The Learning Project: Rites of Passage - Hardcover

Stoller, Lincoln

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1775288048 ISBN 13: 9781775288046

Publisher: Mind Strength Balance, 2019

Synopsis

Ever since I began my schooling I was frustrated by its failure to inspire me or demonstrate its importance. I didn't know what was most important, but I was sure it wasn't this. School did not foster learning. Every year I expected things to improve but they never did.

My classmates progressed from intimidated elementary school students assaulted by teachers, tests, and the pledge of allegiance, to compliant high school students accepting insipid explanations, eroded self-confidence, and hostile competition. By the time I got to middle school, I was seething and  started to search for wise counsel and a deeper understanding of education, the world, and myself.

For six decades of education in dozens of fields--taught, mentored, enabled, and exploited--I have been asking the most interesting people I can find for answers to the question of meaning, growth, and change. I have returned to my most important mentors, classmates, partners, and their teachers, students, and children. I wanted answers that went to the root of inspiration and opportunity. What improves our lives? 

In The Learning Project, thirty-five artists, athletes, tradesmen, soldiers, scientists, and politicians--teenagers, adults, and elders--describe their passages of inner change. One struggles with adolescence in a broken, immigrant family. Another trains to be an astronaut. A third learns craftsmanship from a grandfather who lived during the Civil War. These rites of passage echo a mythology going back thousands of years. In them are the secrets to growing our humanity. 

This is not the sanitized version, reduced to self-help or buzzwords for business schools. These are not pigeonholed people or bedtime stories. They are fully textured, authentic rites of passage, unfiltered and unfolded by layers. Lives like ours: twisted, complex, uncertain, and in the process of being born. This is the story of our transformation and transcendence.

About this title

About the Author

Lincoln Stoller grew up around and was mentored directly by thecolleagues of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller,and Albert Einstein. As a teenager, he traveled the world climbingmountains and, in the process, fell 1,000 feet off the highest peak inthe Canadian Rockies, swam across the arctic sea, crashed his airplane,collapsed his horse, stepped in quicksand, survived a major earthquake,was buried in an avalanche, and became a cultural ambassador to families in Central America, Mongolia, and the Caribbean.

During thistime he attended seven colleges, got a doctorate in Quantum Mechanics,and founded a software company. Building on his interests in physics,neurophysiology, psychology, culture, education, spirituality, andculture Lincoln is now a physicist/therapist living in British Columbia, Canada, where he works with clients locally and remotely. He has twowonderful ex-wives, and two wonderful sons. Committed to supportingintuition and the feeling mind, he can be contacted through his web site at mindstrengthbalance.com.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Learning Project
"In a society deeply committed to time-wasting, Lincoln Stoller has given us something of a miracle in his Learning Project, a window out of our own claustrophobic darkness into the consciousness of others, a momentary intimacy with the essences which animate flesh. What learning project could match this one?"
-- John Taylor Gatto, twice New York State Teacher of the Year, Alexis de Tocqueville Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom award, author of Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education.

"The Learning Project provides a Rosetta Stone for living a self-made, satisfied life; an intuitive understanding worth more than its weight in gold. With brilliant glimpses into fascinating lives, Stoller shows life's answers lie in people. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the process of pursuing their dreams - that should mean everyone."
-- Alexander Khost, founder of Voice of the Children NYC.

"This is a wonderful collection of choices, risks, doubts, struggles, failures, and triumphs from widely differing backgrounds, personalities, chosen paths, and ages - from 15 to 93 - of remarkable, adventurous lives. Lincoln Stoller has a great knack for inviting the revelation of basic life truths, and the learning that has occurred along the way. I recommend this book to anyone, but especially to people thinking about how they themselves might leave a well-worn path for something new and heartfelt."

-- Peter Gray, PhD, Department of Psychology, Boston College, and President of Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Author of Psychology, and Free to Learn.

"The Learning Project is an powerhouse of intellectual and humanistic insights from special individuals of all ages and backgrounds... An intimate look at what it means to be human, masterfully captured by a brilliant curator. An amazing book, well worth reading more than once."
-- Kate Jones, President of Kadon Enterprises.

From the Inside Flap

When I was a boy I was interested in science but didn't know what it involved. So I went to speak to the best scientist I could find: Eugene Wigner, 1963 Nobel Laureate in quantum physics. He was tremendously excited to hear from me, though he'd never heard from me before. He took me under his wing, and from him I began to learn the usefulness of good advice; 45 years later I appreciate how important good advice is... and it's largely unavailable.

The Learning Project gives good advice from a full spectrum of elders who have been there, and from just as many "youngers" who are on their way.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mind Strength Balance
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1775288048
• ISBN 13: 9781775288046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 420