Steem4nigeria Accelerator Contest Week 123 : I have a dream!

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Share a personal dream with us.Be real in your writing (life, career, family, society, or nation)

The Architecture Of Understanding: My Vision of a Connected Society.

We are residing in a time when we are more intertwined via fiber optic technology and more polarized by ideology than ever previously. The thing that makes me stay up late and drink morning coffee is my personal dream, the development of a global Empathy Curriculum. I see the world in which the emotional intelligence and cross-cultural storytelling are studied in as academic way as mathematics or physics. I am determined to build a non-profit foundation to incorporate a concept of radical listening in the public educational institutions to shift us out of a society of echoes and a society of understanding.

Why is this dream important to you?

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This dream matters to me since I have experienced the price of not having it. When we approach our careers, we tend to focus on the hard skills, although the reason why most of the projects fail is due to lack of communication. We lose touch with one another in our families as we cease being inquisitive as to the lives of each other. At the national level, we are observing polarization that is making the neighbors the enemies.

In my opinion, a vast majority of the sufferings of this world can be attributed to lack of imagination, to the inability to experience what it is like to be in the shoes of another person. When we can teach a child to solve the equation with x, we can surely teach them to create space in which they will have a different point of view than that of their own. It is not merely a social objective, which is quite desirable; it is a survival plan of a globalized species.

What challenges are standing in the way between you and your dream?

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The obstacles that have been on my path are big. First, there is the institutional inertia of the contemporary education. Schools operate under heavy pressure to generate workers, not necessarily caring citizens and the first casualty of financial crunch is the soft skills which are usually dropped when budgets become tighter.

Second, there is the digital ego. We are already existing in an outrage economy in which social media algorithms are making money off our division. The battle against a system that sets us as angry with each other is like battling a digital stream up-stream. Lastly, is the scale of the individual challenge. How are you going to transform a philosophy of kindness into something that can be repeated, measured, and effective in a classroom in Tokyo but not so effective in a rural town in Ohio?

What are you doing (or hope to do) to achieve this big dream?

To do this I am beginning small yet thinking big. I am now writing stories of marginalized communities and designing perspective-taking workshops in community centers. To offer a scientific foundation of my curriculum, I am researching the field of neuroscience and narrative: how the mirror neurons in the brain respond to storytelling.

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I would love to collaborate with technology creators to develop an open-source system on which students in different parts of the world could have high-stakes, moderated dialogue on their lives and values. My personal career-life balance is also becoming more and more balanced as I make sure that I am as empathetic to my own family and close circle as I am preaching. You cannot treat an entire nation till you have brought peace to your own dining table.

It is a big dream, possibly even an idealistic dream, but it is better to fail at something that is important than to succeed at something that is not. And we do not require technology to talk to, we require more humanity to listen.

Thanks for reading my post I'm inviting @pea07 @ninapenda and @abdullahw2 to participate.