The second service is the Weaving of Schools. Let’s say that you are a student who lives in a place where droughts are parching the farmland. You may be in Africa, in India, in Iran, in Mexico, or in Nebraska, USA. Perhaps you belong to a farming family, and thus you have seen your own fields turn brown, your own streams dry up, and your own cattle suffer because of the unrelenting heat. You have read the local newspapers, you have talked with other farmers, and you know to some degree that drought is a problem in other places around the world. But for you, drought is primarily a local problem.
With the Weaving of Schools program, you and the other students at your school use find a “Match-Making” service on this website: you click on Drought, and then you find a growing number of schools around the world where other students are interested in sharing their experiences with drought. They provide their names and emails, and the location of their schools. Now you can write to someone your own age (using your best English, or some other suitable language) so that you can learn about both the problems and the solutions. You can share pictures, you can share links to professional articles about drought. And thus you begin to understand the problem of drought not as your own local problem, but as a global problem . . . which needs global solutions.
Your network of students will grow. Maybe you put a map up on a wall in your classroom, with pins marking the location of people who are no longer just students, but your colleagues, part of your team, working to find solutions to the problems which you all share.
You are Weaving Your Schools together. For the first time in human history, you are not waiting for the politicians to solve the problems. You are a Global Generation, working together for one year, five years, ten years, twenty years . . . growing up together as a team which becomes more and more professional.
Of course, you can look for students around the world who are interested in wildfires, hurricanes, floods, various diseases, or whatever climate change disaster is devastating your home on planet Earth. Students in grade schools, high schools and trade schools, as well as colleges and universities, can link with students at their own level.
The Weaving of Schools will work only as well as you make it work. If you spend time searching for other schools, and then make a long-term effort to become friends and colleagues, you will learn far more than you ever could if you are limited to your own classroom.
(This Weaving of Schools is just getting started. We hope to have the “Match-Making” program in place soon.)
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“What do you think about all this climate change stuff?
Is it because those idiots keep burning coal and oil?”
“Naw, I blame it on the cows and their methane.”