New View EDU Episode 62: Wisdom Road

Available September 24, 2024

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If you had an RV full of gas and the chance to spend months traveling anywhere, what journeys would you take? For Grant Lichtman, this wasn't just a hypothetical. It became a passion project called Wisdom Road. He traveled across North America seeking perspectives, traditions, and knowledge that our society risks losing. Now, he's sharing his experience with New View EDU host Debra P. Wilson.

Grant explains that the inspiration for Wisdom Road came from learning about a curriculum developed by a Lakota educator. Her discussion of her work and the traditions of her people led him to reflect on whose perspectives are amplified in society and whose are overlooked. Determined to explore these hidden voices and wisdom outside the mainstream, he set out with a few guiding principles. He sought older individuals with multi-generational perspectives, people respected within their communities, and he focused on locations, communities, and traditions unfamiliar to him.

As Grant tells Debra, his journey was about discovering the threads that still bind America together, even in a time of deep division. However, he didn’t ask about politics. Instead, he encouraged people to talk about themselves, their lives, and their values. From these conversations, he found a profound sense of shared humanity.

Grant’s experiences on the Wisdom Road were transformative. He emerged with an urgent sense of what’s missing in education today: foundational skills in civil discourse. He shares how his own communication evolved as he let go of the need to debate or defend and simply listened. Now, he challenges educators to help students engage with people and viewpoints outside their own. Learning to recognize and respect differences, and hold productive dialogues, is a vital skill in our increasingly global society.
 


Key Questions

Some of the key questions Grant and Debra explore in this episode include:

  • What inspired the decision to take this unique RV journey?
  • How did you choose where to go, whom to visit, and what to talk about on the Wisdom Road?
  • What did you learn about communication—both listening and speaking—from this journey?
  • What takeaways from the Wisdom Road can be applied in schools? How can schools promote civil discourse and foster dialogue with people from different backgrounds and viewpoints?

Episode Highlights

  • “There was also something about the idea that we in America must still share some strong and powerful things that we agree on, or we wouldn't probably still be a country that has hung together well. And yet we know we're existing in a time of incredible divisiveness. And could I find the reasons for that by talking with people, not the people we hear from all the time on the evening news or our social influencers or our social media feed, but just regular folks?” (6:08)
  • “Let me tell you, it only took a week or two and shedding that responsibility, or shedding that feeling, that I needed to get my point across, that I needed to somehow debate people, was one of the great releases of my entire life. … To be in a situation where my only role was to say, no matter what people told me, my only role was to say, thank you so much. And could you tell me more about that? Or can we explore more why you think that? … I was not in a position of having to do what I'd done my whole life, which is defend or argue or debate or any of that stuff.” (18:10)
  • “A big takeaway from this trip is I think we, perhaps mistakenly, went to Global Citizenship 2.0 before we did Global Citizenship 1.0, which is right here in America. I was in the Mississippi Delta for a week, and I can't tell you how important it is. How important it would be, how impactful it would be for many, many young people, old people as well. Go spend a week and live with some folks in the Mississippi Delta and learn about the history there. Or on the Sea Islands where the Gullah Geechee people live off of South Carolina. Or out on the farmlands in the Dakotas or Wyoming or Nebraska. We need to relate better to each other as Americans every bit as much as we need to relate to other people around the world.” (28:41)
  • “I believe there is nothing more important for educators to focus on than teaching ourselves and our students, not in one class your freshman year in high school, but deeply embedding into our system of education, how to go about having and maintaining civility and civil conversations and civil discourse with the quote unquote ‘other.’ ” (33:01)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guest

Grant Lichtman is an internationally recognized thought leader on transforming K-12 education.  He works with school teams to develop a comfort and capacity for change in a rapidly changing world. 

For nearly 15 years, he served as a trustee and senior administrator at one of the largest independent schools in the U.S. Since 2012, he has visited more than 250 schools, districts, and communities, published four books, and worked with thousands of stakeholders to help transform education toward future-focused models of deeper learning. 

His books include Thrive: How Schools Will Win the Education Revolution, Moving the Rock: Seven Levers We Can Press to Transform Education, #EdJourney: A Roadmap for the Future of Education, and The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School.