The Southern Border Is Not the “Hellscape” We Hear About
January 31, 2023My first interviews of Wisdom Road Leg 2 were in the small town of Tubac, Arizona, about 30 miles north of the border with Mexico. Tubac is like a mini-Santa Fe; a couple of restaurants but about thirty art galleries and flocks of snowbirds at this time of the year. The Santa Cruz River, really…
Civility: The Overlooked But Most Important 21st Century Skill?
January 17, 2023For more than two decades, forward-leaning educators have focused on a set of skills that for some reason all started with the letter “C”: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, etc. I want to add another “C” to that list, one, I would argue, that will be more important to the world going forward than all…
Gratitude Is the Fuel of Wisdom Road
January 11, 2023A colleague (Gardner Barrier, head of school at Forsyth Country Day School in Winston-Salem) asked me this week if I felt gratitude was a motivator for my Wisdom Road journey. In that moment and from that question I realized that gratitude is probably the principle driver on this complex, challenging, and frequently uncomfortable project. I…
Global Impact of School Transformation Pioneers
December 1, 2022How the mighty ripples of school transformation have spread! I just spent two weeks working with Unity Grammar, a K-12 co-ed Islamic faith-based school in Sydney, Australia. Yes, the clothing is different, and prayer time more frequent, but the hospitality, generosity, and fervor with which these edu-leaders want to change the traditional model of education…
Failure Of An Icon?: The Nuclear Family
November 5, 2022Is the nuclear family, an icon of the 20th century American dream, a failed human experiment? Hidden within the seven weeks I spent on Leg 1 of Wisdom Road this fall was a feature of rural America that is becoming as extinct as the buffalo that once roamed the plains: large, extended families. As I…
McGillis School: Living Their Mission of Values-Based Education
October 25, 2022A visit to the McGillis School in Salt Lake City has made a fine end to Leg 1 of Wisdom Road. McGillis is a K-8 school with several very interesting and almost unique elements that I think make it a sure bet to continue to thrive in this growing market. The first is that McGillis…
Wisdom Road Day #47: Joe White Mountain, Lakota Elder
October 22, 2022Teaser: Joe reports first hand from an elder who was at Custer’s Last Stand: the history books are wrong about how Custer died! If two families have a dispute of any kind, the older people would put on a feed and they would call these two families together. Then at the end of the feed,…
Wisdom Road Day 46: Sunday Morning On the Standing Rock
October 19, 2022Somewhere on this Sunday morning, church bells ring to call the faithful to kneel before a stained glass reprieve. There ain’t nothin’ short of dyin’Half as lonesome as the soundOn the sleepin’ city sidewalksSunday mornin’ comin’ down Kris Kristofferson My God, the hues and textures of autumn grassy plains tipped by low morning sunlight,…
Wisdom Road Day # 44: A Highlight of Both Trip and Life
October 16, 2022The real core of our lives is simplicity. There is almost zero chance that anyone who reads this blog got to experience what I did. I don’t know many other things in life I can say that about. If a batch of still-warm chocolate chip cookies became sentient and knew how they were welcomed by…
Wisdom Road Day #40: My Young Nominee For Queen of the World
October 13, 2022I had multiple people say to me, ‘I have never voted for a Democrat in my life. You will be the first one I vote for’. The young redhead in a funky multi-colored jacket that looked like it might have been sewn for a theater wardrobe greeted me at the door of the equally funky…
Wisdom Road Day #35: Is Rural America Dying or Just Evolving?
October 6, 2022East-central South Dakota is a poster of American farmland; corn, soybeans, cattle, and silos, out to every horizon, punctuated by tiny hamlets with populations that rarely exceed two digits, and a few larger towns with a gas station, a truck repair shop, a few stoplights, churches, and a school. Over the decades, the quintessential small…
Wisdom Road Day #33: Finding the Good
October 1, 2022The things that break us are not the not the core stuff. It’s the ancillary stuff. An order of Benedictine nuns came to Yankton, South Dakota in the 1880’s and has been a mainstay of the town along the Missouri River ever since. Today they share a campus with Mt. Marty University and the largest…
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