There is no more important work than the education of our children.

http://flickr.com/photos/looking4poetry/2546411940/sizes/m/

Yet within the current conditions of schooling,

and despite the efforts of the best of our teachers,

our children often feel inadequate as learners and

isolated and estranged from learning.

Far too many emerge intellectually, emotionally, and

spiritually disconnected from the natural world, their

communities, and their own abundant potentials.

They have little sense of meaning, wholeness,

connectedness, and belonging.

There has never been a more important time

to reperceive and redesign schooling and the

context and conditions within which the minds,

hearts, and spirits of our children and our

future are grown. The human future will be

defined by our children’s minds and the nature

and quality of their presence on the earth.

Mind shaping is world shaping.

Our habits of mind and patterns of thinking are shaped and developed through experience and practice.

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When our children engage in powerful questions, they learn to explore and inquire;

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when they engage in discovering connections, they learn to seek and discern relationships;

Corpus Criste, Cindy Kendall, June 2006, Cusco, Peru

when they engage in solving significant ethical problems, they learn to creatively resolve complex interdependencies.

http://http://flickr.com/photos/uncultured/1815645413/sizes/m/,

How we engage the minds of our children in learning profoundly shapes the patterns of their thinking and their thinking shapes the world.

http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/2429/globe_west_2048.jpg Text from The Power To Transform by Stephanie Pace Marshall