The Children Can

After watching the TED talk by Kiran Bir Sethi, I realized two things. One is that her school in India is everything I want to support in my future. The second is that visuals greatly enhance the emotional impact of a TED talk.

Kiran Bir Sethi’s talk was inspiring and motivational. It was about her school called Riverside that encourages children in India to change the world around them. She tries to smudge the border between school and real life. She encourages kids to be first aware of the problem, then enable them to change it, and finally empower them to go out and make that change. Kids are full of innocence and care greater than any force; this can be used to change the world. Adults see other adults that are poor and illiterate and feel sadness for them; kids see the adults and want to help them if they can. Her main message is “I can”. I think this is very important. Kids around the world often see the war, poverty and other problems around their community and do not feel as if they can help. They think the adults have to do it and the adults have to change the world. Sethi focuses on motivation within children. If the children can be empowered to make a change, they can spread to their families and other adults. She repeats the word contagious multiple times in her talk. Kids have a joy and love in them that easily spreads to other people. Imagine if kids were using this to make the world a better place. Ahmedabad, the city where the Riverside school is, has become extremely child friendly. If cities around the world could slowly take on this idea and encourage its children to change the world, the next generation of people might be entirely different. I think this is what really matters- the children. Adults are hard to change; they tend to stick to their ways. But if the children, I believe, are taught to challenge the world around them and make it a more peaceful place then the future can change. The world is a massive, horrifying place at times. However, if the world lets the children infect it with their beautiful smiles and simple ideas; I think the entire world could change.

Kiran Bir Sethi uses very successful techniques in her presentation. She used slides with words, pictures and videos to help relay a message. The words highlighted above are en example of some of the words put onto the screen. By having them behind her as she spoke, it emphasized those words and helped the viewer to connect back to the meaning of the talk by just remembering a few key words. Once in a while she would play a video of children doing something like experiencing child labor, then going out into the world to fight against child labor. Hearing about children making a change was powerful, but seeing them actually take a stand and reach out really touches the heart. These videos not only showed how wonderful child empowerment can be, it backed up her speech with visual proof. She also used pictures with things such as statistics that also visually enhanced the viewer’s belief; by seeing the children’s math and reading scores were better than other, regular schools it proved that it was true. Sethi uses visual techniques to enhance her talk and prove her point. Humans are visual beings, and they respond to seeing things happen as well as hearing them. By using these two senses Sethi fully gets across her point in an inspiring way. This TED talk was beautifully created with a beautiful message and I will refer back to this when I create my own.

See Kiran’s TED talk here