Penelope Vos

Change Agent, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Inventor, Parent, Philanthropist, Potential employer, Promoter, Single, Social entrepreneur

Since 1996, Penny has established highly successful, whole-school Esperanto programmes in primary and secondary schools and is now developing and marketing resources to help other schools learn and use the world’s common language to promote peace and intercultural understanding. Penny has a degree in environmental science and 20 years of rich and varied experience teaching in very diverse institutions and in an unusual range of subjects specialties. (Note to the webmaster, I can't record Esperanto in the languages list)

Effective languages education, and doing more with less by clear thinking and better design.

All of the issues that matter most are global and can best be solved by inviting the collaboration of all of the world's people. They could participate in this collaboration in English, if we could provide 1000 hours or so of expensive English instruction to the billions of people who would need it. Much more practically and fairly, they could participate in Esperanto. 10 hours of actual instruction, a teach-yourself book and a dictionary will get them (and us) bilingual in 100 hours. Then we can get on with the business of maintaining our own languages and cultures at home and communicating scientifically, politically, economically, theologically, and socially across our boundaries in Esperanto. If our children learn Esperanto in primary school as a trainer-language, they will be well-prepared to understand their world, and learn more languages if they wish, and the world will be closer to being able to talk about the things that matter to us all.

I found TED yesterday when a colleague sent a link to Alex Tabarrok's talk to the "reago" (reaction) group who respond to references to Esperanto in the world's media and propose it as a solution where relevant. I thought Alex's talk was great and and went on to hear Charles Leadbeater's talk on collaborative consumer design and investigate TED in general. I'm excited to have found this community of bright people focussing on what is possible and valuable. Here's a challenging thought- in future TED could be available in Esperanto so that this treasure is available for full participation anyone with 100 hours to learn it. TED would have a bigger market and we'd have a better supply of ideas, wouldn't we Alex? Participating in the next conference is now top of my wish-list! Thank you.

Thinking broadly, starting at the root of the problem/situation/challenge. Staying committed. Finding a way.