an excerpt from his new book, psychologist Louis Cozolino applies the lessons of social neuroscience to the classroom. The human brain wasn’t designed for industrial education. It was shaped over millions of years of sequential adaptation in response to ever-changing environmental demands. Over time, brains grew in size and complexity; old structures were conserved and new structures emerged. As we evolved into social beings, our brains became incredibly sensitive to our social worlds. This mixture of conservation, adaptation, and innovation has resulted in an amazingly complex brain, capable of everything from monitoring respiration to creating culture. This added com... posted on Jun 2 2013 (148,019 reads)

of people while improving the caring and quality of our many institutions. This emerging approach to leadership and service began with Greenleaf. The term servant-leadership was first coined by Greenleaf (1904–1990) in a 1970 essay titled "The Servant as Leader." Since that time, more than half a million copies of his books and essays have been sold worldwide. Greenleaf spent most of his organizational life in the field of management research, development, and education at AT&T. Following a 40-year career at AT&T, Greenleaf enjoyed a second career that lasted 25 years, during which time he served as an influential consultant to a number of major ins... posted on Jun 4 2013 (121,565 reads)

social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts. Our garbage mingles with New Jersey garbage in our local landfill, and it would be hard to tell which is which.  As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the busine... posted on Mar 4 2014 (20,287 reads)

build is upon us. In his 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (public library), Mandela speaks to the conditioning that produces both love and hate: No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. He echoes Bertrand Russell’s timeless philosophy of education as the foundation of the good life and writes: Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that... posted on Dec 6 2013 (40,690 reads)

scholar” from the south-side of Chicago. It’s a rare juxtaposition, but simply uttering those words makes you realize that Derrius is a rare individual. Still in his early 20s, Derrius is proud to relate his “hero’s journey” (a journey he is still very much on), and hopes that his many experiences will inspire others who face their own uphill climbs. From his bio: “As a product of the Illinois foster care system and the south side of Chicago; higher education did not seem like a feasible possibility for him. More accessible were the fleeting opportunities of the urban streets.” When Derrius was four years old, his father was murdered, and t... posted on Dec 28 2013 (27,115 reads)

Google maps to connect urban landowners with urban farmers. But this is just scratching the surface, an entire alternative agriculture system is emerging that's based on local production, processing, and distribution. 19. FarmHack FarmHack is an open-source, online platform for peer-to-peer innovation targeted toward developing tools and systems for resilent, sustainable agriculture. 20. MOOCS and Online Learning Platforms Technology-based decentralization of education promises to be a game-changing, disruptive force for the future. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS) have the potential to be great equalizers, decentralizing education to the... posted on Apr 7 2014 (183,353 reads)

but they went a step further and made the man a cake. Caring citizens offer tea to British riot police [London, England, 2011] A Ukrainian protester plays piano on a barricade in front of the riot police line, Monday, Feb. 10, 2014 October 2013, Pakistan – Muslims form Human chain to protect Christians during Lahore mass Bogota, Colombia – A demonstrator embraces a riot police officer during a student protest against government plans to reform higher education. An African-American minister, Shun Abram, confronts a Klu Klux Klan protestor calmly, strongly, and peacefully. Riot police walk in the street as Coquitlam-raised Alexandr... posted on Sep 17 2014 (98,472 reads)

The Morrisons both work in straw bale construction, and run the website Strawbale.com. Tiny house living probably isn’t outrageous to single twenty-somethings. But is it possible for a family? Across the country, in snowy Minnesota, Kim and Ryan Kasl have two young children, 6-year-old Sully and 4-year-old Story. The family of four is in the process of transitioning from their 1,900-square-foot home into a 207-square-foot tiny house. Ryan is embarking on a career in education administration, and Kim home-schools both their children. She also blogs about her family’s tiny house experiences. Both the Morrisons and the Kasls can bear witness to the challeng... posted on Feb 12 2015 (25,690 reads)

world may sound slightly dismal from certain vantage points. In the United States, a large amount of money is devoted to incarceration compared to education. California spends $47,421 per inmate, as opposed to $11,420 per student. The latest report from Alliance for Excellent Education states, “The nation could save as much as $18.5 billion in annual crime costs if the high school male graduation rate increased by only 5 percentage points.” But I would like to invite you to our little world in a suburban city within the Los Angeles County. We are like a community within a community. This is our public school adventure…. Wisdom from 10-Year-Olds I am someo... posted on Feb 27 2015 (19,266 reads)

do Shakespeare’s plays tell us about how to run classrooms in an unequal society? The school as factory was a predominant metaphor for education in the middle of the last century. Schools were to churn out young people ready for roles as workers and consumers. In current debates, the laboratory is the model, with successful education defined as controlling variables to produce desired outcomes. In Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty, Jay Gillen, a Baltimore public school teacher, vividly shows the limitations of both models. In each, authorities define successful outcomes in ways that reduce learning to a matter o... posted on Mar 10 2015 (15,570 reads)

becomes a means to reach some quantifiable metric. Not only do you feel like a cog in a wheel, but you encourage others to become cogs too. It's dehumanizing."  Clearly, such a culture is going to lead to burnout. "Over the last twenty years, more than twenty thousand teachers have worked for Teach for America. [...] More than half leave after their two-year contract is up, and more than 80 percent are gone after three years. About a third of TFA alumni walk away from education altogether," Adam Grant reports in 'Give and Take'.  One response to that burnout is technology. Two teachers in our CQ circle worked at Silicon Valley's Summit Prep... posted on Aug 14 2015 (19,956 reads)

be expected and being held accountable has to be expected as well. The points below outline some of the common behaviors that show up often in social justice conversations. I want to be clear that we all participate in some of the following counterproductive acts. We are not all privileged or all oppressed. We are complex people with complex identities that intersect in complex ways. Therefore, we all show up in problematic ways with our privilege. I own that my background is from the higher education setting, but I think the points below can be useful for all folks interested in creating dynamic change in the communities around them. Moreover, this piece was written in the midst of the M... posted on Mar 18 2016 (39,636 reads)

good artist paints what he is,” Jackson Pollock asserted in his final interview. So why, then, do we so readily reduce works of art to objects and commodities, forgetting that they are at heart transfigurations of lived human experience? My recent conversation with Amanda Palmer about patronage and the future of artreminded me of Art as Experience (public library) — a terrific little book by the pioneering philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer John Dewey (October 20, 1859–June 1, 1952), based on a series of ten lectures he delivered at Harvard in the winter and spring of 1931, in which he addresses this ve... posted on Jun 26 2016 (12,011 reads)

give them feedback, tell them what you’d like to see covered, share their stories. Support a mix of media: Construct a diverse media diet with a good mix of indie and alternative news, local, national, and international coverage, niche and countervailing points of view. Get outside your bubble. Support journalism about the causes you care about: If you care about climate change, support environmental journalism. If you care about kids and schools, support a newsroom focused on education. If you care about hunger and homelessness, support reporting about poverty, etc… (more on that below) Finally, wherever you land on the web, look for the "About" section... posted on Feb 6 2017 (20,022 reads)

in a sprawling, three-storey home in Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar area. Photo Source It has a well-stocked library, a computer lab, craft workshops, recreation halls, dormitories, gardens with swings, basketball and badminton courts and a television room, among many other facilities that ensure a comfortable and safe environment for the children. They also learn to stitch, knit and are taught other vocational skills. Dr Agarwal also ensures that the girls receive the best education possible. To meet the ever-growing expenses of the home, the Agarwals have built a large hall on the top floor of the building and lease it out for functions. “Only good educ... posted on Mar 17 2017 (18,483 reads)

applied to be part of the program — worked for a minimum of 12 hours a week for six weeks last summer to develop an autobiographical show, which they performed at New York City Center – Stage II, a sleek theater in Midtown Manhattan. After the premiere in August 2013, the teens returned to high school, though they reconvened for an encore performance of the show in October. “We’re hiring these young men to be members of a theater company,” says David Shookhoff, education director of the Manhattan Theatre Club and an acclaimed director, most recently of the Off-Broadway hit “Breakfast With Mugabe.” “Their job is to write and to perform and t... posted on Apr 23 2017 (7,666 reads)

will land them a better-paying or more stable position, and so on. Thus, they find that their time is increasingly out of control. They can never relax or “take a day off,” and they suffer from what I call a precariatized mind. They don’t know which way to allocate their time optimally because the future is so uncertain. Yet another feature of the precariat, which is still part of this first dimension, is that it is the first class in history for which the average level of education is above the level of the jobs they can get. This creates a sort of existential insecurity. The second dimension is that the precariat is distinct in having limited access to ma... posted on Nov 26 2017 (20,925 reads)

former Jain monk and now peace activist: “Community learning is learning in a collective way with a collective consciousness and collective ideas, but it’s also about shared tasks, working with one another. We are learning for ourselves, for self-discovery, but this learning is not to have a big status. It’s about serving society, the earth and each other.”   The college follows the principles of ‘head, heart, hands’ in its approach to education. All students, whatever they study, are encouraged to be creative and to care for others. “Some students who come here do not know how to boil an egg when they arrive,” says S... posted on Dec 11 2017 (9,001 reads)

me it’s a lovely relationship. Yeah. I want to talk about your family’s history of slavery and how you’ve personally come to terms with it.  How it’s played a role in your own personal growth. Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, and I’ve been thinking about this recently. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. My great grandfather was born in slavery in Virginia. And we grew up with segregation, I started my education in a coloured school. I couldn’t go to the public school when I started. When you think about that now… I know! It’s interesting that I never, ever talked about that... posted on Mar 27 2018 (7,607 reads)

with them until he read Gandhi, and began to believe more could be achieved through engagement with global problems, rather than by detachment. That year, at 18, he ran away to become a student of Bhave’s, where he learnt non-violence as a means to peace and land reform. Now 77, Satish has been a quiet revolutionary for more than 50 years—slowly shifting the social and ecological agenda. In 1982, he set up the Small School, which pioneered a “human-scale approach” to education with small classes and responsive teaching. Eight years later he founded Schumacher College, which offers transformative and holistic education in sustainable living. At 50 he embarked on a ... posted on Sep 11 2018 (9,719 reads)