by Stuart Grauer, Ed.D.

“If his own person is not correct, though he orders, he is not obeyed.”

— Analects, 13.6.

Humans commit savage acts and express disturbing images and ideas. We are told by world leaders that despising others is the way of the world. And yet, we seem to retain a surpassing sense of a virtue I remember first reading about many years ago while studying the great Chinese teacher, Confucius. Since Confucius, civility has been among the foremost virtues expected of our greatest role models and leaders. Though, I don’t need to tell you, it can drift, far.

No matter how much charisma, persuasion, money or power one has, ultimately a lack of civility will diminish them if not bring them down. That’s civility in action. (Okay, some readers will probably come up with some horrible counterexamples, but the essence remains.)

This quality is rarely spoken of, but, to this day, however silently, perhaps in no profession is it more expected to embody civility than teaching. Despite our supposed “dark sarcasm in the classroom” (Pink Floyd) and the occasional urge to stand in the quad and shout “carpe diem” (Dead Poet’s Society) it is a given that teachers, as much as or more than those in any other profession, will possess the quality of civility. Not only at work, but in private life.

Though his teachings eventually became central to the Chinese imperial examination system as we still know it, Confucius did not invent civility. But he elevated it to a foundation of “the good society” and a sound education. He called it li, an ancient Chinese virtue encompassing courtesy, honesty, respect, and the ways of going about everyday life that enable people to live together in harmony. On campuses, the same people rub elbows day after day, and so the requirements and expectations surrounding civility and harmony can be high.

But li was never only about good manners or following rules for Confucius. It was the outward, social expression of an inner moral life: treating others with dignity, exercising restraint, honoring relationships, holding off on those F-bombs that we seem to be hearing a lot of these days, resisting the urge to strangle the occasional teen, remembering that rolling your eyes is not a recognized teaching method, abstaining from expressions of dishonesty and ego. Just by virtue of entering the profession, we get a pass on the vice of greed. Our paychecks have taken care of that temptation.

Civility is the opposite of ego: It means recognizing that our behavior shapes the community around us. Axiomatically, when we see civility, that’s civilization happening. We have a functioning, harmonious civic life. We are curious and caring about others whose experiences are vastly different from our own.

When we see or abide by greed, ego, lies, etc., that’s of course not what we call civility. And yet don’t we see and abide by these all the time? Well?

Confucius paired li with another essential virtue, ren, meaning humaneness or benevolence. Civility, in this sense, is more than just civics in action, it is what humaneness looks like in action — it is what can set humans apart when they are expressing that unique humanness. Beautifully, for Confucius, civility was not weakness or politeness for its own sake. It was a form of moral strength, a daily practice that makes us more fully human — what the ancient Buddhists called warriorship, and there is a name for it in every major religion. I think nowhere is that li practice more consequential than in teaching, where every word, gesture, and interaction can become a lesson, whether we intend it or not.

In “The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen,” a key theme is that real teachers and their students in a great school, like leaders and followers in a civilization, raise one another’s moral aspirations. Ultimately, our best students can become our teachers. That’s leadership. Confucius, it seems, was onto all this a couple thousand years before I was.

This week, I honor another fearless teacher: Confucius. I hope he still makes the rounds in Schools of Education and in schools and gatherings. The message is simple, and not only for classroom teachers, but for parents, coaches, school leaders, politicians, clergy, and anyone whose behavior becomes a lesson for others. Civility is not legislated or demanded: it is taught. If someone claims we are not up to this or that it is weak or impractical, as they will, they will be surpassed, all in good time, and here is how:

We all teach civility not so much by requiring it as by embodying it.

Muse, tell us about a simple man who wandered but was never lost.

He left no writings, created no school and claimed no special wisdom. He appeared in the stories of others much like the Greek gods had appeared, fearing no retribution for anything he challenged — suddenly, in the marketplace or along the road, asking inconvenient questions, relentlessly. Then disappearing.

Not a saint. Something earthier: barefoot, stubborn, funny, homely. Living the polytheistic life among the muses and oracles.

Socrates.

The opening of The Odyssey asks, variously translated: Muse, tell us of a man who wandered and was lost. Socrates hardly went anywhere. His wandering and heroics were of another kind.

I reached Athens after sailing the Ionian Sea off the coast of Greece, and at once began looking for the places where he taught. I knew it was a bit absurd because Socrates had no classroom. He taught wherever he found people: in workshops and gymnasiums, on street corners and beneath the colonnades of the Agora.

Agora. Gathering place. It was the social heart of Athens, a mall and civic center in one — not a formal marble plaza, but a broad, dusty open space beneath the magnificent Acropolis and its Parthenon. The Panathenaic Way crossed it diagonally, and I walked it in my imagination and for real, simultaneously, slowly. Long, shaded colonnades of temples, government buildings, workshops and merchants’ stalls border it. I conjure the smells of leather, olive oil, dust and cooking fires as my imagination shifts to overdrive; the sounds of craftsmen hammering, merchants bargaining, jurors arguing and politicians trying to be heard. Then Socrates was approaching citizens who had come to conduct business and drawing them into conversations they had not expected to have. Later, some youths just learning about new ways of thinking.

Education had not yet been removed from daily life and placed inside a separate institution.

Today, those columns end abruptly and jagged, and building foundations trace the outlines of rooms that no longer exist. But wandering through them was something I had dreamed of for years. It felt less like visiting a ruin than walking through a park inhabited by spirits.

Near the Agora’s edge, I wandered over to what archaeologists identify as the workshop of Simon the shoemaker. Shoemaking materials were found there, along with a small cup bearing Simon’s name. The ancient tradition holds that Socrates frequented Simon’s shop and taught there.

Leather scraps on the floor. Tools on a bench and sandals waiting to be repaired. Out front, Socrates holding court and questioning someone who had made the mistake of claiming to understand justice or courage or logic. Does the word “hypocrisy” sound Greek? He could smell it.

Simon dropped his work when the conversations grew deep or heated, and joined in. He may or may not have preserved the conversations we know today, but one way or another Plato and Xenophon got ahold of them, and each created his own portrait of the man. So we can’t know exactly what Socrates said beside the shoemaker’s bench, but thanks largely to Plato we can recognize the education that was going on there.

It was local. Conversational. Inseparable from the life of the community. The community had a direct democracy — male citizens could vote directly on every issue — so we can imagine some deep discourse and polemics.

Legendarily, Socrates did not deliver information. It seems he created… perplexity. Socrates was the master at exposing the distance between what people said they believed and what their lives revealed. I walk and imagine his teaching beginning just at the point where anyone thought they were certain. About anything. Imagining a place where everyone could freely speak their mind seems a luxury… we do not seem to have this in my real world, at present. We speak in riddles, leery of the deep probes that will reveal too much. We might fear Socrates today, as many came to in his time. Socrates didn’t merely ask difficult questions. He publicly exposed the ignorance of people who believed themselves wise. He questioned politicians, poets, craftsmen, conventional religion, and received wisdom. The young Athenians watched and sometimes imitated him.

Now I walk from Simon’s shop toward the back end of the Agora and find the remains of a building believed by many archaeologists to have been the Athenian state prison. It seems to have been where Socrates spent his final days and drank the hemlock. The formal charges in 399 BCE were impiety — failing to recognize the city’s gods and introducing new divine things. And also corrupting the young. But the politics of the day made those charges more flammable than that.

Nothing dramatic to see here: low foundations shaping a rectangular building the size of a large classroom or two. Scattered stones. And imaginably the end of history’s greatest teaching life.

There is no one around. I sit for an hour thinking on and off about a current reluctance to call anyone a teacher. More of these conversations than I’m comfortable with. We now have coaches, guides, mentors, facilitators and learning designers. Each nouveau moniker describes something worthy, but also a place where our profession is surrendering its real self. Maybe teacher now sounds too traditional, too ruined, too humble, or too branded.

But as we abandon the word, we abandon a noble tradition… making a straw man of Socrates.

Is a teacher really the passive distributor of lessons created somewhere else? A status quo bureaucrat? What of the one who notices whose eyes are present, what question has emerged, what the weather makes possible, and what the place itself is trying to teach. A teacher studies the subject knowledge, sure, just as Socrates surely studied Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (as recorded by Plato, who taught them to Alexander the Great, who carried them into battle). But beyond the prep, what the “real” teacher studies, probes, and divines is this: the learners.

No guide could have predicted what Socrates would discuss beside Simon’s sandal shop that morning even though my muse was telling me all of the above. No standard curriculum could have anticipated which young Athenian would appear or what boast he would bring only to have Socrates lace straight away into it.

In prison, I sit on a foundation stone I’m not sure you are allowed to sit on, where I imagine he sat, but no one is around, and I think of the thousands of people now establishing small pods and microschools and other small learning communities in basements, forests, living rooms, churches, and rental properties. Small schools. When they are led in the way of Socrates, small schools return judgment and trust to teachers and their students. These teachers respond to weather, opportunity, curiosity and place. Little agoras: gathering places where real people gather and pursue consequential questions, whatever they are.

It is hot and everything is still. A tortoise makes his way along the front.

And the pain remains here in prison. Today, back home, questioning is becoming dangerous again. Teachers and librarians remove books or avoid difficult subjects — not always because a law requires it, but because a single complaint may threaten their schools. Scientists revise grant proposals, deleting politically disfavored words and abandoning questions that might make their research unfundable. University presidents, knowing that billions of dollars in federal research support can be frozen or withdrawn, calculate which principles they can afford to defend publicly — they hold their tongues.

Today the cost of asking the deepest questions we can ask is becoming visible, and consequential elections approach back home. The tradition of Socrates matters and is still fraught. To be a teacher can’t merely mean the safe transmission of the approved knowledge — or compliance for fear of risks to your grants or tenure. Maybe “guides” or “learning designers” do that. But teachers follow the question, wherever it may lead, even when powerful people would prefer that it disappear.

In prison, I think about artificial intelligence, too. How I can drive along in my car and ask it question after question as the road spools out along with my curiosity. How I can challenge answers, or dig deeper and deeper, and deeper; or flip the learning and command it to question me deeper. AI becomes a tireless conversational partner, Socrates riding shotgun.

Of course, only an imitation. AI can produce a probing question but not stand barefoot in the civic square. It shares no weather, risks no reputation, notices no silence between two people–and it is censored. It accepts no moral responsibility for the lives it shapes through the inquiry; hence it drinks no hemlock — a massive debate shaping up right now involving the world’s tech leaders and governments.

The Agora is mostly ruins. But its educational idea is not. Wherever a teacher goes off script, wherever a small school becomes a genuine gathering place that re-births the meaning of teacher, and wherever the question is valued more than the answer.

Socrates wandered the Agora, but he was never lost. Twenty-five centuries later, many among us are trying to find our way back there.

Everything I Know About Leadership, I Learned from the Ritz: Extraordinary Observations Aboard the Yacht Ilma

By Stuart Grauer, author of The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen.

I’m going to go right out and say it: My brother Bill made more money in his career than a person needs to make. A lot more. But then, as a lawyer, he worked much harder than most, served people with very high stakes, and made them feel incredibly well taken care of.

Given all this, when he asked this year if I’d like to join him on a Ritz-Carlton cruise in the Bahamas that I would never have afforded or considered, I said: Sure. He is dealing, you could say, and I think we both knew this was going to be his last trip. It had to be a good one.

The ship Ilma is currently the only cruise ship in the world to earn the independent Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating. This is not a marketing pitch, but an award based on rigorous evaluation of the guest experience that I can now verify as deserved: this is a 5-star boat!

But what impressed me most wasn’t the luxury built into the ship — it was the people. Every crew member I encountered seemed:

• incredibly happy to serve,

• genuinely honored to be a part of this crew and team… and to be serving me!

• unusually bright, emotionally intelligent, and well educated,

• deeply attentive (I like the word “attunement”),

• energetic without seeming forced — good energy.

They remembered our names, our stories, our preferences, and conversations from previous days. It was never scripted and it came in from various directions. It was caring, real caring.

Even the youngest employees demonstrated interpersonal maturity that is uncommon in almost any organization. You can see that the Ritz hires for character first and skills second. As a result, they seem to get both. Their recruitment process must be incredibly selective — one crew member said she was one of like 3000 applicants and, knowing her now, I agree with their choice.

I experienced one service failure on the first day right after boarding — someone was very late with our food. What happened next left us with a more positive impression than if the mistake had never occurred: the next day, the staff was all over us like a beautiful, caring swarm. The mistake became a call to action you knew they’d huddled about.

One early morning I was taking a walk below decks far from my stateroom and there was a young woman setting up a bar that I did not even know was there, and she was getting ready to open. “Good morning, Dr. Grauer, can I help you with anything this morning,” she said with a smile. I had never seen this person before! “I hope you enjoy your time on the beach at Great Exuma this morning!” Whaa?

The message: The deep cultures create redundancy in caring. Great organizations don’t just assign care, they layer it. When three different people notice you from three different directions, you stop wondering whether you matter; and to a child, it feels like: Belonging. Redundancy in caring isn’t waste. It’s one of the highest forms of leadership. Look for redundancy.

The food was unbelievable. Probably the highest overall culinary experience I have ever had: beautifully presented. Exceptionally flavorful. Unlimited fresh lobster/sea bass, etc., premium wines and spirits, custom chocolates and coffees prepared at an astonishing level.

So that’s that about the shipboard service, and I hope fun to read about. But that’s not really why I am writing about this. Here’s where the story gets real…

What struck me as an educator and leader

Great organizations are built less by procedures and buildings than by people. Great cruises are not about the great navigation or engine room work, though we need those. They are about the service we experience. Great schools including The Grauer School are not about the curriculum or programming, they are about the mentorships and relationships — the caring we feel and experience from every single person there, from the front office to the principal to the maintenance staff… to the math teacher who greets us at the gateway or doorway, the English teacher who talks about the literature over lunch with us, the joyful volunteer who hands us flowers, the office staffer who sees a sad look on our face — it’s the noticing! It’s the caring.

Luxury — or in schools, distinction — is not created primarily by marble, suites, ivory towers, distinguished job titles, or expensive things.

It is created because carefully chosen, passionate, genuinely caring and giving people consistently make visitors and students and colleagues feel:

• noticed,

• remembered,

• anticipated,

• and genuinely cared for. Sometimes even loved.

When someone is just attending to their assigned duties, we know it. And when we matter to someone, we know that! Day and night. No mistaking.

The Huddle

But you don’t need to be a rich lawyer on a cruise to experience this…

Last week, I was up inn Sonoma County to help out a family member who was in a tough spot. One of the biggest helps he wanted was for me to go to the amazing, top-rated San Rafael farmer’s market and get his fruit. But why was it so renowned, this gathering of a few dozen farmers?

This needing family member lives for that market but was unable to travel there. So there I went and got the best peaches you will taste in this lifetime, and some other produce that would qualify as nectar of the gods. When we told one of the stalls what we were doing here, the owner said, “Yes, we dropped off some fruit for him and the nurses at the hospital last week.”

Who does this? Why?

But there’s more. It was early, my produce bags runneth over, and I happened upon a little stall that was preparing to open. They were selling hot chocolate. Those of you who know me look compassionately upon my chocolate issues and know that this was not a stall I could pass by. Only one trouble: They were not open yet.

But why not? The chocolate was hot. The coconut for the toppings all shaved. The farm fresh crème all whipped. The spices standing by the shaver. Can’t I have my chocolate? No, the owner said. This opening means too much. We never serve anything before our team meeting to explore what we are intending. We share what today means to us, how we each want to treat people on this day. Their mission statement was posted on their counter, writ large:

“OUR MISSION IS TO HELP THE WORLD SMILE.” And they meant it.

Wow. They were serving hot chocolate!

But, to quote a Grauer School motto, it “meant the world to them.” No, not meant the world. I mean it really meant the world to them. I paid, and he shook my hand, and I understood that he was not merely wishing me a good tasting: he was shaking my hand for joy and for world peace, he lived this meaning.

And when I was handed my hot cup, the first sip did not only taste like chocolate, it tasted like: love. And purpose. And when I drank, I drank for the cacao farmers and truck drivers, and dockworkers and provisioners, and chefs, servers, and dishwashers who were all a part of this love, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the invisible community of people whose work had converged in a single, gorgeous sip. This was more than “doing small acts with great love:” they had the sensitivity and energy to notice and create what those small acts might really look like. That’s the love. That’s the character.

Connections to The Grauer School and Your School

When I meet and am served by people who are really Serving, it reinforces some beliefs we’ve developed together over many years as a learning community:

Attunement! When people feel truly seen, trust grows naturally. I just can’t say enough about the difference we experience when teachers and staff are attuned. Routine experiences take on a spiritual quality and we know and feel it when we are in it.

Relationships are not a by-product of the overused word, “excellence” — they are the whole of it. They are the energy that drives it.

Character matters even more than credentials when building a great organization, or at least it comes first.

Hiring and ongoing team building like that morning hot chocolate meeting is one of the most important forms of curriculum design. I regret not having more such meetings, or huddles — no great coach would skip this element of a great start to almost anything we care about as a team.

A culture spreads through example more than through rules — through service more than requirements — through Socratic probing more than information downloading.

Excellence isn’t a single action. It’s thousands of discrete little human interactions (or lack of them) repeated and coordinated consistently into patterns that become culture.

Takeaway:

The great organizations and teachers don’t merely deliver exceptional goods or services. They make them matter. To everyone. Maybe even to a higher power or purpose. I hope you have that in your work, whatever you do.

And that, I think, is a lesson every great school can keep trying to embody …and if you don’t believe me, cruise on the Ritz. Just bill it to my brother, Bill.

Stuart Grauer is founder of The Grauer School and the Small Schools Coalition. His newest book, The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen: A Trail Guide for Small School Leaders, explores how relationships, place, and human-scale leadership create extraordinary schools.

Today, as a part of the American celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the world’s tall ships are gathering again to commemorate the founding of the nation.

Today is the largest maritime gathering in US history. It is OpSail 250.

Fifty years ago, before the U.S. Bicentennial, I cut out of my teaching job in New York a few weeks before the school year ended, and found myself aboard one of those same ships, as a part of Operation Sail ’76, to celebrate our 200th anniversary: Six weeks sharing a tiny berth with a duffle bag and a banjo that got me out of watch now and then. I was just a kid, really, and now I am old.

We met tall ships from all over the world in Bermuda and made way for New York. As the tall ships sailed beneath the Statue of Liberty during OpSail ’76, 50 years ago today, I was smart enough to know I was lost, and being on a ship at sea was about as perfect as could be.

Upon my return after the long voyage at sea, I learned two things: my students had flunked the final, and I was fired — from my first teaching job, a small school, uptown. My principal, a kind man, took me aside. “You’re not cut out for this profession.”

He was half right. I wasn’t cut out for what schools were becoming, and I thought I would quit the profession and just write and make art. Instead, I was just starting a search that has lasted all these 50 years, a search for more original instructions. Not the policies, standards, mandates, rankings, and organizational charts that have accumulated around education, and not the bigness, but some real questions: What is school for? What kind of place allows children to matter? What kind of leadership would that take?

The search took me through nine schools, across deserts and mountains, into Indigenous communities, forests, rivers, and eventually to founding a school of my own where the search was really just starting. I came to believe that our best leadership principles were never invented in boardrooms. They were always there in healthy human communities and in the natural world itself. They are out to sea, all of them, even in storms and doldrums. Seeing all the ships convene again today in OpSail 250 is an amazing bookend to those days of leaving New York. Fifty years ago I sailed away from New York believing I was lost. That might be necessary in order to be on the right course.

Nations return to their founding stories because they know they cannot navigate by forgetting where they came from. It is hard to watch America today without wondering whether we have lost our bearings. For many, this can make our anniversary matter a whole lot more. They invite us take our bearings again, and remember what kind of country we set out to become, how rock solid some of our founding fathers were as they tried to set us up to avoid autocrats, profiteers, egomaniacs, and people who believed their leadership made them superior human beings.

Schools, too, need to return from time to time to their original instructions — to remember what children are for, what teachers are for, and what leadership is for. Happy Fourth of July. If you are one of those people who is just starting out, even someone on one of those ships, I wish you all the courage you may need now and then to leave the harbor in search of honest bearings.

(Dong Kingman watercolor)

In the attics of my life

Full of cloudy dreams; unreal

Full of tastes no tongue can know

And lights no eye can see

When there was no ear to hear

You sang to me

— Grateful Dead (https://www.youtube.com/watchv=_f7RqEsydYY&list=RD_f7RqEsydYY&start_radio=1 )

I am cleaning out my files this summer, so I will not saddle the next generation with 20 or 50 boxes and trunks full of artifacts.

It’s history. What will we pass along? There’s way too much of it. What gets buried or even burned? I want to tell you about this and I promise a chill, beach read. Settle in. Inhale some history. It’s summer. We will braid ideas and make a new whole. Read a story…

Attics

If you are cleaning out your own archives, try this maxim, put civilly: “Nobody wants your freaking stuff.” I tried to stick to that. But it’s more than stuff. It is the well and wash of times gone by. It’s life, deep and warm and sinking. Your life. Your history.

Thousands of documents. Why did I ever save them? It’s some kind of respect thing, I assume, and so I make a promise to myself, out of respect: I will read each document before tossing. Well, won’t I? There are boxes and boxes of papers and photos and old stuff.

I want my attic back, though my past life seems to live there. It’s just that … Nobody wants your … stuff.

Now I have hauled all the boxes and past lives down to the living room and they are everywhere.

First box. Quickly, I come upon a yellowed, tattered list of questions to ask a French chef who was a guest in my class one time. My first fulltime, tenured public school job was as a history teacher in a large school on Long Island. I remember it now. That course was called European Culture Studies. I was innocently trying to be a good teacher by opening up my classroom to: European culture.

I remember all that now. And I toss the question list out. My descendants will never know about the French chef. He is gone from history.

In earlier days, that course had been called Western Civilization, “Western Civ.” In the 1970s, the department of education temporarily determined that what U.S. kids really needed to know was our “real” heritage, our European heritage, a view that the current U.S. executive branch espouses. (After all, we won the big wars and created the Ivy League.)

In European Culture, such as we told all schoolkids was their heritage, we headed straight for the Greeks, the Romans’ rise and fall, and European Medieval times. The Age of Explorers, the Age of Kings, and so on past the Industrial Revolution. To the Great Wars.

Testing

As a history teacher, we knew that our students’ knowledge of all this European Culture would be tested, too. At the end of the year. There was a somewhat feared, standardized statewide test called the New York State Regents Exams. Issue:

I was not exactly following the Regents syllabus verbatim.

The syllabus did not include any chefs. I knew that!

And I was really trying to be a good teacher. But I was in my 20s!

For the Middle Ages, I brought in a Franciscan Friar in his brown robes, to talk about monastic life. Before leaving, he lifted the bottom of his frock and lo and behold he was wearing blue jeans. Not in the syllabus. Not in history.

For our studies in France, that French chef from Manhattan, who I had seen written up in the New York Times, who had had me smell his divine truffles, came out and showed the students how to make French candies — and to answer the questions I had written down and saved on a sheet of yellow, lined paper.

European Culture, right? For the Age of Explorers, I took them to the South Street Seaport to see the tall ships. You see where I was heading? I thought history was living.

I was not exactly heading for the Regents syllabus rigorously:

From Europe, we learned, Columbus “discovered” a New World. There were millions of Indigenous people he called Indians, which he ran into on account of sailing in the wrong direction. He discovered them and, from then on, they existed.

Columbus: courageous and statuesque.

My students and I studied the Indians. (Not in the syllabus!)

Magellan, of astonishing fortitude, was first to circumnavigate the world — an astonishing explorer! Except he was killed by the Indonesians he tried to subjugate before he was even halfway around the same world he is credited with being the first to sail all the way around. How did he get credit for this? Simple: his ship’s reporter was a really good writer.

History is what gets passed down. Whatever it is.

Note: I am all for the Age of Discovery! I personally trademarked the paradigm: “Learn by Discovery,” THE GRAUER SCHOOL, Trademark serial number 78216548. I own Learn by Discovery. It’s historical. Don’t try using it. We got lawyers.

The job of a history teacher is to pass along culture and truth. It’s a given that history teachers know what that is. Because it’s right there for them in the textbook.

I am afraid I veered much wider than the “truth” in my European Culture Studies lessons. I brought in officials from the United Nations who started us down a long road studying world hunger and food production, overpopulation, and various global affairs. We (and the whole of European Culture) were the First World, and we were started by Columbus.

Trouble is: all that U.N. stuff was called the Third World — not “our” culture, any more than the Second World, which was Russia. Not us, not relatable. (Digression: they had killed my forefathers.)

(Coming back from digression:)

I was taking my students out of bounds for the Regents exams.

I did not think much of any of this until I got a pink slip at the end of the year — I got laid off. My students, it turned out, had performed poorly on the N.Y. State Regents exams. I had not passed along the right history.

Luckily, I was saved again by my writing skills (aren’t they great!): I documented all of the above, and more, in a letter to the principal and the vice-principal. I was rewriting history. We met. The principal relented. I kept my job. (That summer, I taught him how to fish on Lake Winnipesauke.)

All of the above only egged me on.

I taught all about the South Seas and even created a kava kava ceremony for my students as we learned how Magellan never made it around the world, despite his iconic, legendary circumnavigation. Was I trying to get fired!

We studied the Industrial Revolution — including its pollution and child labor — and visited the construction site of a local nuclear power plant — what would they do with the 10,000 years of waste? No one knew. So much for the industrial revolution. The legendary Bell Labs had invented the solar cell 20 years before that, but not a soul in high school studied that.

Don Kish got 7 patents while at Bell Labs in the 1960s. In the 1990s and oughts, Don was our legendary physics and math teacher

Had it occurred to me that I was subverting the prevailing notion of history in showing my students any of the above, I’m sure I would have been fired. Deservedly? Who knows.

But I was innocent and only following my own process of discovery.

When I was a kid, history was a kind of gospel, some of it had even been written on stone tablets.

In this gospel, people like Indians — from India and from the New World, both — were footnotes to all the Europeans had done: the European conquerors, artists, writers, generals made history, no one else. Everyone else was peasants or nowhere near as civilized, despite a few anomalies like Confucius and the Communists.

Time marches. History gets written. Over the coming decades, the world, prevailing educational theories, and the teaching profession all changed. European Culture Studies teachers were to teach World Cultures, whatever that meant, then Global Studies, then World History and Geography, and so on. Today, the U.S. President and supporters want schools to begin with the Ten Commandments, whatever course they may be studying, and they claim moral authority over history by virtue of having won the last election.

So, today, our US culture is again being seen as “Western.” Interestingly, the old title — European Culture Studies — sounds more humanistic and interdisciplinary than many modern courses, too. It suggests literature, art, philosophy, music, religion, and ideas, not just chronology. And not just victory or dominance. We build history out of what we like, like a playroom.

Achives

Now I am preparing to throw hundreds of my own travel journals in the recycle bin: faded photographs, love letters, many long letters from caring people whom I had stopped thinking much about; job rejection letters; a massive paper correspondence that taught me how to be a writer. The emails I send today would not teach anyone how to be a writer. They are short and they lack soul. They braid nothing. They are informational, not epistolary. They have no life, and people act like they have no time for more.

I get a sense of overwhelm. Our histories deserve review and reverie as they fill up our attics and our souls. And I get a sense of “real” history being the study of living cultures, cultures in a hurry if not exhausted.

Cast Aways

There are boxes and boxes. I am startled by how much I had forgotten, and how much had once mattered. Entire friendships, ambitions, romances, arguments, dreams — all reduced to a few fading pages in a few boxes.

And now, I have re-read every single letter, and feel some deepening and appreciation, and very much loss. We take for granted our times way more than we can realize while those times are happening. History is the slim pick’ins of every one of us. But mainly of the powerful and wealthy.

So, suddenly, at last, I feel an enormous sense of loss to those people and times I may toss in the recycle bin. We embody those people and times we have left behind, or loved, or taken for granted, and tossing out all of their artifacts may not be historical justice.

Standing over a bin, holding a stack of forty-year-old letters, which you will do one day unless you want your kids to do it, you may find yourself facing the same question that confronts every historian:

What deserves to survive? This story?

No archive can keep all our attics. No curriculum can teach all the history. Every act of remembering is met with a great many more acts of forgetting. Of letting go.

Here is a photo of me looking weird, and there a letter written to me I also shall not be passing along to my daughter. I toss bundles and pounds of letters into the recycling bin, because I am writing history. I am making curricular decisions. I am deciding what future generations need to know about my life. Historians do this. So do teachers. So do states. So do dads.

The attics of our lives contain whole lives that may have more meaning as we churn through them than they ever did in real-time. There’s joy and success in there.

And there is so much pain in a life and a culture. Historiographers must feel like infant trauma doctors as they separate out what we can save or lose. Sometimes I can hardly bear some of my past, just as sometimes I can’t bear looking at the news today: the greed, the wars, the egos in charge, and I wonder how all this will be written up and passed along versus gone like the howl of a coyote behind my house right now or like a life I could have lived but didn’t and so it feels like a lost life.

A time to keep, and a time to cast away. — Ecclesiastes 3:6

By the way, those European Culture Studies courses we used to teach were not all bad: they resembled the old “Great Books” and “Western Heritage” programs that were common in universities during the 1960s and 1970s. But they naturally buried a great many ugly photos so they could save their favorites, just like you do in your life’s attics: They put Plato and Michelangelo and Shakespear and Napolean in the trunk for the next generation, while discarding ordinary villagers, most Indigenous peoples, most women, laborers, and colonized cultures.

Lets Wrap This Up and Get on With Summer

That tension between the victors and the less wealthy has been at the center of history education debates for the last fifty years — or maybe forever. Somehow, if we are going to teach the history as we have lived it, we will have to deal with the Euro-centric teaching:

The colonialism, the eastern and southern hemisphere greatness we marginalized, as they might us.

When some students and I visited schools in Cuba, their books were filled with photos of great men who our books at home villainized. Little children sang songs about these villains. We joined them, my own Grauer School students, sung with the Communists. Take that!

So, let’s bring this home.

Today, California’s current World History course is largely about understanding how societies and cultures interact. How they shape the world we think we are in. But the State stopped annual history testing in 2013. For all they know, teachers are teaching European Culture Studies. Or indigenous studies. Or Second World communism, which, as we know it was actually more like fascism. Which we hate. We are anti-fascist.

In conclusion, the boxes in my attic taught me something that never got on the Regents exams: History is not the study of the past. It is the study of what survives us.

Every culture and every individual converting an attic into a playroom for their grandchildren decides what to carry forward and what to leave behind.

Now I find my Highest Camp Honors trophies from Camp Awosting. Me. Camper of the year. Did my life peak around the age of 13?

So I look up that camp for the first time in a half decade, and I email the founder’s son, Buzzy. I thank him for how formative that all was, how deepening — and I even tell him how I used some camp principles in developing a school. This is true.

And then, all there is left to do is heap those trophies in the bin, like little pieces of my soul that will be done for, like a funeral prelude. They are my Mayan Codices, my Library of Alexandria: Look those up. Peak human history. Vanished. They are the entire oral history of prehistoric people. The duck-billed platypus. They are every aging man or woman cleaning out a garage or attic.

Most all of those men and women have been completely forgotten in less than 50 years after they are gone, as though they never set foot on the face of the earth, and not much of this is met with any sense of loss. Their “real” history already passed into other lives, the lives of descendants and students, which is what great parents and teachers do. After all:

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

— Gospel of Matthew 6:21

Whatever was worth saving has escaped the archive and taken up residence in the hearts and habits of those who come next.

The next generation is our treasure, especially teachers and parents and beneficiaries. Muse about this as you are sitting on the beach this summer or travelling to see the sites you will make photos of. After seeing probably like two or three photos in my original camp trunk, my daughter will get the idea that it is filled to the brim with unformed or unfinished dreams, and maybe a few dreams realized, people loved and almost forgotten until now; that the trunk is my Library of Alexandria, and she will figure out what to do with it by the time she makes her own trunk.

So later on, or sometime in the world, you might think you are cleaning the attic, but you will be teaching history, shaping stories out of silence and carrying them forward, releasing them like leaves coming off the trees in the fall when the wind comes.

What will your children and descendants get? What will your students get? I have read every letter now, and tomorrow is trash pickup day. I take the giant boxes of paper and trophies out and they slide into the bin and it sounds scratchy and hollow, like another world.

War does not only destroy the “enemy.” It damages the future of everyone involved — including our own children and our own schools. Can our students know this?

Today, amidst strife and division at home and war abroad, I cannot imagine that ordinary citizens of Iran — teachers, parents, students, musicians, scientists — are my enemies. Especially their teachers and students. The people I struggle to understand are those on all sides, including my own country’s leaders, who continue ordering the destruction and killing.

That’s one struggle. The other struggle is unspoken — we have to watch a sudden and poorly explained war, to bear witness to quiet and terrible messaging entering our school gateways and student psyches, and to wonder if is all somehow unmentionable. But my charge is to talk about education, not war, though war is at hand, so please press on whatever your politics.

A recent Nature journal report on the bombing of universities and research centers in Iran shows something deeper than geopolitical conflict: the collateral destruction of education itself.

Since the war in Iran began on February 28, 2026, approximately 30 Iranian universities have reportedly been damaged. Among them are Sharif University of Technology — Iran’s leading technological university — and the historic Pasteur Institute of Iran, a research institution more than a century old.[1] The fact is, Iranian scientists and academics have long collaborated with American and international scholars despite governmental hostility between nations. The Nature article mentions an Iranian physicist working with CERN and participating in the Large Hadron Collider CMS collaboration — one of the great, world scientific collaborations.

The ongoing and real damage to younger children’s schools is harder to get data on, maybe because the loss is too intimate or local for statistics gathering. But we already know that classrooms have vanished, teachers and students have been killed, and kids over there are no longer waking up to normal school days — they may never.

(The last time I wrote about this war was during its first week, when a girls’ elementary school was demolished and its students and teachers perished.[2])

It is easy during wartime to reduce war zones to abstractions in a foreign land: “targets,” “infrastructure,” “strategic sites.” But universities are among humanity’s most sacred and defining creations. They are where young people learn to think independently, where scientific discoveries are shared — critically, across borders — where books and ideas survive political eras, and where the next generation imagines a future larger than hatred. They are where trust is built, and that trust can last generations.

When those places are bombed, the damage is never contained inside a school building or even within a single national border.

The Nature article describes Iranian students unable to concentrate because cities around them are under bombardment. Researchers have lost access to the Internet and to international scientific collaboration. Scholars fear not just the physical destruction, but the tightening of political repression after the war ends — the end of their real work and a blunt end to the expression of their moral (and professional) imaginations.

One physicist working with CERN pleaded with journal editors around the world for patience because students and researchers have been struggling simply to function under attack. A research ethicist described scholars unable to focus or safely return to campus. A philosopher returned to his office after a bombing to discover that more than 1,000 books, manuscripts, student papers, and years of handwritten work had vanished in a single night.

Those images matter because education is not only a national asset. It is part of our inheritance and our basis for our connections and trust everywhere.

And there is another layer teachers must not ignore: wars that normalize attacks on universities and centers of learning end up reshaping our own societies as well. When we grow accustomed to seeing academic life treated as expendable or “collateral,” we accidentally teach our own children something dangerous: that knowledge and the human spirit are secondary to force, politics, and national identity. So, every bomb that destroys a library or classroom abroad diminishes something at home.

While I was growing up, it seemed that World War II had taught us that we could be the good guys.

Yet all our wars since then seem to have carried overtones of greed, ego, nationalism, and self-interest, and the “good guys” have never been easy to agree upon. When my brothers and I were in college, our country was ground deep into a war few of us could fully grasp or subscribe to. Vietnam ground on.

My brother David tells a story from that divisive time. Four student protestors had been murdered by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, protests erupted on campuses everywhere, and classes had been made optional at many universities across the country. But he would never miss a philosophy class.

His professor entered the room silently, spread his papers before him on the podium, and delivered a one-hour lecture before gathering his papers and silently leaving.

It sounds ordinary enough.

But my brother was the only student in attendance.

The hollowness.

Schools are among the few institutions capable of dealing positively with cycles of fear and dehumanization. But what my brother experienced on that strange day was not school, and not the presence of an actual teacher. I still do not know what it was.

Our students absorb the moral atmosphere we create as teachers. Those morals are evident, however much we say nothing. This is why it is imperative for teachers to write about education in a time of war and to keep trying to arrive at some truth.

Our students are comparatively innocent. They sense whether the adults they trust defend learning, curiosity, dissent, scholarship, and culture, or not.

We can try to avoid these conversations out of fear of being “political,” but our students are already “absorbing” war emotionally and socially through their regular media, peers, family stress, etc. Schools influence whether those experiences become isolating and destabilizing — or humanizing. I worry that all this shows up in our sensitive kids in the form of depression or anxiety. There are columns to be written on this topic and the research is a google away.

But it is all blaring out from televisions, podcasts, and phones, anyway. Our students hear it and feel it. One of my students, a junior, calls is “dull hurt.” The erosion may be subtle and overlookable, but it is real and profound. Avoidance is risky. Avoidance is unhealthy.

Avoidance is: not teaching. Not learning. Great teachers have shown us this. One reason Montessori spoke so passionately about peace education was because she witnessed firsthand, during two wars, how societies educated children into obedience, nationalism, and militarism. Great teachers do this. But we teachers don’t even need to speak passionately. As a colleague says, “If we just open up the space for students to share their thoughts our own judgements don’t even have to come into play… the kids are smart and they are seeing it all, they just need a forum for discussion…open the space.”

At war, we risk raising a generation more cynical about truth, less trusting of schools, and more accustomed to seeing human beings reduced to categories like nations, religions, and tribes rather than communities or human beings. The categories and nationalities can become reductions of people’s worth and spirit.

I do not believe there are people who ought to be our enemies, despite their misguided governments — certainly never students.

The tragedy described in Iran is therefore not simply “their” tragedy or “our” cause. It is a warning to us as educators. The destruction of schools, universities, manuscripts, laboratories, and intellectual communities obviously weakens our global connections.

And here is another word for those global connections:

Civilization.

You can rebuild walls. You can reconstruct laboratories. But rebuilding trust in learning, trust in intellectual freedom, and the peace of mind of students who studied under falling bombs — that may take generations.

Psychologists have shown us something difficult and deep: trauma is intergenerational. When politicians launch wars, children may pass the resulting trauma to their own children, no matter how unnecessary those wars once seemed to them personally.

Personally, today, many teachers I know are having a difficult time imagining what we are receiving in return for the sudden wars unfolding around us — especially compared to what great education might have provided all nations if we invested in that instead.

If we waged study.

A teacher needs to question. That’s what teachers do. It’s a terrible thing to teach silence (or to confuse morality for politics). American educators must be able to ask during wartime, without prejudice or fear:

What else could these resources have created?

The cost of modern warfare is almost impossible to comprehend. Even limited military operations consume billions of dollars within weeks through missiles, aircraft deployment, intelligence systems, fuel, logistics, reconstruction obligations, environmental destruction, and long-term veteran care. The same resources could fund teachers, preserve small schools, modernize libraries, expand mental health support for students, reduce class sizes, restore arts and environmental programs, forgive student debt, or rebuild aging public campuses across the United States.

I was born in 1950 and have lived through a fair number of wars. Over time, the patterns become visible.

1. Schools and universities become political battlegrounds. From Vietnam to Gaza protests today, campuses become places where young people challenge — and often become disillusioned with — the moral direction of society. Or they grow numb. Things get worse when silence prevails.
2. Fear enters childhood culture. From nuclear drills to lockdown drills, generations of children learn to practice survival inside schools. Many experience an erosion of innocence.
3. Public resources shift. It never fails: massive military dollars coincide with debates over school funding, teacher pay, college costs, arts education, and mental health services.
4. Education becomes one of the last places where societies can still argue about moral meaning. War changes the questions:

• What is patriotism?
• What is truth?
• What is courage?
• What do we owe strangers?
• What kind of civilization are we trying to preserve?

To be honest, sitting here writing, I understand that commenting on the patriotism and ego at play in today’s wars might be sensitive. I’m supposed to be silent and watch this horror. Maybe our country is too fractured to tolerate much reflection.

Will people be angry that teachers like me are even discussing schools being exploded?

For someone born in 1950, the educational story of my lifetime is inseparable from the story of war — not only through destruction abroad, but through the way conflict keeps changing the emotional, civic, intellectual, and moral atmosphere in which our kids grow up.

UNESCO and trauma-informed education researchers repeatedly emphasize that schools create psychological stability partly by helping students make meaning of frightening events rather than avoiding them.[3]

We reveal the values of our nation through what we choose to build — and children need opportunities to talk honestly about those values as they see them. One cultural image this week was a bombed university. Another was a towering, 22-foot high golden statue to the same political celebrity who declared the war. Children are always watching what adults build temples to. All of that is choice, and behind every choice lies a belief system.

Today, as a teacher, I have this to say: the war makers are not my people, and they are not expressing my belief system.

“My people” are not Americans or Iranians or Israelis or Palestinians or Ukrainians alone. They are scholars, surfers, musicians, cooks, gardeners, scientists, librarians, and poets. Everywhere.

And many of them — including nearly all of the teachers I have most admired — share a kind of pacifism: not naïveté about evil, but a clear resistance to greed, cruelty, ego, lying, domination, and the discretionary destruction of human life.

Destroying schools and colleges anywhere — whether labeled war crimes or collateral damage — is like smashing all the violins because you do not like the concert.

I believe that great teachers are, almost by nature, pacifists. Not because they deny conflict or evil, but because they dedicate their lives to the proposition that human domination is not the only possibility. Dr. Goddard (my 12th grade Problems of American Democracy teacher), Socrates. Paulo Freire. Jesus. Maria Montessori. Thich Nhat Hanh. Krishnamurti. Albert Einstein. Teachers. Seekers of understanding.They were pacifists, but never avoiders.

Recently, our own Secretary of Defense (who calls himself Secretary of War) stated, “The world is not governed by goodwill. It is governed by force.”

That may describe some of history. But it stands in direct opposition to the faith of education I spent the past 50 years in pursuing: that human beings grow through relationship, inquiry, imagination, and understanding rather than domination. That we humans are up to that.

Even the classic The Art of War by Sun Tzu was not merely about winning battles. At its heart is the idea that the highest form of victory preserves life, culture, and continuity. It is victory achieved without destruction.

My teacher-heroes stand on the opposite side of history from those who normalize and rationalize force — and they make that stand known. The educator’s instinct is regenerative: to repair, awaken, cultivate, and mentor possibility. Education is the oldest pacifist tradition I can find in the history books. Are we teaching this today?

Schools and universities are among the earliest human creations explicitly meant not only to connect us across borders, but to outlive us. When war destroys them, everyone loses, especially the coming generations.

When people begin believing that war is inevitable or redemptive, those generations inherit less education — and with that, less empathy, less historical understanding, and less capacity for peace (inner and outer).

Education is what happens when we pass along civilization. We can wage study.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01394-y?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=3d08e7bff1-nature-briefing-weekly-20260508&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-33f35e09ea-52231780

[2] https://www.grauerschool.com/campus-life/stuarts-page/~board/dr-grauers-column/post/dr-grauers-column-the-boundaries-of-peace-education

[3] https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience/teen-war?utm_source=chatgpt.com

AI can now write most student essays in seconds.

So what happens to thinking?

Across the country, schools are quietly confronting a new reality: traditional assignments no longer guarantee authentic learning.

And in response, some are turning back to a surprisingly old solution — the blue book.

When I was in college in the 1970s, for almost all exams we were greeted with blue books on our desks, 9 inch by 6 inch lined booklets where we would answer all the questions in our own handwriting. They always had a light blue cover. On a particularly gnarly exam, someone might say, “Wow! I filled up three bluebooks!” Bluebooks were feared and revered. But the pages were small, so easier to get a page written.

The Blue Book Era: When Thinking Happened by Hand

When I worked at The International School of Bern in the 80s, the senior class English teacher famously gave so much writing that the head of school assigned her a grading assistant just to enable her to get some sleep at night.

As an upper and middle school teacher at that time, I still taught handwriting to my class. A little.

In the late 80s, I’m sure I filled up like 9 or 12 bluebooks a day for my doctoral comprehensive exams, where I wrote frantically nonstop for 4 hours, two days in a row. And imagine the teacher reading all that. (Thank you, Dr. Rost.)

In the 90s, we got computers. I worked at a school in Rancho Santa Fe that pioneered a keyboarding/typing program based on the behaviorist work of BF Skinner, and the computer printout was replacing the handwritten bluebook entirely. By the 2000s, we had entered the age of cut and pasting: rampant plagiary accompanied by twenty or so years of weakening drone about the tragic loss of handwriting (mine has become terrible).

From Keyboards to Copy-Paste Culture

We could notate today as the quarter-century marker — 2025: The Age of AI, and, in school, the age of artificial scholarship. (Plagiary is not even a strong enough word.) Or perhaps we can also herald the return of the blue book, as many schools are, and this just might make it possible to really enjoy this new age and not have to resent it, at least in schools.

Computer printouts have had a pretty good run, 30-plus years, but many of us are looking at the glorious, burgeoning return of the blue book with curiosity. The reason: The Great AI Cheating Crisis. The purpose of this column is to find some light in this crisis.

The AI Cheating Crisis Has Already Arrived

Researchers, and the founder of Chat GPT himself, Sam Altman, warn us that AI could run out of publicly available human-written text between 2026–2032, creating bottlenecks in meaningful progress. But a bottleneck has already hit practically every high school and college in the country:

AI replaces the lion’s share of newly generated student thought. Why think?

Every school simply must have an “AI strategy” today, and, increasingly, I’m hearing about The Return of the Bluebook. Students will most likely dread it, in a good way somehow, but to me it sounds like folk music, an all acoustic show. Unplugged learning.

Why Schools Are Bringing Back Blue Books

For a while we thought we might just redesign assignments so students could not use AI. Well, if you want to find continuing evidence of student intelligence development, watch them outwit our efforts to forbid the use of AI. I don’t think it can be consistently done. Anything that can be cut and pasted can be generated by AI about as well but usually better than a student.

There could be only one answer: talk to the hand!

I love student handwriting. I have always found that there is a connection between thinking and using our hands or bodies, as though connecting thought and physical action anchors it better in our brains. The theory is called embodied cognition and, among quite a few proofs, a 2014 Princeton/UCLA study found students who took handwritten notes remembered concepts better than those who typed.

Handwriting, Memory, and Embodied Cognition

The return to bluebooks also signals a giant step forward for what we were calling flipped learning around the time of that awful pandemic: you do the reading and calculating at home, and class is the time to express it, live and in the flesh: students can use all the AI in the world to prep their work, but once in class, they can be evaluated by their articulation and, at the end of the lesson or unit: the blue book!

I read in the Wall Street Journal that blue book sales are skyrocketing. (That’s actually what prompted this story.) But this is more than just an AI strategy: it is a return to relational education!

From Transactional to Relational Learning

Education was turning into a transaction: teacher assigns work > students cut and paste and print out (or download) assignment > teacher grades work, next…

At The Grauer School, our mastery learning practice famously turns that transaction into a loop where the main learning can occur once the student gets the teacher’s marked up assignment back: this is a fantastic learning process. But when a teacher gets an AI-assisted assignment, which they do all over the country, there is not much for the teacher to do: it becomes an infinite feedback loop and our students become more like observers than participants: Teacher generates cool assignment on AI > student generates cool homework and turns it in > teacher has AI grade it > sends it back to student for revision > repeat.

Unless the student completes the work authentically and the teacher grades it authentically.

The case here is simple: that original student writing can be done and shared in class, by hand, and that in class is a great place for that to take place. As in so many areas, this is a kind of schooling where smaller schools have a tremendous advantage because the intimacy of scale makes it almost impossible to hide — everyone’s voice is heard, and every page of handwriting belongs unmistakably to a person known in the room.

Why Small Schools Have a Unique Advantage

Outside of class, if students don’t have to deal with having AI do their homework, AI becomes something completely different for them: AI is a fantastic, amazing, exciting encyclopedia. AI is like hanging out with a really, really smart friend — a friend that is endlessly responsive to your curiosity. But for homework? What kid is curious about homework?

Thank you for giving all this some consideration. I was having daydreams about students creating their work on AI, teachers grading it in AI, and this whole artificial, circular conversation going on, a nightmare séance held by machines.

The Danger of Fully Artificial Learning

Back in medieval times, books were scare and almost all learning was oral. Memories were famously long. When I first studied navigation and coastal piloting, in that same scholastic tradition, every ship’s captain had a story about learning Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator’s 38 rules of the road in dozens of pages by heart.

This oral and seafaring tradition remains also in university doctoral thesis “defenses” –and the Grauer School Senior Graduation Defenses are derived directly from this tradition: it is an oral defense and, after the presentation, the graduation candidate is sometimes grilled by peers and teachers. This is the very heart of Socratic dialog or just call it Q and A, but it’s original, engaging, challenging, and honest. Student’s think on their feet and demonstrate what they have learned by heart.

By heart. Learning by heart. Remember that phrase? I have not heard that phrase around lately. Why not! It went out with the Blue Book. Let’s not turn the whole of learning and teaching into a transaction. Real learning is embodied and Socratic. Learning by heart. Wow.

Learning by heart.

How are you seeing AI impact student learning in your school or classroom?

What if a classroom didn’t have four walls?

Around the world, some of the most powerful learning environments look nothing like what we expect , from treehouses to floating schools to open-air bamboo campuses.

Creating learning environments can be a wide-open world, a Grateful Dead improv. Or it can be militarily rigid, maybe for some cause. Some seem highly inefficient by our standards, and yet completely adapted to their native cultures, and those schools can be colorful and fantastic. Some seem to have deep or exotic roots. Some classrooms are not models of our top definitions of efficiency, unless your variable is how kids are seen, how lucky they feel to get to a real school or have a teacher who gets them, or how immersed they become in a “classroom”… whatever a classroom really is. Let’s never forget that the image that comes to mind when we think “school” or “classroom” might be envisioned with blinders on. Let’s explore…

What kind of classroom sparks imagination and that sense of wonder? It’s expedition week at here at The Grauer School where learning takes to the road but, wherever you are, maybe it’s a great week to look outward and around our beautiful world of schools.

One of my favorite side projects has been visiting and/or studying cool schools from around the world. I’ve visited or served at hundreds. I have learned much from biophilic and vernacular classrooms, connected to nature and cultures, and I think you will be inspired by them, below. I’m betting there are way more educational options than you realize.

Some magic schools show how adapted they can be to local ecosystems and traditions. Others seem like little outposts where expatriates can gather daily in their home cultures. I once served (as a board member) at a little school in northeast Panama, receiving students who paddled to class every day through the mangroves in dugout canoes. A life precious and always at risk.

So here is a very short collection of cool classrooms I’ve loved reading about or visiting: Some of the most inspiring classrooms in the world. Some of these classroom descriptions can be found in this article by a 15-year old homeschooler.

I love or am fascinated by these unique concepts so much I hope I will not overwhelm you with too many! So you can skim for ones that call you. Which ones would you visit on your vacation, which convey a very hard life, and which are both? And if you teach, which of these could jolt you — and your students — out of the daily slog and sleepwalking we’re all prone to?

Here are 18 of the most unique classrooms around the world:

1. Nomadic Siberian School (Russia)

Siberian kids travel to portable tipi-like classrooms as their families are reindeer herders. They hold lessons where the herd goes.

2. Thinking Huts 3D-printed School (Madagascar)

First-ever 3D-printed classroom in Africa, visioning rapid sustainable school building in underserved regions

3. Grauer School Vernacular Classrooms (Encinitas, CA, USA)

The Grauer School in California

Grauer hosts examples of vernacular architecture in education — schools or classes that emerge from local materials, climate, and cultural building traditions. Tree-Stump Circle: Students gather in a circle of native tree stumps in a sandy wash circle perched beneath the native Torrey pines — used for Socratic core-value meetings and nature reflection, music, literature,

Or try our Tree-House Classroom. A hidden loft nestled among branches of a Hawaiian coral tree, perfect for immersive lessons in ecology and wonder, poetry, or just lunch.

4. Sandy Hook Elementary (Newtown, CT, USA)

A biophilic, forest-edge campus with large windows, natural materials, and a healing garden to support emotional well-being. Sandy Hook has become a deeply moving place for permanent healing.

5. Hogan-Based Learning: Navajo Preparatory School (Farmington, NM)

At Navajo Preparatory School, students learn in modern classrooms, but the school grounds include traditional hogans (round, earth-and-wood dwellings). These are used for ceremonial gatherings, storytelling, and Navajo language and culture classes. The hogan provides not just shelter but a cosmological orientation — its door faces east to greet the sunrise, reminding students of their place in the cycles of life. In these settings, lessons on ecology, astronomy, and responsibility are taught holistically, blending science and spirituality.

6. Green School (Bali, Indonesia)

Green School in Bali features open-air bamboo classrooms fully immersed in the surrounding rainforest, blending nature with learning.

This school consists of the famously towering open-air bamboo structures that form the classrooms, with thatched roofs that spiral like snail shells. No walls separate students from the rainforest. Instead, flowing air and bird calls are part of the learning environment. Desks are handcrafted from bamboo, and even the chalkboards are framed with woven reeds.

7. Niki-de-Saint-Phalle Elementary (Saint-Denis, France)

The building’s hemispherical wings resemble brain lobes — brightly colored and organically shaped interior pods inspire creativity.

8. Nationality Rooms (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

A standout amongst these creative “Nationality Rooms” is the African Heritage Classroom: a meticulously recreated Asante temple courtyard, complete with carved benches and cultural artifacts. This is an Asante-inspired space with dark wood carvings, woven mats, and clay-colored walls. Students sit on low stools arranged in a circle, surrounded by symbolic artwork and traditional ceremonial objects.

9. Energy-Positive Portable Classroom (Hawaii, USA)

A modular classroom that generates more power than it uses — solar saw-tooth roof and natural ventilation in island environments.

10. Ørestad Gymnasium (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Ørestad Gymnasium in Copenhagen is a striking glass cube with open, flexible learning spaces designed to encourage collaboration and creativity.

A massive glass cube with no traditional classrooms, encouraging collaboration across flexible open spaces.

11. Escola da Ponte (Portugal)

The democratic schools movement has grown enormously. This one is an open-plan elementary school run by students and teachers together. No fixed classrooms, no desks in rows — the school has no assigned classrooms. Instead, students and teachers move through airy, loft-like spaces filled with natural light, colorful rugs, and low bookcases. Groups form organically around shared projects, sitting on the floor or at round tables, creating a studio-like hum of activity.

12. The Hive, NTU (Singapore)

Heatherwick-designed “dim sum” towers with 56 cornerless classrooms and a central atrium to foster incidental interaction and propinquity. Honeycomb-shaped towers with curving walls are said to encourage inclusivity and collaboration. Natural light pours through circular atriums, while inner gardens and wooden finishes blur the line between inside and outside.

13. Gando Primary School by Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso)

Earth-brick classrooms with ventilating canopy roofs built by the local community, sustainable in extreme heat.

14. Reggio Emilia Preschools (Italy)

The inspiration for Reggio Emilia schools all over the world, many in the US: These preschools use “atelier” classrooms designed as mini art studios. They have large windows to flood the space with light, mirrors to reflect the children’s work, and provocations — tables of clay, paint, or natural materials — to spark curiosity. Plants, hanging mobiles, and tiny furniture give the rooms a sense of enchantment and child-sized wonder. Studio-like rooms where light is treated as a co-teacher: huge windows, mirrors bouncing reflections, and lanterns create a sense of magic. Materials — clay, twigs, paints, fabrics — are beautifully arranged to invite exploration. Children move fluidly between areas, discovering the “hundred languages” of expression. Plus, children are the tour guides when you visit them in beautiful Piedmont, Italy.

15. Zi Ling Changxing Kindergarten (Huzhou, China)

Classrooms are shaped like soft clouds, with round windows framing views of sky and water. Reflective white floors and curvilinear furniture are said to give an otherworldly calm, while pools and play spaces flow organically around learning pods.

16. Mid-Cave Primary School (Guizhou, China)

Carved into a cave, this space uses natural acoustics and earth walls as teaching aids. Vernacular education!

17. Ding Dong Tree Classroom (Scotland)

Beneath a 150-year-old beech tree, kids gather on blankets amid roots, exploring nature and mindfulness.

18. Boat Schools (Bangladesh)

Floating classrooms that navigate seasonal floods, bringing lessons directly to riverbank children.

Floating schools, forest schools, or desert tent schools are all over the world! There are too many to cover and the vernacular school might be something like a worldwide movement. As a school developer, I constantly see schools evaluated by how scalable, efficient, and easily replicable they are, and this concerns me. These classrooms and learning settings remind us of the preciousness of what cannot be scaled, the spaces uniquely formed by human connection.

Each of these classrooms breaks traditional boundaries — whether by blending architecture with ecology, democracy, technology, or community-built sustainability. But in a way, since they each are shaped based upon local ecosystems and traditions, maybe they don’t break traditional boundaries so much as revive and preserve them. Each of these schools is a way of avoiding bureaucracy, bigness, institutionalization, and standardization.

A great classroom attempts to immerse learners in atmospheres and cultures that spark curiosity, unique connection, and wonder.

Maybe the question isn’t what a classroom should look like, but what kind of environment helps students feel most alive to learning. Which of these classrooms would you want to learn in?

When The Grauer School started back in 1991, I wanted a better way to screen students for admissions — one that went deeper than test scores and grades. After consulting multiple psychologists, I adopted the FIRO-B, a quick, reliable psychological survey originally designed for, of all things, the U.S. Navy to help build effective submarine crews. It reveals how people balance inclusion, control, and openness — insights that told us which students would thrive in our collaborative, trust-based environment, and which might need more support before joining.

The Limitations of Standardized Tests in Independent Schools

Meanwhile, mimicking colleges and universities all over the country, many independent schools clung to the Independent Schools Entrance Examination (ISEE), a near-clone of the SAT. At considerable risk to our enrollment pipeline and peer relationships, I refused to give it. The FiRO-B made more sense than the ISEE, which only gave information we could easily get elsewhere.

For 35 years, I’ve stood against the standardized achievement test approach to admissions — because it fails to capture the whole student and, in doing so, undermines true diversity. Like so many blunt fixes, it keeps producing the same inequities it was supposed to solve.

Legal and Ethical Pressures on College Admissions

Now, universities are under federal scrutiny, even massive lawsuits, for their diversity efforts. Investigators often focus on GPAs and standardized test scores — the very narrow measures colleges still rely on most heavily to decide who gets in. Those same metrics, stripped of context, are being weaponized to allege “unfair” admissions.

I don’t like the government’s approach — massive lawsuits instead of collaboration — but the deeper problem is the system itself. Relying on GPA and SAT/ACT scores as the primary admissions gatekeepers makes us vulnerable to both inequity and litigation.

And here’s the point: colleges must have reliable, valid data to make their case for fairness. For decades, the only data widely considered “valid” came from standardized tests — character data, however valuable, was dismissed as subjective. But now, thanks to well-developed surveys, strength-based assessments, and advanced psychometrics, we can measure personal qualities as reliably as we measure algebra skills. The tools are here. The validity is here. The question is whether colleges will use them.

Holistic Assessments: The FIRO-B and Beyond

Colleges could adopt a dual-pillar admissions framework. Keep academic measures like GPA and standardized scores if you must — but balance them with reliable, research-based human metrics. Psychological inventories like FIRO-B, strengths assessments, resilience scales, and collaborative-problem-solving exercises can tell us far more about a student’s potential to thrive, contribute, and lead. The Panorama Student Survey, the Challenge Success Survey, the High School Survey of Student Engagement, the YouthTruth Survey, for instance, all demonstrate that social-emotional data can be normed, reliable, and comparable across applicants. Grauer has used most of these to gain critical information on our mission achievement and the wellbeing of our students.

When we built The Grauer School’s admissions around such tools, we weren’t lowering standards — we were broadening them. We admitted students who might have been invisible to traditional metrics but who went on to become the intellectual and social anchors of our community. Isn’t that the point of “diverse” admissions?

Teen Mental Health and the Need for Social-Emotional Readiness

The stakes are higher than ever. The U.S. Surgeon General reports that teen mental health is in crisis: nearly one in three high school girls seriously considered suicide in 2021, up 60% from a decade earlier. The CDC reports that feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness among teens have increased from 26% in 2009 to 42% in 2021. Loneliness — already endemic — is compounded by social media, pandemic isolation, and high-pressure academic environments that reward performance over connection.

We cannot afford admissions systems that ignore social-emotional readiness. A student who is resilient, empathetic, and able to work well with others is not just more likely to succeed personally — they make campuses healthier, safer, and more dynamic for everyone. Meanwhile, we ethically diversify the applicant pool in this way.

Building Fairer, Evidence-Based Admissions Systems

I have written research articles and op-eds, called up major thought leaders, and filled earlier columns with this argument. Have you ever had something that was overwhelmingly obvious to you, but no one seemed to care? I’m ready to shout this from the mountaintops: admissions must evolve to see the whole student and make its cases reliably and fairly.

I am urging every educator, trustee, policymaker, and parent to help make this strategy part of every conversation about the future of education. The tools exist. The data exists. We just need the will to use them.

Let’s replace narrow gatekeeping with a broader, fairer, evidence-based way to see the whole student. Let’s build admissions systems that reflect not just the test scores we’ve always known can reduce us, but the communities we want to become.

• How should schools balance academic metrics with social-emotional readiness?
• What tools have you seen work to measure the whole student?
• In your experience, how can admissions better foster equity and diversity?

If you agree that admissions must evolve to see the whole student, share this post with educators, parents, and policymakers.

In September 2025, Canada observed Truth and Reconciliation Week. This is a transformative five-day journey for students, educators, and the broader community to engage with the history and enduring spirit of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. September 30th annually memorializes the children lost to the residential school system and honors Survivors and their families.

In the United States, though we have no Truth and Reconciliation Week, we observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 13). For many who may not have considered the purpose of truth and reconciliation, it is important to recognize — and teach — that the history of the whole of the North American continent includes the killing, displacement, and cultural erasure of millions of Indigenous people.

Looking Beyond the Holidays

What I don’t hear about much in these beautiful honorings is the true life and learnings of the Native American child that were taken away forever. It is hard to imagine what the Native children learned “back in the day,” and so it is hard to have an experience in feeling the loss of it all. We don’t really know what their life was like, even as we try to honor it. So I am offering this description, which is personal to me as a teacher — and I will disclose how this can be at the end.

Here is a long out of print, firsthand account of an Indigenous boy’s life and learning over 100 years ago, in the far North: the story of David Butterfly, “Papoose,” from an old fur trading village.

The passage is a direct account recorded by a fur trader well over 100 years ago but censored by me in parts that would be too offensive to bear today even though the writer, Captain Thierry Mallot, seemed to love this culture. The passage reflects his lived observations of a child he knew. Though his language does not translate well across generations, I have chosen to leave much of it intact as a window into the way Indigenous life was described in that era. Readers may find parts of it difficult, yet it seems important to encounter these words in their original form, in order to better understand both the life being described and the perspective of the time. To feel what was lost, we need a glimpse of what daily life looked like before removal. Here is such a glimpse into the lost world we honor, beyond just the observances of Truth and Reconciliation Week.

Papoose: Life Over 100 Years Ago

Papoose is the only boy of the family. His parents love him with the fierce love of the Northern Indian…. To be truthful, I am afraid that he is utterly spoiled and his manners are atrocious. But … he keeps me posted on everything that goes on. I have of course to bribe him heavily for that, with sweets, tobacco, jam, and pocket knives, and what not…

Papoose is a thin, long-legged little human… with the healthy purple-brown complexion… His coarse black hair rests like a round cap on the top of his skull, his last “haircut” having been accomplished by his mother, with a pair of straight shears, all along the edges of a kettle clapped beforehand on his head.

His eyes are really enormous, velvety black, and as sharp as needles …He wears a pair of soiled canvas trousers, reaching halfway down to his ankles, sustained by a leather string which starts from his right hip, reaches across his chest over his left shoulder…

His shirt, made out of an old caribou skin, is torn open at the neck, while his feet are shod with real moose-hide moccasins.

He always wears on his wrist a pair of thin bracelets, in leather and beads interwoven with small porcupine quills…

Papoose smokes a pipe, like a man, and when he does not he wears it thrust, bowl upward, in a slit in his shirt, on the left side of this chest. When he smokes he spits, and his skill at spitting is just short of miraculous. He never moves his head one way or another — his aim is unerring.

He dearly loves dog fights and I have caught him several times coaxing two huskies to come to grips by rubbing their noses against one another.

His great joy in life is to shoot, at anything, with a bow and blunt-head arrows. As in spitting, his skill is amazing. Inside of forty feet he can hit anything he aims at, including your tent guide rope and the small knob on the lid of your kettle when the latter is boiling merrily over the camp fire.

Another favorite passion of his is to throw the short axe, holding it by the handle, at a given target. As long as he is aiming a something large and consistent, such as the trunk of a tree, I don’t see much harm in the game. But when he tries to hit the snow birds in camp, especially when the latter are hopping on the ground in close proximity to my tent, I cannot help feeling a bit nervous.

He knows and can imitate the call of any wild animal. His masterpiece is the laugh of the loon, but he can honk a flock of geese three miles out of their course.

Papoose doesn’t know how to read or write, even in Cree, but his sense of location is uncanny. The north is stamped in his brain wherever he is. Blindfold him, twirl him around for a minute, stop him, and ask him where north is. Invariably his hand will point “true north.” I have never known that experiment to fail.

He has travelled this year alone, either in a hunting canoe or on foot in winter, twenty miles from my camp which his family has pitched. He is nine years old, mind you! Nobody here seems to think it very remarkable.

He loves to sing, all to himself. Funny Indian songs — half Cree, half Chipewayan. I have listened to him an hour at a time… There is no tune to speak of — just a plaintive singsong which never seems to end. But now and then he strikes a high note and his whole little self seems to give way to it. He sways back and forth, beats the air up and down with the palms of his hands, and keeps up the note until his very breath stops.

In the pitch-darkness of a winter night, right under the northern lights shivering in the sky, on the edge of a camp fire shooting weird thin sharp shadows across the snow, his little Indian song grips and scares your heart.

This eerily vivid book is long out of print, for which some of you will be grateful, but I am transported by it because it is intensely real. It also captures the view of Westerners in those days when most were coming to believe that all Indigenous needed to be re-educated by whites, and the children — all over the United States and Canada — were removed from their families and brought to boarding schools where their cultures could be erased. In the U.S., our Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act in 1819. The Canadian “Indian Residential School” program was expanding rapidly in the 1880s (and the U.S.’s would a few years later) and Papoose must have somehow escaped it. In the above story, I am un-erasing a little. How Papoose escaped this program, I cannot say.

Lessons From Captain Mallot’s Account

As promised, the back story: The writer, Captain Mallot, was a fur trader who worked for the legendary Revillon fur manufacturing firm that, 50 years later, bought out my own father’s (and grandfather’s) company in New York. I have cut some of his phrases which do not translate across generations, and some of what remains is also potentially misunderstood. But there is a core there we can bring forward for our students: the giving economy, the respect of the caribou, the forest-schooling perspective — including astonishing connection and sensitivity to the natural world — and the respect of the land. All these remain as teachings featured in the annual Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Week, along with the “re-wilding” of our techno-absorbed children. They all belong in school textbooks and discussions, though they seldom are.

Much educational programming is brought to schools every year by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, though. Students and teachers must engage in meaningful dialogues and contribute to our collective path toward reconciliation.

I am amazed to have the Theirry Mallot book, “Glimpses of the Barren Lands,” and I handle each page like an antique. I think reading and telling the truth about Native life from back in the day is an ultimate and great educational challenge. In the United States, we have not created a national Truth and Reconciliation process, though in recent years Indigenous Peoples’ Day and growing public attention to Indian boarding school history have begun to serve a similar purpose.

Listening, Learning, and Reconciliation

As a final note, I want to acknowledge that the polemics in our nation today are so intense that many people I know are about to give up the belief that we are even capable of talking and listening across all the cultural lines being drawn. Some may even object to the story above.

And yet, providing a perspective from long ago is one way to see if we can comprehend the truths we struggle most to face. My own belief is that the answers to our apparent cognitive dissonance — and the path to reconciliation — lie more in listening people into compassion, listening more deeply and with greater care, than in talking over them, forcing them into our view, or inflaming divisions. More than proving others “wrong” or cruel, we need reconciliation first if we are ever to arrive at a sharable truth.

The Canadian Trust and Reconciliation would appear to be modelled after the South African model of Nelson Mandela following the end of their Apartheid: an honest facing of the truth, an absorbing or letting go of blame so that we can move forward in greater peace.

The Importance of Truth in Education

Truth is rarely simple — it is normally complex. Not often complicated, but complex, and that can be confusing and frustrating, and so it takes study. I’m not in favor of a romanticized version of Indigenous history. and yet, there must be something about the human condition that enables us to put all of this truth out of our thoughts and sensitivities, to treat it as nonmaterial, and to exclude it from our education. We are grateful to the teachers who open these antique truths.

We don’t tell the truth because it’s prettier or more colorful, we tell it because it needs telling — and the truth is the only legitimate teacher. Though the observances of Truth and Reconciliation Week and Indigenous Peoples’ Day have passed, I wish you a thoughtful engagement with these truths, and hope this story sparks reflection year-round.