of free summaries on Google,
and then sell the extras for a few cents or dollars on every click.
Now an entirely new marketing concept has soared into prominence. Chris Anderson, the Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, calls it “the long tailâ€.11 Up till recently,
he says, we lived in “the age of the blockbusterâ€. Only the world’s top-selling books
or long-playing records featured in most bookstores or radio-station play-lists.
Now, as Apple has proved, if only ten copies each of fi ve million songs are sold, on
average, at under $1 each, that would achieve sales of $50 million. Apple has made
big profi ts from that.
But Apple has made even bigger ones by selling more than 140 million iPods in six
years. In that time iTunes has sold over four billion songs, 50 million TV shows and
1.3 million movies. That’s the kind of impact that Google’s Schmidt is talking about
when he says “we should think of all the world’s information being available in the
equivalent of an iPodâ€.
And Harvard Business Professor Clayton M. Christensen—an expert on “disruptive
innovationâ€â€”predicts this revolution will go further. No later than 2014, he says, 25
percent of all high school courses will also be available online—later personalized to
each student’s preferred learning style. By 2019 that will be 50 per cent.12
6. It’s EASILY SHARED
The new world of collaborative networks
All seven “keys†are of vital importance for education. But none more so than the
new world of cooperative networks of teachers and students.
Wikipedia is the ideal example.13 Ten years ago it didn’t exist. Other encyclopedias,
such as Britannica and World Book, sold for $1,000 or more. Microsoft’s Encarta
soon surpassed them in popularity, given away free or sold cheaply on a CD-rom to
encourage sales of Windows. But Encarta was based on an inferior printed encyclopedia,
with only 4,500 articles.
Now Wikipedia is by far the world’s largest encyclopedia. It has around 2.5 million
English entries, with over ten million in all its 252 languages: instantly available, free,
on the Web. All are contributed free by more than 75,000 volunteers.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales states his aim succinctly: to give “every single person
free access to the sum of all human knowledgeâ€.14 Now apply that same principle tolearning and schooling. The world currently has around 59 million K-12 (kindergarten
to twelfth-grade) teachers, with about 1.5 billion students.
Silicon Valley researchers say around 2 percent of adults are innovators and another
13 percent “early adoptersâ€. Simple arithmetic shows 15 per cent of 59 million equals
8,850,000 teachers. Imagine each of those contributing only one favorite teaching or
learning idea in a year, and sharing it with teachers around the world. Now imagine
one each a month!
Britain’s Promethean company already provides a model. It makes some of the
world’s best interactive digital whiteboards (at right), with built-in touch-screen software
to teach mathematics, science, geography and other subjects. Promethean also
coordinates collaborative online classrooms. In them, science and other teachers at
every level can share their best lesson plans online with teachers around the world.
7. It’s CO-CREATIVE
To link your unique talents with multi-talented teams
As we’ll explore in later chapters, everyone has a talent to be good and probably
great at something. The trick is to fi nd that something, and now to blend it together
with the talents of others—anywhere.
Most people—if provided with the opportunities—probably have a passion for
something. And when both passion and talent are unleashed, those opportunities are
virtually limitless. Great schools are already achieving this by enthusing students to
set up their own personalized learning plans. And to keep on upgrading them, and their
skills, throughout lifeâ€: to be self-directed, self-motivated lifelong learners.
Many brain researchers, such as Harvard’s Professor Howard Gardner, have argued
for more than twenty years that intelligence is not fi xed and that each of us is smart in
different ways. Many schools now include Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligencesâ€
into their daily program—so that students can build on their own strengths and learn
from the strengths of others.
But the new twenty-fi rst century world of digital multimedia means that students,
even from early elementary-school age, can blend their own talent into semi-professional multi-talented teams. Scripting, shooting, editing and providing music and props
for school videotape, for example, requires many different talents: technical, visual,
musical, graphic, linguistic and animation.
Wikipedia provides a brilliant one-dimensional model for cooperative sharing and
co-creation. But leading American digital games producer Marc Prensky has an even
better idea.15
Like the co-authors of this book, he wants the world’s students to reinvent education,
reinvent schooling, reinvent the way the world learns and teaches.
And he wants them to do it by cooperatively building digital learning games with
the same appeal that Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo and Microsoft interactive games
already have for tens of millions of children in every continent. Kids love them because
they’re interactive fun.
Now imagine tens of thousands of individual colleges, schools or millions of classrooms
each taking responsibility for becoming the expert on one “subject†or aspect
of each subject. The goal: the best learning software, produced by the students of the
world, and shared freely with all other students around the world—on every aspect of
every “subjectâ€. Welcome to the real Free World. Linux, the open-source computer
operating system inspired by Finnish student Linus Torvalds, was co-created by thousands
of computer-science students around the world. You can now download it free
from the Web, like you can download low-cost or free software or music.
“Linux,†says Eric Raymond, “was the fi rst project to make a conscious, successful
effort to use the entire world as a talent pool.â€16 A small group of students on the new
Web fi rst proved this by together co-designing a complete computer operating system.
Now one million are working together on other digital projects—and a new business
model: instead of the winner-takes-all—all can be winners.
In pockets around the planet, talented school teachers have also started the reinvention.
All great teachers involve their students in challenging, interactive projects.
Some of their interactive classroom innovations are brilliant, but serve only twenty
to forty students. We’ve called that The Learning Revolution 1.0.
Now the overwhelming need is to “scale up†their efforts—to make them available
to hundreds of millions—to use the whole world as this new talent pool. And this is
The Learning Revolution 2.0.
Just as genius students like Google’s Brin and Page can turn their combined talents
into a company valued at $170 billion—so too can the world’s greatest teachers and
other bright students share their talents with millions—some free and others as incomeearners.
â At Singapore’s Overseas Family School, with international students from
seventy-four countries, teachers and students have digitized most of their lesson plans,
for sharing with others. And they’ve also used their own excellent computer network
to provide individual learning programs for all 3,500 students.
â At Mexico’s K-12 Thomas Jefferson Institute, highly creative students from its
high schools and middle schools each produce one Broadway musical a year to professional
standards: from The Disney High School Musical to Cats and Wicked. And
the Institute has ongoing global relationships with MIT’s MediaLab, NASA, Apple,
Microsoft and top-tier schools and universities around the world. Their high school
students even take the Harvard Business School’s business courses.
â In New Zealand, the Government abolished its national Education Department
almost twenty years ago and replaced it with a much smaller policy-recommending
Ministry. Since then all schools, public and private, have been charter schools, run by
local boards. Innovation has soared.
At two new special-designation schools in Christchurch, students use the entire city
as a classroom. Each student has a personalized learning plan, worked out in partnership
with parents and learning advisers. Each plan starts with the student’s own passions,
talents, interests, vision and drive. The very names of the schools—Discovery One
(for primary students) and Unlimited (for high school)—echo the emphasis.
New Zealand’s new national curriculum guidelines are also being hailed as an international
model for K-12 education.17 The vision is for young people who are confi
dent, connected and enthusiastic lifelong learners, with goals to achieve excellence, innovation and diversity as well as twenty-fi rst century literacy and numeracy.
A completely new approach is also about to revolutionize university life. A group
of educational leaders have used a $68 million fund from the Hewlett Foundation to
show how the world can build a new online Global Cyberspace Learning Web. This
will be co-created by all, shared by all, expanded by all.
But we stress that this is not a book that recommends interactive technology and
the Internet as new all-embracing “magic bullets†to transform education. Only a fool
worships his tools. But over centuries dramatic new disruptive technologies—from
the wheel to the plow, sail-power to steam-engines, printed books to electric power,
automobiles to television—have ushered in great social changes.
Those changes transcend the technologies themselves. And this new revolution is
more about the social and personal changes than the technologies that spur them.
Link those new innovations with the incredible powers of the human brain—and
the new breakthroughs to unleash the unique power of the human mind—and the
scope of the new revolution is truly unlimited.
As Gary Hammel summarizes it in Leading The Revolution: “We are now standing
on the threshold of a new age—an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer
is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-fi rst century,
change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious. In a single generation, the cost of decoding
the human gene has dropped from millions to less than a hundred bucks. The cost of
storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing.
The Web is rapidly becoming a dense global matrix of connections between people,
their ideas and their resources.â€18
In this new world, says Hamel, the future is not something that happens to you, but
something you create.
And now we can co-create that future together, wherever we live.
1 comment so far ↓
There is a lot that Mauritian Educationists can learn, but is there a will to change? Change is painful but necessary.
http://www.lexpress.mu/Story/858~Les-cas-de-vols-sur-les-touristes-en-baisse-en-2008-comparés-aux-chiffres-de-2007
I am amazed that the Ministry of Tourism is delighted that the number of robberies perpetrated against tourists has fallen from 884 to 792 in a year.
To me, for a country which depends so much on tourism, this is unacceptable. You will need to aim for zero defect in such cases. With the Air Mauritius debacle, tourism is going to be hit and heads must roll. Heads do not often roll when they should.
We are all too happy to be content with the status quo, no matter what McKinsey or whatever may be advising.
The populace for the price of a few beers will continue to support the status quo.
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