The Learning Project: Rites of Passage
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Book Overview
Ever since I began my schooling I was frustrated by its failure to inspire me or demonstrate its importance. I didn't know what was most important, but I was sure it wasn't this. I had heard about the genocide of the Indians, witnessed the assassination of JFK, and lived through the Vietnam war. I asked about these and other things, but I was never told; these topics never came up in school. Every year I expected things to improve but they never did.
My classmates progressed from intimidated elementary school students assaulted by teachers, tests, and the pledge of allegiance, to compliant high school students accepting insipid explanations, eroded self-confidence, and hostile competition. By the time I got to middle school, I was seething and I began to take things into my own hands. This was the start of my search for wise counsel and a deeper understanding of education, the world, and myself.
For six decades of education in dozens of fields--taught, mentored, enabled, and exploited--I have been asking the most interesting people I can find for answers to the question of meaning, growth, and change. I have returned to my most important mentors, classmates, partners, and their teachers, students, and children. I wanted answers that went to the root of inspiration and opportunity. What improves our lives?
In The Learning Project, thirty-five artists, athletes, tradesmen, soldiers, scientists, and politicians--teenagers, adults, and elders--describe their passages of inner change. One struggles with adolescence in a broken, immigrant family. Another trains to be an astronaut. A third learns craftsmanship from a grandfather who lived during the Civil War. These rites of passage echo a mythology going back thousands of years. In them are the secrets to growing our humanity.
This is not the sanitized version, reduced to self-help or buzzwords for business schools. These are not pigeonholed people or bedtime stories. They are fully textured, authentic rites of passage, unfiltered and unfolded by layers. Lives like ours: twisted, complex, uncertain, and in the process of being born. This is the story of our transformation and transcendence.
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