Saving newborns

[nairiporter]

'We Can Save Newborns' - Melinda Gates
http://allafrica.com/stories/201405193000.html?aa_source=mf-hdlns

Amid a renewed push by a coalition of organizations to reduce high death rates among newborns, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation answered questions from AllAfrica about the prospects. Melinda Gates is telling the World Health Assembly in Geneva today that governments and health professionals should implement proven practices to make pregnancy and delivery safer for both mothers and babies. The group of African countries participating in this week's assembly, which is the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, succeeded in getting the group to elevate the issue of newborn survival to a prominent place on the agenda.

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Do you suppose there is any chance that the Gates can be convinced to spend all of their time on this project so that they stop trying to ruin American education?

http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/04/mr-gates-please-answer-anthony-cody/

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

If there is ample pressure from the public about it, probably there is a chance.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I really admired the work Gates has done for illness and poverty worldwide. Then he turned his eye to school in the USA and has been explaining how standardization and testing is good for schools because standardized electrical plugs is good for home appliances and well, the old problem of deferring to medical experts on what is needed to aid health because everyone respects that doctors know their stuff but nobody respects that teachers know our stuff and thus no deference at all...

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Yes, the double standard he is applying in those two cases is well visible. And insulting to teachers. And detrimental to the students, who are not exactly robots molded in the same shape.

He is trying to apply his approach to IT to education, but not to health-care. That's curious. Probably he realises he is incompetent in medicine, yet for some reason presumes to know a lot about education?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Teachers, at least in the USA, have suffered from that as a pretty widespread phenomenon for a long time. The average person K-12 here spends 15,000 hours in classrooms...so even when you respect your teachers, the work SEEMS familiar. Plus, teachers are among the only professionals who are tasked with "giving away" their expertise...both in knowledge and in the skills to continue learning. Surgeons don't teach you how to perform operations and lawyers don't give away their legal education.

That leads a lot of people to think all a teacher knows is in the textbook and then they discount that making that text pedagogically powerful for many different people is a skill everyone does NOT have.

Gates is one of those people who come along and have a special insight into a field that nobody else has, and it made him very successful. It is also likely that his insight was not the result of his formal education although that education put him in the time and place to have it.

He very wrongfully extrapolates that formal education did very little for him and that his experience can be generalized in the slightest.