At the moment I would like to emphasize the need for vocational training, for non-formal education in Burma to help all those young people who have suffered from a bad education. They have to be trained to earn their living. They have to have enough education vocational training to be able to set up respectable lives for themselves.
Vocational education programs have made a real difference in the lives of countless young people nationwide; they build self-confidence and leadership skills by allowing students to utilize their unique gifts and talents.
I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.
I was lucky in the sense that I started work very young but had a solid family base provided by my mother. She instilled a strong sense of perspective and humility in me from a very early age.
I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in.
My formal education as an extension to my college degree in journalism was the time that I spent working with the student newspaper. I would argue that my greatest education occurred by working for the student newspaper. It wasn't necessarily the classroom work that made my formal education special. It was the idea that I had the opportunity to practice it before I went into the real world.
I don't think it should be allowed for people to start working at a young age and not take the time to just be living as themselves in the real world, especially now in this new age of new media and the obsession with celebrity. I think it's a real crime.
Social media is addictive precisely because it gives us something which the real world lacks: it gives us immediacy, direction, a sense of clarity and value as an individual.
It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.
If we want boys to succeed, we need to bring them back to education by making education relevant to them and bring in more service learning and vocational education.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
I love the values football can teach. It gives young people a sense of how to defer present gratification for future success, it teaches self-discipline, it teaches teamwork, it gives them a bonding experience that can be hard to find somewhere else, it teaches the ability to process large amounts of information and apply it in real time.
My work gives me a sense of purpose that I never really had before - it gives me a lot of joy, and it would be wonderful to invite other people to get involved.
A high school diploma will no longer be sufficient. But that post secondary education does not have to be a four-year university or a four-year college. It can be career technical education, vocational education, community college.
Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.