Education—a universal good
I finished up my latest Girl Develop It class on PHP this week and next week I will be wrapping up the one on Android development. Each time I teach a class, for GDI or elsewhere, I always leave the class with an elevated sense of how capable we, humanity as a whole, could be with access to education.
In my classes, I teach programming to people, particularly women, who are uncomfortable with the traditional world of computer science. I love the “I can do this” smile that steals across each students face throughout the class. The moment can come while I explain a concept, when they have created something for the first time, or when they have challenged themselves even further and have met the challenge head on. The moment when they realize that they are truly capable.
I believe that understanding how the technology that controls our modern lives is not only empowering but vital to our understanding of access to information, technological progress and human interaction. But more than that, I believe that giving ambitious, talented women (and men) the tools to begin creating their own technological platform can be the catalyst for a chain reaction of good.
If even a fraction of the hundreds of students I have taught this year alone go out into the world a begin creating platforms for education, awareness, advocacy, (in short, humanity), then my contribution has been amplified by that much. My two, four, six hours a week educating people about the technology that controls most of our information can potentially translate to hundreds of changed lives.
Education, about anything, is one of the most important gifts we can give anyone. All causes, all problems, all movements must begin with education. When I walk out of my classroom at the end of each class, I want to feel that I have given my students that gift—a gift which they can then use to change the world in their own way, for their own causes.
