Wisdom Road Day 12: Sharon Utter From Wheatland, WY
September 9, 2022Sharon Utter grew up on a ranch between Jay Em and Lingle, Wyoming. She helped me organize a set of interviews, portions of which I will post over the next several days. Like the others I met in Wheatland, she is a bit older than she looks. “We want accountability. How do you say this…
Wisdom Road Day 8: Where Are All the Cattle?
September 7, 2022Answers are usually just one person away you haven’t met yet. There are something like 1.3 million head of cattle in Wyoming. That works out to an average of about one head for every six acres of land in the state. Of course there is land that is off limits for grazing, so the density…
Wisdom Road Day 7: An Outlier Brings Her Perspective to Rural Wyoming
September 5, 2022Rachelle and Dan Barkhurst live in Encampment, WY, a town of about 500 people. They let me park my rig overnight in their yard. Rachelle grew up in a town in Missouri. Her mother was an early pioneer in marketing formal wear over the internet. Rachelle got interested in fashion and her life took more…
Wisdom Road Day 6: Three Wise Women From Baggs, WY
September 3, 2022The first stop of my journey, after a three-day, 900 mile drive from southern California through the fried and baked Nevada desert and the bare, vaulted geologic skeletons of Utah, is Baggs, Carbon County, Wyoming. Just a few miles over the Colorado-Wyoming state line, I crest a hill on the two-lane and laid out below,…
Wisdom Road Day #2: Nevada Into Utah
August 31, 2022Even the thin, muddy, Virgin River, trickling slowly from the Utah highlands seems to know that Nevada is where water goes to die. There is no state boundary located more perfectly to separate “here” from”there” than the Virgin River Gorge, a deep slice through a short mountain range between Mesquite, Nevada and St. George, Utah.…
Wisdom Road Day -1: Leaving Home
August 28, 2022A series of short, frequent reflections from the road. Education transformer and author Grant Lichtman begins a long, largely solo journey around the US and Canada in search of wisdom traditions in overlooked communities that we can better pass along to the rising generation. Learn more at www.grantlichtman.com and join the journey in real time…
Can Wisdom Heal Some Of Our Divides?
August 24, 2022At its heart, that is the question I want to help inform as I head out on Monday on this long, wandering journey that I call Wisdom Road. I don’t expect to find a concrete answer; there is no silver bullet. The fact is that our country, our species, has always been divided across a…
72 Hours of Lightening In a Bottle
August 14, 2022This is how schools transform. Last spring, the community of Lake Ridge Academy gathered to imagine the pieces of their future-focused North Star. It came together as a 1 1/2 page draft with three main pillars that will differentiate the school from any other in the area. Last week they shifted gears to early-stage implementation…
What Unites and Divides Us?
July 12, 2022Is America really “one nation”, indivisible? Has it ever been? It is a remarkable question, made more important as we suffer the impact of decades of increasing divisiveness in our economic, civic, and political environments. And it is a question at the heart of what pushes me to travel along Wisdom Road starting next month.…
Keys to Great School Building Designs
July 8, 2022The vast majority of the 250 schools I have visited over the last decade were designed and built with little alignment to what many of use believe is the future of learning. School communities have spent vast treasure building learning spaces that re-enforce an industrial model of education that should have been retired thirty or…
New Wisdom Road Collaborators!
June 10, 2022I could never launch and accomplish the audacious goals of Wisdom Road without people and organizations willing to collaborate and support my work in different ways. Just this week, the list of collaborators has grown significantly to include: Education ReImagined and Next Generation Learning Challenges: helping others “join” the journey by pushing out and co-branding…
My Wisdom Road Home Starting This Fall
June 8, 2022A year of research, watching a thousand YouTube videos, and lots of discussion with my wife, Julie, but we finally landed on what I hope is the perfect RV for my Wisdom Road journeys. Small enough to drive and handle myself with little worry; big enough for both of us when Julie joins me for…