The Spirit Of Education

-In this episode: If we do manage against the odds to make something of ourselves as a species, eventually the universe will come knocking. We have a lot we might offer. We don't know what that is yet, but we will. I suspect it will have little to do with our technolo

-In this episode: In the end, it doesn't matter who we are as individuals so much as it matters that we all stood up together when we were called. We are all the same; we are all different. If we can find the synthesis between these two truths, then we've got it.

-In this episode: When our minds are clear, when we know who we are and where we're going, we finally sense that learning isn't really a struggle. It may remain difficult, but that difficulty a pure one, a challenge we set for ourselves as we strive to transform our k

-In this episode: Let's build a society where education can serve the purpose inherent in the word itself: educing that which is within us. Let's build a society wherein people are honored and valued just because they've agreed to come to the planet and offer their in

-In this episode: Perhaps the future of education looks like this: perhaps it will begin with who we truly are as humans. Perhaps it will aid us in knowing our world, not only in a mechanistic way but in a complete way, with depths of beauty and mystery intact. Perhap

-In this episode: As we educate ourselves, we reclaim our power. Before too long, we begin exercising it. This is the nature of democracy, though those espousing their version of the term wouldn't have us think so.

-In this episode: We are not intended to be creatures who maintain a singular level of consciousness. We weren't created as beings whose purpose is to be entrapped by the world around us. The acorn is the mechanism of our intellectual and spiritual evolution.

-In this episode: Transformative learning helps us express our fullness as humans. We find a way out of the ruts that humans are so good at creating and wallowing within. We find a path through the blockages (most of our own creation) that keep us from taking the oppo

-In this episode: At root, transformative learning isn't about learning at all. Rather, it's about forgetting some of the lies we've been taught about ourselves, and the rediscovery of what has been true all along.

-In this episode: We need to be willing to take a different look at our world, to incorporate ideas that challenge the ways in which we've constructed our sense of reality, and to consider that reality is more complex than we have made it out to be.

-In this episode: Ideas aren't dangerous. An idea is little more than a collection of words, a little packet of information, a plaything. An idea believed: now that is dangerous.

-In this episode: The wheel of fortune isn't intended to tell us that some of us will win and some will lose; it's trying to give us a big picture in which each of our lives might come to be seen as a meaningful part of a whole.

-In this episode: It's a satisfying thing to shop at the bazaar of ideas, outfitting our internal spaces with just the right accoutrements. It is how we find our home in the world, and how we make it comfortable. It is how we make it uniquely our own. The spirit of le

-In this episode: Our acorn grows with no urging from us if we allow it sufficient room; the strength that we derive from our passion clears the space for it, and protects it while it grows. The more unabashedly we claim our passion, the more fully we become who we we

-In this episode: The spirit of education insists that we clear the road ahead of us of the roadblocks that stand in our way. We can learn our way out of the nihilism, the despair, the depression, the consumerism, the addiction: whatever form of mental blocks we've pu

-In this episode: Education isn't a process of being told what to think at the hands of experts. It is stepping out into the unknown territory of ourselves. It is in every way the Hero's Journey.

-In this episode: There is a sort of bliss that can come when one is on just the right path of learning. When one is on the path of bliss, things happen just as they are supposed to. Serendipities abound. Circumstances that couldn't have been organized ahead of time m

-In this episode: The day-to-day things we do in schools might be used toward the ends of freedom; they can also be used toward the ends of domination. Every interaction in schools places students within political contexts. It puts them in categories of haves or have-

-In this episode: True education isn't merely a preparation for life. Education is a process of life itself.

-In this episode: Our inner, emotional nature is the basis of the meaning that our learning both depends upon and fuels. Without it, we become unbalanced between head and heart, and our learning can lead to the dead end of nihilism.

-In this episode: Didactic learning shouldn't be an end in itself. Rather, it should be a part of a continuing cycle of learning, wherein students are given opportunities to engage with their areas of interest in a more personal way, at levels including more than simp

-In this episode: We have it all wrong when we ask children what they want to be when they grow up. The fool asks us who we want to be; education is the process of answering that question.

-In this episode: The word education comes to us from the Latin educere, which means "to lead out" or "to draw out." Where education in the common parlance has become a process of adding cumulative layers to one's store of knowledge, the true aim of education is to ca