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.
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.
