Whether we are the parents sending our kids like "orphans" into the world or are the adults running the "day orphanages," we must take seriously the cost of our current pursuits and seek to be part of a solution in the ways we educate.

A great place to start is by recognizing that a true education cannot come without proper attachment to adults.

To be educated is to learn from the generations gone before not only what they have learned academically, but how they have learned best to live.

Our current system largely reduces learning to purchasable, career-creating skills and facts. This is not an education, or at least not a complete one.

The one way we all can start to provide a more full education is to promote in our homes and schools a culture that learns less from experts, and more from known, trusted adults who have gone before. This intimate, relational component of education has been lost and neglected to everyone's wounding.

We can begin achieving a reversal in our culture, as we will further discuss in blogs, by:
1. Re-promoting Grandparents,
2. Developing Mentoring, and
3. Creating Community

This week I want to encourage all of us to simply reflect about education as defined by the following two quotes and to ask ourselves how we are providing such an education to the children we love and serve:

"The inescapable purpose of education must be to preserve and pass on the essential human means—the thoughts and words and works and ways and standards and hopes without which we are not human. To preserve these things and to pass them on is to prepare students for life.”

“Through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of others’ explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings—wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of the objective and generalized record of their performances.”