We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bernard Vasconcelos. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bernard below.

Bernard, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

In a fast changing society where content and knowledge is abundantly available and where artificial intelligence is just beginning, education must adapt and change. Sure, learning how to learn and helping kids obtain general knowledge of the world is important, however, schools can’t focus on teaching content so kids can take a multiple choice test they have to study for. Our education system must change and not heavily rely on teaching content when students have access to an infinite amount of content online. Schools should instead focus on developing skills and different abilities that will be useful in life.

This is why when I started my English school, I decided to focus our methodology on developing the four English skills; reading, writing, speaking and listening. Most language schools focus on content (vocabulary and grammar), which are easily tested on multiple choice tests students study for. Nevertheless, after a few weeks, students forget this content, as kids also forget how to do trigonometry months after learning it. Why? Because they don’t use it. The most important thing about learning a language is using it. We’ve all learnt our first language by listening to our parents speak and trying to mirror the language and have our parents correct us. We learn by trail and error.

Society is merging towards giving people so many tools that they’ll live in their comfort zone. This is creating lazy and unintelligent beings, that rely on tools to get things done. Language translation apps have made it easy to speak in your native language and be understood in any language. This can be very instrumental, but it does not help make people smarter and more creative, two things the economy needs.

Teaching skills in schools and language centers should be what education centers should focus on. Skills that help people become better humans and citizens that can apply knowledge as needed.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I founded Liberty Language Academy in 2016 to help people from all over the world learn English as international students in the United States. I graduated as an architect in 2007 and went on to get a Masters in Education in 2009 in London. In 2010 I started working at a language school, while working on my MBA. Today, Liberty has had over 1.5 thousand students in its campus in Orlando, Florida, learning English in order to achieve their goals in their professions or life.

We’ve had students from the age of 18 to 71 passing through our school. Education is a very rewarding industry because we are always dealing with happy customers/students who are relying on us to help them learn a powerful language. Some students need it for their profession, some just want to improve their English to be able to travel, while others need it to continue their education. Nevertheless, all students enjoy applying English in social settings with family and friends.

Throughout my journey as an educator and entrepreneur, I’ve found that students are students, no matter what age (7 or 70). Students want to learn but also like to have fun and build a report with their teachers and fellow students. This is why teaching is a beautiful art. It is not ridged and inflexible. It is organic. Students learn from teachers and teachers also learn from students. The journey of learning is more important than the certificate/diploma at the end of the program.

At Liberty Language Academy, we focus on the student’s journey with us. Most of our students come from a different country to experience life in the USA, learn the culture and the language. It’s not about the certificate, but about buildings a memorable experience.

When I was about 22 years old, I went to Paris for 1 month to learn French. Actually, I didn’t really go to learn French. I was studying architecture in college at the time and I wanted to spend some time in Paris and see everything I was learning in person. French was just a bonus. I learnt so much in that one month in Paris and had the time of my life. I didn’t just learn French, but I learned important life skills, like being able to get around without my parents, explored the metro system, learned how to book excursions, how to make friends that didn’t speak my language, and so much more.

At Liberty Language Academy, we look to give our international students the opportunity to learn English and have the time of their lives!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I started my company in 2016 and we needed national accreditation to be able to work with international students coming from abroad on a student Visa to study at my school. To start the process, we needed to be open for a whole year, teaching English to locals and tourists. After that first year, we started the accreditation process. In 2019, we were finally accredited. It was a long 2.5 year process which depended on continuing investments to keep the business financially operating. It was stressful, time consuming and very risky, because you can invest in a company for many years and if it doesn’t succeed, you lose all your money. Our team was remained strong and in the end, we succeeded!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our reputation comes from having a caring team that prioritizes the customer. This does not mean we do whatever the customer wants or that the customer is always right. This means that we offer a quality product and we are clear and transparent on what we offer and how much it costs. We also care for student’s problems and we help them as much as we can. When we can’t help them, we do show that we care and understand. Customers are humans and have feelings, frustrations and different issues, as we do when we are customers.

Our school grew rapidly because we gave students quality customer services and product in a time our competitors were growing rapidly and not caring about their customer services and products. Our school became a great alternative and we’ve been living up to our student’s demands ever since.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.libertylanguageacademy.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/libertylanguageacademy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/libertylanguageacademyusa
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernard-vasconcelos-50a7ba59/