 is treating everybody with kindness and decency and fostering encounters with those different from us, the key to healing our wounded world. I've been struggling with this question a lot lately because as you see over the last few years, this rise of totalitarian dictatorships and the threats against liberal democracy, against freedom of speech, against rule of law, not just globally, but also in our country. It starts making you wonder what's really gonna take to try to rebuild those bridges that are being broken. One of the most fundamental things that I love about America, the country that I immigrated to is that special fabric of decency, of civil discourse, of respect, the ability to listen to one another, the ability to foster community even with those that have different perspectives from you. And it's sadly something that's truly under threat today and that we cannot any longer take for granted. So it's fostering emotional intelligence and empathy among children going to change things. My perspective and my history, my mom's history, but even more my father's experience tells me that it absolutely can and that it's the only way. My mom was born in cattle country in the north of Mexico and came to the United States as a foreign student when she was 15 years old to our lady of the lake to study school and she learned to navigate different cultures and taught that to all of us. I came from Mexico from a sheltered isolated Jewish community. There's a couple Jews out there in Mexico to a public school system in San Antonio, Texas from a private Jewish school that was very homogeneous to a very, very diverse public high school in San Antonio. So yes, I'm a product of a public education also. And I really learned not without some trials and tribulations how to navigate different cultures and cliques and groups. And I have to say, going from that sheltered of bringing in the 1980s to the middle of San Antonio, Texas I don't know any of you guys that experienced it but there were people wearing break dancer pants and Michael Jackson jackets and some were jocks and some were punks and some were new ageers and I had no idea that they were all different. So each day I wore the clothes of a different one and I sat down for lunch with the drama kids one day and with the debate kids another day and with the black kids one day and the Hispanic kids another day and I didn't understand that I was not supposed to hang out with everybody. And one day Amber Alonso who was kind of in the punk group and she looked at me and says, Daniel, I need to give you some advice. You have to define yourself. You have to choose one of these groups. You can't be friends with all of them but I managed to be friends with all of them. But it's my that story that was the most impactful to me and that gives me both the most pause and fear and existentialist fear about what we're living through in our world today but also what gives me the most hope. He was a holocaust survivor. He was nine years old when the war started and 15 and a half when he was liberated from a concentration camp by American soldiers who risked everything to travel from abroad to save him and others like him. And he made sure to talk to me about the horrors that he went through and it absolutely seared itself into my mind so that I will never forget what he went through and not let it happen again. But he also made sure to talk to me about the kindness that helped him survive. About the moments of courage and kindness and just human recognition of his humanity. Oftentimes the people that were not kind that helped him live and that helps me be here today. And one of them is a German soldier that when people were not watching through a rotten potato by my dad's feet because he saw in my emancipated dad's persona shreds of remaining humanity. And I think my dad was strengthened not just by the nourishment of the potato by that recognition that he was still a human being. But one of the most harrowing stories that he told me was about his superintendent. When he was around 10 or 11 years old and the war had broken out, his superintendent told him, you're hungry. And my dad said, yes, let me show you where you can get some food. And he walked him a couple blocks and pointed to a pile of dead bodies. And he said, there, those are Jews. Cut a piece of meat and eat it. And my dad was a little kid. And shortly after that, the paramilitary forces showed up to the building where my family lived where my grandfather, grandmother, my dad and his brother lived. And the superintendent escorted them to every house where the Jews lived and they exterminated them all. And when they ended up at my grandparents' house, they took my grandmother into a room in the back. My dad didn't understand what was going on there. And when my grandmother came out after a while, they walked them down presumably to be exterminated. And then out of nowhere, the superintendent spoke to the paramilitary forces and whispered to them something and they left. And he approached my dad and my grandfather and he told my grandfather, Mr. Lubecki, you were always kind to me. You always looked at my eyes. You always smiled. You always told me jokes. And on the holidays, you give me a bottle of snaps. So I'm sparing you and your family, but leave before I change my mind. And that night, they went into the Covno Ghetto and then thereafter, they were sent to a concentration camp and then liberated by American soldiers. And it's not easy to come to terms with the fact that I sit here today and I live because of the kindness of an evil person who somehow, in the darkest of moments, found the courage to spare my family. And that has fueled, my dad's experience has fueled my commitment throughout my entire life to try to build bridges between people, to prevent what happened to my dad from happening again to others. And I've done it through businesses that I've started, like Peaceworks, the first company I created right after law school, where we tried to use business as a force for bringing neighbors together, to build products together, to shatter cultural stereotypes, to cement relations through that shared incentives that they have to profit from those trading relations where Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Turks, Jordanians traded with one another. And through the one voice movement we've created a movement where hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians were given a voice and a set of tools to try to discover, choose humanity and raise the voice of moderates that want to end the conflict while preserving their pride in who they are and where they come from, but finding a way to build bridges. Or through Kind, the company that makes healthy snacks that are about doing the kind thing for your body, for your taste buds and for your world, and for your bodies about nutritionally reaching ingredients for your taste buds, they should be delicious, but for your world is about trying to inspire kindness, about making kindness a state of mind, about elevating kindness into the most cherished skill that we can pass on to our children, the most cherished value that we can celebrate. And through Kind we created a kind foundation and recently in the last year and I have launched Empatico, which in my opinion is the most important thing that I've been involved in giving birth to together with George Halaf who's sitting there and our Empatico team, because it has a chance to potentially reach tens of millions of children across the world and to give them the gift to connect with those people that are different from them and to learn how to navigate those difference, to learn how to celebrate what they have in common as well as what's different and how to solve problems with kids that are different from them. It's based on a very simple notion of making it easier for teachers to be able to connect their classrooms. So it's a technology platform and a community and an ecosystem where thousands of teachers have registered and we hope it'll be at least a couple thousand more after the end of today to give them for free access to connect with other classrooms and it's very seamless and very frictionless, very easy to use, it's free and very easy to adapt to what the teachers want. So if you wanna create a free forum for the children from Memphis, Tennessee that Melissa Collins has to connect with the kids in New Jersey that she connected to and they just wanna talk, they can just talk. Or if they want to try to cover curriculum unit to satisfy particular needs that they need to cover in that particular year, there's products created by teachers with best-in-class educational tools for the kids to solve problems together or cover the weather or math or any particular assignment. And it's very, very flexible and malleable and it allows the teachers to make it their own. And I was really, really inspired earlier today where I was talking to Melissa Collins and when they turned and they made me cry, I think they should be here rather than me telling you about how impactful it is to be able to connect these kids. Some of Melissa's kids, it was in a lower income title one school, all black kids connected with these kids in New Jersey who were all white who had never met a black kid and they made friendships that were so deep that when they agreed that for Christmas they were just gonna be able to send each other a little gift and they agreed on a budget of $5 which was a lot to ask for these kids. Some of these kids from her school showed up with gifts of $25 and $30 for their friends in New Jersey. And some of these friendships ended up yielding the connections where the kids ended up meeting with one another and when these kids met kids from Delaware, met kids from Minnesota, but now they're gonna meet kids from Nigeria. And look, connecting kids with one another is enriching to everybody. But it is essential to those kids that have otherwise no other opportunity to expand their horizons and to discover differences that are important to navigate in our lives. We live in an interconnected world and we really put our kids at a disadvantage if we don't give them this toolkit, not just give, but this essential skill set for them to grow. And emotional intelligence and empathy according to a lot of studies has been proven to be a greater indicator of professional success and of happiness and fulfillment. But it's not just for the kids that were doing this, it's also for all of us, for society because if we equip these kids with this set of tools, with these skill sets, not only are they gonna be able to do better in their lives, but our world is gonna be a better world. And tomorrow and today and the day after, they're gonna face encounters where they're similarly trivial encounters about how to approach one another in a coffee shop or life moments where they are gonna be able to make a difference. And turn this world into a kinder world. So I wanna make sure that everybody understands that Empatico belongs to all of you. And that it's promise is not gonna be fulfilled and it's potential is not gonna be achieved if you don't take ownership over it. Please, if you're right now a teacher of kids at just seven to 11, sign up now on Empatico.org and commit that you're gonna use this tool at some point over the next month or two. And if you're not teaching kids seven to 11, commit that you'll find somebody that teaches kids seven to 11. And soon enough, it'll be expanded and brought into more and more classrooms. But it's really, really important that you take ownership over it, that you tell us what is it that we can do together to make sure that we reach more and more kids and that it becomes something that we can when they take for granted because every kid is given the gift to connect with one another. I'm pleased now to introduce our final speaker for the night, an amazing storyteller whose story is really, really, and that TED Talk really, really reached me, but whose name I have to read, Chimamandan Gozi Adiche. It's a pleasure to welcome her to the stage and thanks for having me tonight. It's very good to be here. So I see that somebody who spoke before me still has the papers here from somebody else's speech and I'm very tempted to just deliver it. The slide number one. So education has been a central motif of my life. I grew up in a university campus in Nigeria. My father was a professor of statistics. My mother was an administrator and she retired as the first woman to be head of the university administration. And so in my family, education was almost a moral value. Actually, it kind of was a moral value. And it was also how my parents earned their living. And so because of my parents' circumstances, I was fortunate to get a good education. Because my parents were university staff, I attended the university primary school and the university secondary school. Both of which were very good schools. And I like to think now that everything I know today, I learned in primary school. But really that I think of university primary school as sort of the launching pad from which I could leap into my full potential. Some years ago, I went back home to visit my parents. And my father is known to be a meticulous record keeper. When we were growing up, he had a file for each of his six children. And in this file, this is true. And in this file, he put in everything, you know, our school reports, notes our teachers wrote, all of that. And so I went back home and I decided to look at my file. I sort of went looking in my father's study. And so I found my kindergarten report card. And in that report card, my teacher had written, she's a brilliant child, but she refuses to do any work when she's annoyed. So I remember reading that and thinking, what? And I thought, wait, why didn't somebody smack me? But all right, please don't send me angry emails. I know that smacking is not done in U.S. schools, but this is what I thought. I thought, you know, I was five and clearly I was very strong-willed and wouldn't do work when I was annoyed. But what that comment showed me really was that my teacher had paid attention to me, that he had seen me, that he had paid a kind of particular attention to me. And I suspect that he did the same to the other children in my class. And I think of it now as a gift. I think that it must have taught me confidence to have been seen in that way by my teacher in kindergarten. And I will always remain grateful to him. His name was Mr. Idoko. And then there was Mrs. Kahlu. She was my teacher in grade five. Mrs. Kahlu was kind, she was patient, she was firm. And she saw me, she saw all of us in her class, grade 5A. I remember once, she said to me, you feel things too strongly. And there was a wistful sort of sadness in her voice as though she knew that this, this feeling things too strongly, it would be both blessing and curse for me, that it would infuse my writing, but that also it would lead to that curse of the creative's depression. It was Mrs. Kahlu who first acknowledged my interest in writing and in storytelling. She nurtured it, she valued it. She created the time to read the stories I wrote. She allowed me to write plays and to produce them in class. And she stood by and she applauded. She made me feel that my passion mattered and she is in my mind an unassailable star. And then there were the other kinds of teachers. I remember Mr. Ibuna and Mr. Okabue in secondary school. I was a child with many questions and I was educated in a system in which questioning was not necessarily rewarded. In secondary school, I got straight A's in all of my subjects which would have pleased any parent. But each last day of term, my stomach would tighten with anxiety because my teachers often wrote comments about what they termed my lack of respect. And these comments always got me in trouble with my parents. And it's been 30 years almost and I still have not forgiven those teachers. Lack of respect was really my curiosity, my asking questions, my taking delight in intellectual argument, my refusal to accept easy answers, my reluctance to perform the rituals of deferential fear that was often mistaken for respect. And I felt that my teachers should not have punished me for this. Now, looking back, I do see how I could very well have been a bit of an annoying teenager. And yet I wish those teachers had known how to guide my questioning and how to encourage my curiosity. My point in telling these stories about teachers is not just to make the rather obvious point that teachers matter, because they do, I think teachers are stars. But to say that to be a good teacher is often not just about teaching the curriculum. It's also about those things that are harder to quantify. It's about teaching confidence and making a child feel seen as an individual. Because when we value a student, we teach that student to value herself. I used to roll my eyes at people who, when they were asked where they lived, would mention two places. Alas, I have become one of those people. And I sometimes roll my eyes at myself now. But I do have two homes, one in Nigeria and one in the U.S. Twenty years ago, I left Nigeria and I came to the U.S. And my reason was education. It wasn't merely that I was coming to the U.S. to get an education, it was also that I was running away from another kind of education. I had been in what is called the science track all of my life, because I did well in school, and when you do well in school, they tell you that you have to study the sciences. Studying the arts was for people who did not do well. And I think that this is a great, great disservice done to students that devalue in of the arts, which I think is the result of thinking of knowledge in a very narrowly utilitarian way. I remember when I... So in secondary school, the first three years, then you take an exam, which is called the junior secondary school exam, and I remember when the results came in and I happened to get the best result in the school and a teacher of mine said to me, of course you're going to be in the science class. Why would you want to study poetry? What will you do with poetry? I saw her point. Poetry was not an obviously practical skill, because it didn't teach you how to build an electric circuit or, I don't know, an experiment in osmosis. But poetry and the arts are practical if we widen our definition of practical. Their ability to think, their ability to have empathy, their ability to use our imaginations. I would much rather have as my physician a person who reads literature, because I think that person is more likely to know that for a human being to be well, that human being must be thought of as a whole person, emotional, mental, spiritual, and not just as a logical collection of bones and flesh. What I really wanted to do was to write and to read, but I also understood the need to study something practical that would enable me earn a living. And so I went along and I studied the sciences. I came to like chemistry, because I had a wonderful chemistry teacher, Mr. Achille K. And I had it all nicely planned out. I would go ahead and become a doctor, which is again what is expected of everyone who does well in school, the teller you have to be a doctor. And so I had planned it all. I would become a doctor. I would become a psychiatrist. And during the day I would walk as a psychiatrist and at night I would use my patient's stories for my fiction. But I think it might have worked. But after one year of medical school, I realized that I would be a very unhappy doctor. And I also didn't want to be responsible for the inadvertent death of patients. So I thought it was time to leave. And because I had been in the science track my entire educational life, leaving medicine would have meant going to study something else that was a science. And I didn't want that. And that's when America became the place to go. I was fortunate that my sister was already here. My sister is a dual citizen. She was born in the 60s in California when my father was at Berkeley getting his PhD. And so when my sister graduated from university in Nigeria, she decided to come to the U.S. And so when I decided to flee the study of medicine, I had somebody here who would give me a bed to sleep on and feed me for a while. So I took the SATs, I got a scholarship, and I came to the U.S. I had always thought of America as a place of possibility, as an aspirational place, an imperfect place, but one in which there was much to admire. Well, with the recent political situation, that image has been severely cracked, but still. And now 20 years after I came to the U.S., America has become home. And yet it's a home in which I will always have the emotional demeanor of a curious and content visitor. I began observing American public education very early on because I helped care for my American-born nephew, my sister's son. He was in elementary school in small-town Connecticut. He was a very bright, funny, kind, lovely child, who's now a 24-year-old successful young man whom I adore. But when he was in elementary school in small-town Connecticut, he very quickly started to have problems. He would come home and say that he had been sent to the principal's office. There would be teachers' notes in his bag about how he distracted other children, how he spoke up too often, how he couldn't keep still. I began to see that the teachers, and indeed the school itself, were seeing him, this young black boy, in terms that were different from others. He was not a child to them. He was a problem to be solved. He was the only black boy in his grade. Everybody else was white. But it was when his teacher started to talk about special ed, and at the time I had no idea what special ed meant, but apparently they thought that he needed something called special ed. And so my brother-in-law, his father, decided to go in and talk to the principal. And I should say, as an aside, that my nephew likes to joke now about his father. He likes to joke now about how when he was six years old, I was teaching him long division. I don't know, what is it called in the U.S.? You know, the division, yeah, long division. Because I'm an African immigrant, and I sort of feel like you should know your long division when you're five years old. And... So this was a child who was bright, and he learned really quickly, and now as an adult, he's like, Auntie, that was not appropriate. But what I said to him is, well, you did learn it, right? And you did do well in math. But anyway, so my brother-in-law went in to speak to the principal, and my brother-in-law wanted to ask why? Why does my child complain about other children doing the same thing, talking, not being still? But he is the child who always gets singled out. And the principal said to my brother-in-law, when we look at him, we don't see any difference. Now, my nephew was not just the only black boy in his grade. He's dark-skinned. He's easily distinguishable. He's not in any way racially ambiguous. Now, in telling the story, I'm reminded of something that happened more recently. A friend of mine moved from England to come to the U.S. to teach for a little bit. This is to teach in college. And he said that at the first faculty orientation meeting that they had, he expected to be told about, you know, academic rigor and making sure that, I don't know, exam policy or something. But he said the emphasis of the meeting was to tell the instructors to make sure that their students were never made to feel uncomfortable. And he was surprised by this. Now, I understand the good intentions behind that idea of keeping everyone comfortable, which is a particularly American idea. But I think it's important to make peace with discomfort. There's something perverse about expecting always to be comfortable. Life is messy. Sometimes discomfort opens us up to growth and to knowledge and to meaning. And it's especially relevant today in America, in a country with deep political divisions. I think it's impossible to engage honestly without some discomfort. What that principle in Connecticut was doing that day with my brother-in-law is that he was choosing comfort over truth. Because to acknowledge the truth, which is that my nephew, of course, was different, would be to ask why all the kids do something and one child is singled out over and over, and that child happens to be the black child. Acknowledging it would also mean having to ask, does the fact that the teachers are nothing like him have anything to do with his being singled out over and over again? Of course, teachers who do not look like you can be wonderful for you. But the truth is that teachers are human beings who bring to their jobs, as we all do, the totality of their own particular experience. And teachers naturally come to expect what they themselves experienced. And it leads to an expectation from teachers that the child's family must do things a particular way. But things that are important to a teacher might not necessarily be important to a child's family. If a child's family doesn't experience school as a teacher did, then that teacher is likely to judge the family. So if a teacher grew up with parents who diligently signed those forms that you get in a nice folder in your backpack and the child doesn't, that teacher is likely to feel a certain kind of way about it. I want to tell a story about a woman I met in a bookstore. I'd gone in to look at children's books. I have a three-year-old. Actually, almost three-year-old. She's three and two weeks, and I'm beyond excited. But even before I had her, I would often go in to buy children's books because I have nephews and nieces, and I'm the auntie who's involved in everybody's life and who sort of gets in their business. So I was in a bookstore, and there was a woman in the bookstore, and I was talking to her about how I was having a difficult time finding children's books, early children's books that had black characters. Actually, to be completely honest in the storytelling, I had first said diverse characters, and then I thought I needed to be clear because even that can be very murky when we talk about... Sometimes it's important, I think, to track what we mean by diverse. So I said very clearly that I wanted to find books that had black children. And because the books that didn't have... They mostly had animal characters, but the ones that didn't had white children. And she was very sympathetic, and she said, yes, I see why you would want books like that. Her emphasis was on you, as though she herself did not think this was particularly important for her. I think there's something wonderful and affirming about reading about your reality and reading what is familiar and seeing yourself reflected in fiction and in literature, and that particular pleasure should never be denied anyone. But it is equally important to read about people who are not like you. If for anything, then, because the world is not full of people like you. I wished that that woman had also considered it important for herself to have children's books in which the characters are diverse, to have white children and black children and Asian children and Hispanic children and children who are different in all kinds of ways. Because if she reads diverse books to her children, then she's preparing them, hopefully, for a world in which their conception of people is wider and healthier. I like to think of myself as a lifelong student. And I do not merely want to read about people who do not look like me, but I also want to hear even people I disagree with. And so, for example, even though my politics are left-leaning, I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not left-leaning. And I deliberately seek out and I want to learn how people who do not see the world as I do think. Because I think it helps me better able to understand the world. The content of education matters. It's not enough to be educated. It's important also to talk about the content of our education. I think very often, for example, that until Galileo put up his telescope to look at the sky, in the great and the grand universities across Europe, students were being taught at the heavens where this sort of perfect arrangement of beautiful layers of, I don't know, gold and silver. And also in thinking about the education that happened in the colonized parts of Africa and Asia and Latin America, is to realize that education often meant teaching the so-called natives self-hate. And it is not surprising in talking to many older people in these parts of the world, in Nigeria, for example, that they often have very disturbing views of their own history and it's a result of the education that they had. And I was recently reading about Hillary Clinton being wiped out of books in one particular state in the US. So there's also magical thinking going on. So it's not enough to have an education. The content matters and books should have a range of people. And the reason books should have a range of people is not because we want to be politically correct but because we want to be accurate. You cannot understand the world if you know only about a fraction of the world. In small town Connecticut, my nephew finally left that school and went to another school in... So it wasn't small town, it was sort of not very small town in Connecticut. And I was thinking, should I name names? But I thought this is not a good place to name names because I feel like somebody will figure out and then she said the people in Connecticut. Because also I think I'm only using my examples, I think, to talk about a larger, what I think is a larger phenomenon. But when my nephew moved to another school, I came to see that there's a fundamental unfairness that is embedded in the structure of American public education because of property taxes. All public education is not equal. It should be, but it's not. And I think it's important to acknowledge that because then we have to question America's claim to having a system that is purely meritocratic. I also came to understand from observing my nephew's experience that in America sometimes race becomes class. Or as a friend of mine recently put it, they see the black child and they immediately think title one. By the way, when my friend said that I had no idea what title one meant, so it was sort of an opportunity for me to get an education. This friend, who lives here, who lives in Maryland had problems with her child's school and she said that they couldn't see anything past his blackness and that there was often the automatic assumption that he had come from an economically and educationally deprived background. But both his parents, Nigerian immigrants, were physicians. And it made me think about how many black and brown children, how many poor children of any race, who are seen in terms only of their need, will grow up with their dignity eroded because they were not seen as full human beings but only as a single thing, a person in need. Now this same friend of mine, the Nigerian immigrant who's a physician, has children who I think it's fair to say are not meek or mild-mannered. And she said that her son would often, that a teacher had said about her son, he's so rough. And I think saying he's so rough is one way of thinking about him. But then there's another way which is, he's assertive and confident. Now I'm not suggesting that we excuse bad behavior. Bad behavior should never be excused. And actually I have a little confession to make, which is that there's a certain informality in American schools between instructor and instructed that I'm not very keen on. Because I think it sometimes blurs the lines and enables bad behavior in students. But again I am an African immigrant and I came from a very strict school system. The point I want to make about bad behavior is that it is important to be clear about when we are sanctioning the behavior and when we are sanctioning not so much the behavior but the body exhibiting that behavior. And here's another story about a woman I don't know very well, but I met her at my daughter's daycare. And she told me a story about her son in daycare. So he's three and a half, four maybe. And he's playing with another child. Her son is black, her son's friend is white. And she dropped in to visit the class and they're playing in the science center. And the teacher says to the white child, oh that's so good you're going to be a scientist. And then later her sister, her son, oh that's so good you're going to be a mechanic. And she said that she got very upset and she spoke to the teacher about it later. And the teacher got very upset and said she hadn't meant anything bad. And at the end both of them were in tears. And something had gone wrong there. I think both of them were sincere. But they were not hearing the same thing. It was almost as though listening to her, in my imagination they were inhabiting two walls that were not intersecting. How do we bridge those two walls? And we must bridge them if public education is to succeed. Maybe, maybe if the teacher saw the context of the child and his history as a black boy in a country that has systematically broken the dreams of black people. A country that has made non-black people think of black people in stereotypical ways. It takes a willingness to be uncomfortable and it takes courage. And it's not easy. But I think it's worth it if we are to mold a generation of people who will be better and who will do better than we have. We need to broaden and widen our conception of how things are and of how things should be. A child is never a single thing. A child whose family doesn't sign all those nice forms in the folder in her backpack can also be a child who is loved and cared for. It may merely be that the child's parents don't really know how the system works. A child who fails a test can also be a very intelligent child who needs to learn in a different way. I know how many times I sat bored to death in class because I didn't feel challenged. Maybe we need to ask real questions about teachers and who becomes a teacher and who gets hired. How is the recruiting done? I was thinking recently of Maryland which is my American home and wondering if teachers are recruited from the historically black colleges and are recruited. Do people think of things like transportation because I think when you're a student and you're doing your student teaching in your fourth year and you don't have a car and the school is very far away then it becomes almost impossible for you to do it. And without the student teaching experience you're not likely to get hired in the sorts of schools where maybe your presence is needed. I think we also need to question who doesn't belong and who doesn't belong. I remember once a friend of mine saying that a teacher wasn't a good fit at her child's school. This friend, by the way, is black and she was talking about a teacher who was also black. The teacher had an inner city accent. Now the teacher spoke English perfectly. Her grammar was fine but apparently she had an inner city accent and so it had been decided that she wasn't a good fit. And that made me wonder how do we define good fit? What determines good fit? And will children benefit from hearing somebody who speaks in a way that's different? It also made me think that what was in question her accent was itself a consequence of structural exclusion and public education has a moral duty and a civic duty to start to dismantle that structural exclusion. We need to remember that students are not employees and schools are not corporations and the point of education is not to maximise profit. It is to maximise human potential. I've always kind of liked that. And I think it's also important to remember that human potential is beautiful and gloriously messy in co-ed thing that can never have one single solution and that there are many, many solutions. And thank you. So I'd like to welcome Crystal Brown. Well, what do we say after that? Thank you so much for such inspiring and thoughtful words. Can we please just another round of applause? Thank you. So I know that we are very eager to hear more from you and we have some questions from our live stream audience. So let's go ahead and get started. The first question, your writing and your personal story really suggest that understanding other cultures broadens individual perspective and ultimately changes a person for the better. What do you think today's students and educators need to thrive as informed and engaged world citizens? I have no idea. But you have some thoughts. I think many of the things I talked about already, I think there needs to be a much broader understanding of what matters, that books should be, and I think also even just the... I think it's not just that we need diversity, it's also important to think about how we think about diversity because sometimes I think in this country when people talk about it, it's almost done as though it's sort of a favour, but I think it's a necessity. And just in thinking practically about education, especially in a world that's becoming so much more globalised, so much smaller in many ways because of technology, that it's important to just have a sense of the world, to open students up to all kinds of things and to think about how they're thinking about those things. I, for example, think that obviously the whole point of minority populations is that they're not... numerically they're smaller, so of course there are going to be areas in this country where you don't have many black students or many Hispanic students or many Asian students, but what matters is how have the students who don't see minority students, how do they think of them? And I think that's what education can accomplish that we can humanise other people and not think of people as single things. Thank you. So when you spoke, you talked a lot about just different examples as a youth. What were the questions that you carried inside of you but rarely ever had the opportunity to explore or discuss? Oh, there are many. I still have many of those questions. I think the thing about when I was a teenager is, I suppose like many teenagers, I think I was a difficult teenager. I was moody for no reason. We know you were annoyed as a kindergartner. But also I kind of felt that adults didn't... I just felt that adults didn't know anything. And I felt like I knew it all and they just didn't want to hear me. But really I often had almost existential questions. I remember I grew up Roman Catholic and my family was moderately religious and I loved going to Mass. But I had questions about just the nature of things. Why? I had many whys. Why is a baby born and the baby dies? What's the point? I had questions about people who just by accident of birth, your entire destiny is almost predetermined. I had questions like that. And I just felt that growing up, I didn't really have much room to have them answered. I still have those questions. I have the answers I want to know. So a follow-up to that then. How do you think students today can connect to that innate curiosity that you talk about? I think reading. I'm such a believer in the power and the wonder of reading. You know, reading widely. Reading and this is probably... I was going to say, this is what I say often, but this is not the best place to say it, but really I don't mean reading for school. I don't mean the sort of thing you have to read for school. I don't mean reading the things in the curricula. So usually when I go to speak to students and I ask them what novel have you most recently read? They're like a catcher in the rye. And I think, yes, that's because you had to read it for your literature class. But I think reading is important and I think it's really important to start early to encourage it as something that's joyful and not as something that's tedious or atrocious but as fun, because it is. And also to allow students the space to find the kinds of books they love. When I was growing up, my brothers loved fantasy and science fiction. I couldn't stand fantasy and science fiction, but we both read things and we found the things that we loved reading. And I think it's really important because reading, and reading widely, it's just such a wondrous thing. It teaches you about human beings. It educates you. You learn things without knowing that you're learning them. I really just am passionate about reading. And another thing I would say is, you know, turn off the bloody screens. No, all right, all right. I don't want any angry emails. I understand that technology is part of learning today. But you know, sometimes I'm lying. Just turn off that damn thing. I also feel... I also feel... I have my friend's child who I don't think that she can actually calculate without a calculator. I just sort of, you know, and again, this is the African immigrant in me. I'm just like, turn that thing off and do the math. Empathy and reflection seem to be really important precursors to understanding the stories and experiences of others. How do you cultivate these skills in yourself? And what advice would you give to others? I can talk about myself, which is that I'm constantly questioning myself. And also, I always start with the premise of imperfection. And I think this is something I've learned from literature, which is that we're all flawed. And I am very suspicious of perfection. I just don't think that anybody's perfect. And I'm constantly questioning myself. And I make room to call myself out. So that helps. But I think it's also just making the choice to see people. And so I'll give an example. I'm generally known to be a very passionate feminist. And I feel very strongly about women being equal, human beings in the world, even more strongly today, considering. Can I just say I'm just sad? Anyway, so... You can say that. So sad. But I also realize that being an unspoken feminist doesn't mean I have all the answers. And so recently a friend of mine, she was laughing at me because she was telling me a story. And we were speaking English and Igbo. And Igbo doesn't have gender-specific pronouns. So it's one pronoun for man and woman. And so she said to me and Igbo that she'd gone to see a consultant. And I then said to her, what did he say? So she starts laughing. And she said, you just did what you always ask us not to do, which is assume. And she's like, the consultant was a woman. Why did you assume it was a man? And I just felt ashamed. But for me it was also an important moment because I realized, yes, I spend my time sort of trying to get people not to do that. But here I am doing it as well. And for me it was an opportunity to realize that sort of the patriarchy, that the system that we live in is very deeply embedded. And we're going to slip and we're going to fall. But then for me the thing is that we get up. So we have a lot of educators in the room. Do you have any particular advice for them in terms of their role in sowing the seeds of equality and respect for others in the classroom? Be uncomfortable. Choose truth to comfort. There are going to be times that you're going to feel attacked. You know, take it for the team. No, but really it's to say that, and I think being a teacher, I think it's just a really special but also really difficult thing. And I'm very sympathetic to what I know the challenges are, particularly I think in a country like this, because it's a country that is very much about, you know, America doesn't sort of have that kind of, it's not Europe with its sort of old stories and its myth of a certain kind of homogeneity. It's different and I think because of that teachers have particular challenges. But I think it's just important to have honest conversations. I sometimes think that there isn't enough of that and I think students benefit from honesty. I also think that students can tell bullshit when they hear it and I just don't think it's worth bullshitting kids. But also I think it's important to listen to children. I find that students can sometimes teach you how to teach them if you listen to them. But all the same it's important to know that they're the kids of the teacher, right? So I don't think a teacher should be friends with the students. But I don't think they should be mean like my teachers, those ones who I have. I hope somebody will do it. I'm hoping that the teachers I named them and it was kind of wicked of me because I'm hoping that somebody, you know, that they'll hear about it. Oh my god, that's a bad, bad, bad staff. But they'll get the emails. So today's event is all about the power of stories and you've told a lot of them today. What were some of your favorite, most beloved books when you were younger? Oh, when I was, I loved Enid Blyton, the British children's writer. Just adored how I read everything she wrote. I felt transported by Enid Blyton, particularly like the famous five series where there's five children sort of going, exploring and solving crimes and going to dungeons and things. And I think what I loved about it was it felt, it was so different but at the same time so accessible. I didn't know, I didn't understand why they ate cucumber sandwiches, for example, because it felt to me it would be really dry and not terribly appealing. But somehow, because I was reading Enid Blyton, cucumber sandwiches became something to aspire to. You know, so did ginger beer. And my childhood is one, I think, that will just always be sort of, my memory of childhood is one in which Enid Blyton is wrapped around it in this sort of beautiful hill. I loved Enid Blyton. And then, of course, when I discovered that there were, in fact, Africans who wrote about Africans, it was such a thrill. So one book I love deeply is a novel by Kamara Lye. It's called The African Child. And sometimes it's actually, it was first written in French as L'Enfant Noir. And it's translated sometimes also as The Black Child. And it's just this really lovely coming-of-age story that's set in sort of the 1940s. And I just, I love it because it's, I just love it. And then I love Chinua Chebe. His novel Arrow of God is one that I reread often, both as a writer because I think the complexity of it is just stunning. But also just as a reader because he, Chinua Chebe's novels did something for me that he gave me a sense of dignity in my history. And I think that's one of the powerful things books can do. He made me realize that my history was worthy of dignity. And that's been very meaningful for me. So educators work to support their students every single day. It can be a really demanding job without limits. How do you embed self-care into your work and practice and any advice you have for educators in terms of how they might take care of themselves and their practice? That's a very good question actually. Sometimes just turn off the TV, don't read the news. Not today's news especially. That's sort of me telling myself that for today. Yeah, I think sometimes, I think it's important to switch off. Which I mean just really, just switch off to turn everything off and to be in ward. And I think particularly, I want to say particularly for women because I think teachers are sort of caregivers really. And women are already socialized to be caregivers. Women are already socialized to put themselves last, that sort of thing. And I think it's important sometimes to put yourself first. Which is to say to create the time for yourself. And even if it's five minutes. Also, and maybe this is more difficult, not to take things personally. Because I think that, and because we're human, it's easy to take things personally. But I sometimes think that if we can find a way emotionally, not to do that. I think we sort of, we then better protect our emotional well-being. So just be able to acknowledge things, just let it go. And just be like, okay, this parent yelled at me. It's really not about me. This parent is frustrated of the child and I'm just going to let it go. Well, thank you, Trimamanda, for an amazing and inspiring set of words. I appreciate it. So stories have been part of life long before recorded history. Think prehistoric cave paintings and Greek mythology. Fast forward to now where Ted talks and binge listening to your favorite podcast. Continue the tradition of storytelling. Today we hope we've added a new subgroup to the storytelling canon. Stories about keeping the promise of public education. We chose the story medium because a human-centered story can greatly shape the way we look at life, broaden our thinking, create opportunities to listen to divergent views and challenging experiences. Words affect how the listener acts from the moment they hear the words. Our stories today were not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think about. We believe storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to put ideas into the world, into the world. Our stories allow diverse voices to be heard, offered hope and wisdom, and we trust today's stories will motivate you to act in support of public education. We are deep believers. We will make the foundation's golden anniversary year a stage from which thousands of American public school educators, students and their allies can lift their voices and celebrate their personal commitment to students every day, caring for and our obligation to future generations. Along the way, each time a keeping the promise story is retold, we'll be making clear that public education is not buildings or buses or bureaucracies, but rather real people who want to learn, real people who want to be heard, real people who believe in the power of public education to grow, give and save lives. Future generations are watching. We will not let them down. Thank you very much.