Educate Me is an Egyptian NGO that aspires to redefine education in Egypt. We started in 2010 as a fundraising initiative to reinstate financially underprivileged children back to school, shortly after we discovered that sending children to schools DOES NOT guarantee their education, most students attending Egyptian public schools end up graduating functionally illiterate or robbed of basic 21st century skills and therefore unable to cope with current and future life challenges.
Motivated by that conclusion, we started working on developing our own learner-centered skill-based educational model that seeks to develop children’s knowledge, skills & values aiming to produce individuals who are self aware with a clear understanding of their beliefs, desires and potentials and limitations, conscious about their choices, aligning them with that awareness and proactively moving towards maximizing their potential and that of others - in other words: “self-actualized”.
Throughout its journey, Educate Me has always believed that children are naturally born learners who can learn best through indulging their curiosities. We believe that the final product of education is not a university certificate or a place in the job market. We believe that education should cultivate individuals who are ever-committed to a path of self-actualization and are mutually responsible for helping one another become self-actualized. That belief soon turned into a vision that moved the whole organization, a vision of a world where we are all accountable for one another’s self-actualization.
For four years, Educate Me delivered its model to children through part time programs in our own community center in an underprivileged area. In 2015, we took our first steps towards extending our unique educational model nationwide through establishing a community school. It has always been our dream to influence the Egyptian national education system, and now, owing to this recent act of government recognition and our ever-growing learner and teacher network, our efforts to turn around Egyptian education have finally begun to bear fruit. In 2016, we intend to capitalize on this growth by taking the first steps towards scaling our model by starting our second community school in another underprivileged community which should be the first in many to be established over the next few years.
Educate Me’s desiredrole in generating a community model committed to mutual self-actualization is fundamentally that of a catalyst; an influencer that aims to impact the whole community by encouraging individuals to become accountable to one another’s self-actualization, and not just the children of Educate Me. To achieve the desired ignition, Educate Me will start first by seeking third party evaluations to obtain a proof of concept for its self-actualization model through measuring its impact on nurseries and full-time community schools, while raising public awareness about its vision to create further interest in the model aiming to convert this public interest into active engagement and to make everyone feel ownership of the vision of self-actualization.