This Brilliant 12-Year-Old Mexican Girl Is Touted as 'Next Steve Jobs' Dodai Stewart - Jezebel
go to original October 24, 2013

Meet 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno. She goes to José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico. She's being touted as "the face of Mexico's unleashed potential." Mentioning Steve Jobs in the headline is purposely attention-grabbing — on Wired's part and on mine — but the gist of it is this: Our current idea of "genius" might be a Silicon Valley white guy with glasses, but a small brown girl from a dirt-poor town could be a future game-changing icon, thanks to experimental teaching methods.

The Wired cover story isn't really about Paloma, though she's a big part of it. It focuses on her teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa, who, frustrated with a boring curriculum and uninspired students, decided to change his teaching methods. He discovered videos about Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK:

... Many people have become familiar with Mitra's work, which emphasizes curiosity-fueled exploration instead of the usual discipline and routine schools generally enforce. It's all about critical thinking, free-thinking, organic thinking.

Read the rest at Jezebel

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