Quotes of the Week from Me:

“Remain committed.”

“Lean into your loved ones.”

“Want more. Want less. Want new. Want old. Want change. Want the same. Take it.”

Quotes of the Week from Others:

“You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.” – Jerry West

“Confidence isn’t about walking in a room and thinking you are better than everyone, it’s walking in and not having to compare yourself to anyone at all.” – Unknown

“Life’s not about expecting, hoping, and wishing, it’s about doing, being, and becoming.” – Mike Dooley

Quick Optimism:

Three to five years of focus, sacrifice, and working smart for the right things can set you up for the rest of your life.

What does “set you up” mean to you?

Words that came to mind to summarize my answer: family, fitness, knowledge, money.

Full Newsletter:

After coming off of the quintessential family weekend in last week’s newsletter, I got COVID. For the third time. Then my wife and kids got it. And now we are here again. This Monday we are officially past feeling like crap and things are looking up!

Thankfully, something carried me through this week and it came from a miniature library in a random park, next to the busiest road in our town. It is quite literally a bird house. I guess it’d be more like a bird mansion.

About the books it said, “Take one and leave one.” So, I took one. Which left an excuse to go back since I now need to leave one.

My discovery was a book titled, “The Genius of American Education (1965),” by Lawrence A. Cremin. An exploration of commitment to popularization in education, Cremin suggests and discusses the sources of what he calls a ‘new, tough-minded progressivism that is at the same time consonant with the best in our tradition and appropriate contemporary needs.’ The old and the new.

Instead of regurgitating Cremin’s writings about the history of American education, its key stakeholders, and their opinions about improving the education system, I’d like to leave you with my favorite excerpts from the book so you can think about how you learn and how you think learning could be improved. I think it is clear that students would benefit from additional non-classroom learning. Would adults/people benefit from additional classroom learning every once in awhile? Is classroom learning completely obsolete as suggested so many times in history and today? All of life educates, but some forms of education are probably better than others. Four excerpts below. Enjoy.

1. “Some years ago, Margaret Mead, in a fascinating essay on obsolescence in our education system, drew a distinction between the vertical transmission of the tried and true from a mature teacher to an immature student and the lateral transmission of what has just been discover or invented or created to every sentient member or society. Schools by their very nature, she indicated, emphasize the vertical transmission of knowledge; and hence, in a world of rapid change, they are forever doomed to obsolescence. What is needed, she suggested, is a recasting of our traditional concepts in such a way that primary education would refer to that stage of education in which children are taught what they need to know in order to be fully human in the world in which they are growing up and secondary education would refer to whatever further education is obtained during the individual’s whole lifetime.”
2. “In effect, what I have been trying to suggest is the host of new relationships and problems inherent in the educational revolution of our time, There is no doubt that this generation of American children will experience a range of formal and informal education unparalleled in history.”
3. “The great [people] of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to another, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.”
4. “What we can continue to hope, it seems to me, is that men will learn to face their problems more intelligently in the future than they have in the past. And that would be progress indeed for humankind.”

Make it an educated Monday.