Read the full transcript of Episode 62 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features author and education thought leader Grant Lichtman. He joins host Debra P. Wilson to share his experiences with a passion project that he called Wisdom Road. He traveled across North America seeking perspectives, traditions, and knowledge that our society risks losing. He emerged with an urgent sense of what’s missing in education today: foundational skills in civil discourse.
Debra Wilson: Welcome back to New View EDU. I'm so excited for today's conversation with Grant Lichtman, who's been out having conversations with people across North America. I know this conversation is going to be far ranging, a little bit on the meta side, and I'm just really looking forward to it.
For those of you who are not as familiar with Grant, he's an educator, he's an author of many books, and he's been a longtime colleague and thought leader on school transformation in the independent school space. He, I love this new project that he's on because he's really stretching beyond the horizons of classical education and seeking answers to some big questions that challenge, you know, just the future of education and really thinking about how do we bring in more voices to the conversation?
This most recent project, again, he's been traveling across North America, primarily in the United States and Canada in search of…I would call it almost misplaced wisdom we may be overlooking in our current tech heavy society. He's been capturing these conversations for his new book, Wisdom Road. He also has a blog by that same name where you can find ongoing updates. And I'm just really looking forward to hearing what wisdom he brings to us today.
Grant, it is so good to have you with us on New View EDU. How are you today?
Grant Lichtman: I'm doing great, and I'm so honored and privileged and happy to be with you. If you gave me five choices of who I'd love to spend some time chatting with in education world, Debra, you would be right at the top of that list.
Debra Wilson: Well, that's very sweet. And I've always enjoyed our conversations together. And I just want to share with our viewers, last time that Grant and I saw each other in person, he was actually on the Wisdom Road. And we had the great privilege to be on a boat with a head of school. And just it was like sunset and the dolphin were jumping out of the water. I mean, Grant, that goes down as one of the most beautiful, picturesque, just lovely October afternoon, evenings that I can remember. I don't know about you.
Grant Lichtman: Absolutely. And I can't tell you how happy I was when head of school DuBose Egleston from Porter-Gaud said, "Grant, we're going to go out on a little boat ride in the afternoon." I said, "That's fabulous." And then you drove up to join us and I said, "This is just getting better and better." And then we're out toward the salt water and the dolphins are playing around us and the fish are jumping. And we had a great conversation. It was a marvelous day. And those are the sort of just absolutely serendipitous unplanned parts of wisdom road that just added to the overall journey and made it so powerful and wonderful.
Debra Wilson: Well, you know, we talked a lot about it that day, but I'm really excited to dig into this because, I mean, you've been a prolific author. I know a book that a lot of our listeners are familiar with is your #EdJourney, a roadmap to the future of education. And that was a different kind of road trip. You traveled around the schools, you were really looking at, you know, just innovation. What did that mean? What did that look like for schools who are transforming? And how did we, you know, share that information out? And so, this has been a totally different kind of journey. So you know, give me a little background here. How did you end up traveling these back roads and engaging in these conversations?
Grant Lichtman: It started, to be honest, I was asked to keynote an All State Educators’ Conference in South Dakota in 2018. And at that conference, I attended a workshop given by a marvelous educator, a Lakota woman who has built some marvelous curriculum and made it free and available, publicly available on a website, really about using the, what I would call the wisdom traditions of the Lakota people. How does a community work effectively? What's the role of a leader? How do we raise our kids? What's the relationship between ourselves and the nature around us? Just some really, really good stuff. And she built curriculum to be used by any educator anywhere, made it perfectly free.
And I was listening to this workshop saying, you know, I've had the privilege over the last, you know, 20 years, of meeting 10,000 American educators. And I felt like, wow, most of them would say, this is really, really good stuff. We should figure out a way to embed this in our learning. And yet, as far as we could tell, almost no one was, or maybe still almost no one is using that free curriculum. And I thought about myself. I went to great public schools, two degrees from Stanford. I fancy myself a bit of an amateur historian, certainly in American history, I'm very well read. I didn't know any of that tradition, those wisdom traditions of the Lakota people.
And so that kind of, I came home and I frankly was kind of angry about that. It got under my skin, you know, why is this? And over a year or so, I then started thinking, you know, I just can't believe that the Lakota are the only, what I would, became in my head, under voiced and overlooked subcultures in America who do have deep cultural wisdom traditions that most of the rest of us are unfamiliar with. We just haven't accessed, we haven't been taught. And are we at a risk of losing all that?
So I started thinking about other groups around the country that maybe I haven't been as familiar with as I would have liked to have been. And the idea of going on another trip and meeting people and trying to uncover and share some of these values and ideas and cultural wisdom and traditions just went from a sort of an idea to a passion. It became something I needed to do. And I think there was another element that added to it. And this was going on during COVID, of course, and within the framework of the last decade or so of our own American experience. 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? And I kind of had this idea that might there be as much value, think about this metaphor, might there be as much value in a pile of sand as there is in a few gemstones? I'm sure I could just go to the bookstore and read books by famous authors or listen to podcasts by famous influencers. But what about the folks we don't hear from? And maybe that's where some really great value lies.
And so it became kind of a passion. I went to my wife and my family and I said, you remember me saying I was never going to do one of these trips before? I think I need to do it. And I think this one's going to be a whole lot longer, a whole lot more expensive, a whole lot more needful of my time and resources. But I really feel like I have one big project left in me before I get too old, and this is something I really feel I need to do. So that was the origin of it.
Debra Wilson: I love that. I just, I want you to take a minute to share, like, so when you and I first talked about this, you reached out and you said, “Hey, I'm going to go do this crazy thing.” And I think you even said like, “I'm getting in an RV. I'm driving across the country. I'm going to go up into Canada. I'm not even really sure where it's going to take me. And I'm going to talk to people.” And I was at SAIS at the time and you, and you said, you know, would you be interested in, you know, setting up some webinars or whatever, so I can update people on the way?
And as you know, I love to support anybody doing something a little bit out of the box. But I have to tell you, my first thought was like, OK, this is awesome. So Grant's going to go get in an RV. He has no idea where he's going. And like, just show up and start talking to people in different places. So like, tell me like, how that came together.
Grant Lichtman: The logistics were a big part of it. The first thing was to look at a map of the country and start thinking about some of the cultural groups and affinity groups that I felt like I would want to go visit.
Some of them were really obvious. The first one that came to my mind was I really wanted to go to the Mississippi Delta, you know, some of the really deepest roots of African-American cultural history. And that then led me to what about, you know, Latinos all along the southern border, which has been such an incredible cross pollination of cultures for years and, and Appalachia and places like that and Native American reservations.
And then I just started thinking, you know, this isn't about race and ethnicity. What about farmers and ranchers in the Great Plains, loggers in Oregon and fishermen in Maine and things like that. And I started thinking about artists and musicians and different life experiences. And so I looked at a map and started putting together, you know, different routes that I might be able to travel. And one thing about traveling in an RV is you don't want to go anywhere in the winter, because it's cold and snowy, and you want to avoid the middle of the country when there's tornadoes and things like that. And so I started being able to piece together some multi-week trajectories around the country.
And then there's the question of, who am I going to talk with? And so I had to put together some kind of an idea of who am I actually looking to speak with? And here's what I came up with, Debra. I wanted to speak with people who had multi-generational life experience and roots within some of these, what I was thinking of as overlooked and under voiced subcultures. And I wanted to speak largely with older people because if you think about it, if someone is my age, 68, 70, 75 years old, and they remember their grandparents and they interacted with their grandparents, we're now looking at potentially 150 years of that cultural history and that place and what that represented and what they learned.
So I wanted to speak with generally older people. I wanted to speak with people who were sort of respected within their community. The iconic sort of mayor on the block who, when they speak, other people shut up and listen. And that was about it. That was about really my only filter. And so I just started reaching out to colleagues, friends around the country, relying quite frankly, heavily on school people. Why? If you are somebody in a school, in a community, you generally know a lot of people in that community or you know someone who knows someone.
And that was how I got to talk to people. It wasn't because I emailed somebody and said, can I speak with you? I emailed friends or called friends and colleagues and said, you probably know somebody who knows somebody. And it worked. I'm sure there are people who were contacted by, you know, second and third people who'd heard about me who said, I'm not interested in that, which is fabulous. But a whole lot of people said, sure, I'll sit down and talk with this fellow.
Debra Wilson: I think they just wanted to see your RV, Grant. And they're like, OK, this random guy is going to get in his RV and go across the country. And I love that. I think that, it gives you a randomness and insight and kind of an empathy lens and filter that is very rare.
Grant Lichtman: I do think people felt it was weird enough that it was probably non-threatening. Let's put it that way. And then when people started saying yes to interviews, it wasn't that one, having or not getting one particular interview was going to make or break the experience. It was really about the cumulative listening that I could do.
Debra Wilson: OK, so you've got your route, and I know you share these on your website, but so when you go into these interviews, you have some questions. At least you started off with some questions. And so I'd love to get a little bit of history on, what were you asking people? Being consistent and where did they come from? And did that work out? Could you be consistent across your entire journey?
Grant Lichtman: Well, first of all, let me remind people, I am not a trained cultural anthropologist or social psychologist or any of those things. I'm just a guy.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, but you’re playing one on a podcast. I think this is great.
Grant Lichtman: So I started, there were really three questions that led the conversation with everybody. The first question was just to get people talking quite frankly, which was, tell me a little bit about you and your family. How did you get here? How did they get here? You know, that sort of thing.
And that got people talking, because people love to talk about themselves and their stories. I wasn't trying to replicate a lot of work that's been done like that in the past, StoryCorps or anything like that. The real meat of the question was, what do you feel that you learned or acquired from your parents, your grandparents, other people who influenced you, your community, your cultural roots. What do you think you learned growing up and living your life that you find important and valuable that perhaps we're maybe not doing a good job of passing on to the next generation, that we're at risk of losing to the arising generation, not from an educator's point of view, from a societal point of view. And that became the meat of it.
The third question was, why do you think America is so divided recently? Well, first of all, do you think America is more divided than the past? Why is that the case? And what do you think we can do about it? Those were the three core questions.
I set out thinking that this journey was going to lead me to more sort of concrete answers like Tamera Miyasata, the Lakota woman, had been able to put together based on the Lakota wisdom traditions. That wasn't the case. I think I found that wisdom and shared values do not thrive without the fertile ground of shared humanity. And that really became, I think, the overriding theme and takeaway of the journey, is what is it that we share as human beings that is powerful and not necessarily unifying, but allows us to operate well as a civil society? And how did that come about through these very, very diverse voices?
I didn't say here at the outset, by the end of this trip, I had sat down with people of many different colors, ethnicities, national backgrounds, some of the wealthiest people I've ever met in my life, some of the poorest people I've ever met in my life, some of the most liberal people I've ever met, and certainly some of the most conservative people I've ever sat down and had a conversation with. And so, the accumulation of their answers to these ideas of what they believe is important and powerful through their lenses really spoke to the importances of our shared humanity. And I think that became the major takeaway and theme of the trip. So I didn't end up changing my questions very much, but the answers that I got were not those that I maybe started the trip expecting.
Debra Wilson: That must have been kind of exciting.
Grant Lichtman: I'll just say that I have been privileged, extremely privileged in this life. First of all, I've been privileged to be married for almost 40 years and have raised, co-raised two remarkable children who are both vastly better people than I am and doing great things in the world. I've also been privileged to, before this trip, to have visited 49 of the 50 states and I think 53 different countries around the world.
This net 30-plus weeks that I spent on the road after raising those children and my family life has been the most powerful, by far the most powerful experience of my life. To have people share very, in some cases personal, in some cases intimate details of their life. But as you said, every day was a surprise. Every day was something new. Sure, there were themes that repeated themselves, absolutely. But seeing through different lenses and being able to hear that and then sort of dig into that with people was just absolutely an extraordinary experience.
Debra Wilson: You know, listening to you say that, what jumps out at me, you know, something that we're talking about right now as a big leadership skill, but a big skill that we're talking about with students, right? And that, that listening skill. Tell me a little bit about that. When you're listening to these conversations, because I do think it is a gift, right? Like just to hear somebody and to ask them deeper questions about themselves, right? It's to not insert yourself into that, but to listen to really understand somebody.
Tell me a little bit more about that, like what that felt like and how you might've gotten better about it on the journey. And then in education, like how should we be thinking about that more or a little bit differently given what you've learned?
Grant Lichtman: Yeah, so those are two different things and I'll start off with how it was for me. And let me share personally, my personal background. Ever since I was a child, Debra, and this may not surprise you because we know each other, nobody ever told me I was a very good listener, because I wasn't. I have been vastly better at talking than listening my entire life. I'm tall. I have a big personality. I have a loud voice. And I love, and have loved ever since I was a kid, to discuss and debate and frankly just to argue. I love that. I've learned a lot from it. And hopefully people have learned from me, but you know it also can be off-putting.
So I've never been a good listener and I don't recall anybody in school or otherwise ever actually teaching me how to be a good listener. My own brother, who is retired now as a lifelong educator, my own brother told me I wasn't going to be able to do this trip. He said, Grant, you're going to get there with some people who you have strong disagreements with, and you're going to lose it. And I said, thank you very much for your opinion, brother, but I am going to do this trip.
And 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. I mean, it literally felt like shedding a coat of armor, Debra. 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? Was one of the really great experiences or releases in my life, and I was amazed how quickly I was able to get comfortable with that, because I just didn't have to– 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.
So from a personal point of view it was an enormous transition, or transformation, and I am pretty comfortable that it's going to carry me through the rest of my life.
Debra Wilson: What did you learn about talking? Because if you're listening, and if we're teaching these skills, right? Like, so if you're talking about face-to-face, you know, that human interaction and bringing that humanity back into the way we interact, and it sounds like you crossed a bridge in terms of learning to listen. What did it teach you about how you talk?
Grant Lichtman: I love the way you ask questions. You're the first one who's asked me that question, and so I'm thinking in real time. So one thing it taught me was, I had well over a hundred interviews with strangers and I really only asked three questions. So I didn't do a lot of talking. So the first lesson I learned was shut up.
You know, and it doesn't take much to get others– I'm doing most of the talking on this podcast because you asked me to, and that's OK. I can do that. But it doesn't take much to get people to dig down. And they don't do that if I'm talking. So that was probably my biggest lesson was, you don't have to talk. Just be.
Debra Wilson: Well, and creating that space for vulnerability, right? Like the questions that you ask and giving people space to talk. You know, there's a, there's a great lawyer trick. It's a deposition trick where you just, you pause and you let people kind of just speak. And if you're in a deposition, that's actually like when people tend to get themselves in trouble. But in a normal conversation, like regular people, it provides people that window to get vulnerable or to reflect or to provide more color to whatever it is that they're saying.
Grant Lichtman: And I think the other thing was that I'm going to say everybody, almost everybody, maybe even everybody that I end up interviewing, recognized that I didn't and don't have an agenda. I'm not there to prove a point. I'm not there to, for my voice, I'm recording their voice. I've told them, I'm going to use your words in the book and quote you. I don't have an agenda. And I think many people quickly allowed themselves to be vulnerable back to me because they recognized that I wasn't there for any gotcha moment or any, you know, I didn't know what I was going to get from them. All I knew was it might be valuable.
Debra Wilson: I just love that. It’s so funny; In my head, I have just this like, image of you in just these sort of random way out there places, having these conversations. So I have to ask this question and then I'll move us on a little bit more to education. What's the most unusual place you found yourself? Like you kind of looked around you're like, wow, like I didn't see this part of my journey coming.
Grant Lichtman: There were a lot, but one sticks out. There was an educator who was actually back in South Dakota who said, I've got an uncle who lives near one of the Hutterite colonies up in Northeast South Dakota. Hutterites for those, I'd never heard of Hutterites before. And I quickly learned that Hutterites are part of the Anabaptist tradition, similar to Amish and Mennonites, but somewhat different. And they have colonies in the Dakotas and up in southern Canada. And I said, yeah, I'd love that. Well, Hutterites tend to be kind of reclusive. They don't just, you know, don't just say, hey, come on, the door's open, come on in.
Well, I'll try to cut this long story short. There was a fellow in South Dakota who I never actually met, who emailed somebody who I never actually met, who made a phone call to somebody who I never met, who texted a gentleman on this Hutterite colony outside of Aberdeen, South Dakota, who said, sure, you can come do an interview. I pull up in my RV to this colony and stop at kind of the gates, massive, there's barns and houses and everything, farms all around. And I just kind of pull up and stop and a couple minutes later, some guy pulls up on a golf cart and says, yes? He says, are you here to buy or sell?
And I said, well, neither one, I'm clearly not one of you, neither one, I'm here to meet so-and-so. And he says, well, if he knows you're coming, he'll find you. And sure enough, a couple minutes later, a gentleman rides up on his old bicycle, long black pants, black beard, suspenders, motions me to follow him. I thought we were going to go to his office. He's a teacher in the colony. And I thought maybe we'd go to the school and talk for an hour. He brings me into his family home, his wife is pulling freshly baked pumpkin cinnamon rolls out of the oven. There are kids from a number of different generations sort of sitting at the kitchen table roaming around, and we start talking. The kids, some of the kids would contribute, mostly the adults, about an hour we're talking, I'm learning all about their traditions and who they are and what they believe and all that. And by the end of it, he and his wife just say, well, it's kind of getting late, it's four or five in the afternoon. Do you want to spend the night here with us? You could eat dinner with us, we eat communally, we have church before, and that's in German, you wouldn't understand. But you know, would you like to do that?
And I just kind of looked at him and I said, if there's one thing I've learned on this journey, is you never say no. Anybody says you want to do something, the answer's always going to be yes.
I had the most amazing 20 hours that I never expected. I went to their church service, which was in German. I went to their dinner, which was communal. The kids showed me how they wash the dishes. And then we came back and had a nice conversation. They said, it's time to go to bed. And they said here, you can have this bedroom over here. They're kicking all three of the kids out so that I could have one of their bedrooms. I said, no, no, no, no. I've got a really, I got a perfectly good RV. Just show me where to park it.
Debra, to have been invited into this community, a complete stranger, and spend 20 hours with them, including, by the way, hanging out with the school kids in their school for about, for an entire morning. And he just doesn't, that stuff just doesn't happen. And man, was that cool. And by the way, I am 100%, I am 110 % sure that if I ever find myself near Aberdeen, South Dakota again, I can drive up to that colony, drive in, and they would welcome me back with arms– the most wonderful people maybe I've met on the road. What an incredible privilege.
Debra Wilson: That’s awesome. Well, so let's go up a level, right? Because you're doing this because, at least on some level, you're thinking about, what does this help us learn for schools? What does this help us learn for education? As we're looking forward to raising people, right? And really looking at this next generation, the future of our country, the future of humanity. What were some of those big takeaways for you? What were some of those…I don't know if they’re so much aha moments, but maybe aha threads that you're like, yeah, these are like, if you're starting a school today or you're really thinking deeply about education today and it's all on the table, like what are those sort of big buckets of things that you were like, yeah, these are really some of the things that I would bring back to education from this journey?
Grant Lichtman: Here are three that I think are the most important. Let's dig down into each of them a little bit. The first one is that schools are communities. We have our students, our faculty, our administrators, our parents, and then we serve broader communities around us.
And one big takeaway I had from this is that in America, we don't know who we are. We tend to exist within fairly narrow sort of bubbles of demographics and interests and culture and background. And even schools that pride themselves, thankfully, on being very diverse organizations.
I quickly came to the understanding that, or the belief, I believe, that often, certainly in my experience, our view of what we think of as diversity is very, very narrow, frankly. They're important, but narrow. So I'll just speak for myself. If you plop me down in a group of people and say, what's the evidence of diversity in this group of people? The first things are going to pop into my head are skin color, gender, and age. And I would argue that that's probably true for a lot of folks. They've just, boom, the first, your first boom response are probably things like that.
I found on this trip a much more complex definition of diversity that has to do with where we grow up, what our life experience was, what our families were like, who were our caregivers and who raised us? What was our relationship to our community? What was our relationship to faith organizations and faith traditions? And that's that shared humanity. So I think that as school organizations, as we pride ourselves on the work we're doing around the diversity, equity, inclusion, whichever of those words are most important to you, I think we need to go much deeper.
The second one has to do with this idea, and it sort of overlaps from the first, has this idea of global citizenship, which so many independent schools have focused on in the last two decades. And I'm not too humble to say that, you know, in the early 2000s, I was one of those ones in an independent school screaming, you know, we're not going to become global citizens by taking our kids to France to go visit museums and drink wine in the summer. That's not where the world is. So let's go visit the real world.
And we have, we've done a great job of it. 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. And so I think we need to rethink this idea of global citizenship to include citizens who are really very much closer to us as an imperative, before we just say we're going to focus on developing countries in other parts of the world.
And the third one, which I think we really probably want to dig down into the most, based on our conversation when we saw the dolphins that week, has to do with the concept of civility. Over a couple of years, I'd been thinking about the role of education in what you and I know of and I think many of your listeners know of as VUCA world, a world that is vastly more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous than it ever has been. That's not an opinion. We can objectively prove that the world is changing much more quickly than it ever has been throughout human history. And when I started thinking about that deeply, how do schools respond to that?
Look, since the 1950s, education is, was and still largely focused, uses Bloom's taxonomy. You know, Bloom says we start with, the lowest level of Bloom's is remembering and we finally get up to creating somewhere as a higher order skill. And in the early 2000s, some of us sort of said, wait a minute, let's, we got to flip that on its head. If we build and create stuff, which by the way, is what John Dewey and Maria Montessori were telling us 100 years ago. If we re-remember them, we flip Bloom on its head, and we start by creating and building and experiencing and then we get down to we're actually going to remember that stuff. That was great.
But I started thinking about taxonomy in a different way. The industrial age model of taxonomy, which education has operated under for basically 150 years, the lower levels were, we're going to teach literacy and numeracy and through that, we're going to work our way up to essentially conformity and compliance. That was why education came into being. And there's a lot of that that still is very important, but a few years ago, many of us realized that there was a level below that that we had to get right in this modern age. And that was the level of understanding truth versus fiction and fact versus opinion. Because if we don't get that right, we don't necessarily agree on what we should be teaching in terms of literacy and numeracy and subject material and all that.
When I was growing up, we never had to ask our teacher, are you telling us something that's true or not? We knew it was true, we believed it was true. Well, that's no longer the case. So that became a real fundamental layer to me. And I think a lot of people, a lot of educators around America over the last decade have agreed with that, recognized it. So that's not the aha moment from this trip. The aha moment from this trip is there's still another layer below that. And that is that if we cannot sit down with other people who are very different from us, who have significantly different opinions, even about what's opinion and fact, and have a civil conversation with them, we will never be able to even then get to the point of agreeing on what's true and what's not true. And all the rest of it is in the taxonomy above it.
So that's a long-winded derivation of saying that 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.” Which leads us back to the first takeaway, is first we got to know who we are.
So if I were starting a school, if I were advising a school, if I were talking to schools about, what do you want your value proposition to be? That's where I would start. And I want to emphasize this is not me talking. This is me relaying to you and your listeners what everybody I spoke with out there in the country told me. I didn't go out and sit on a mountaintop and come up with this. This is what I was hearing from the farmer, the rancher, the fisherman, the politician, the musician, the naturalist, they're all saying these similar things, is we have to find these ways to be human with each other again, rather than finding ways to be combative with each other.
Debra Wilson: So when I'm listening to you say that, I have a few different emotions. And one of it is that I worry people feel isolated. But then I think about that story you told, and it's interesting. People are isolated together, I think, sometimes. So how do you get people speaking across difference, you know, outside of those bubbles, right?
So like, how do we facilitate that? I mean, I think schools are a great place for it. And certainly, at least to teach the skills to engage in that. But when we think about, like, how do you promote that kind of discourse? Like, how do we get people really exercising those muscles?
Grant Lichtman: I think one of the first points of solution is, and this is going to be uncomfortable for schools, you have to go out and find people who are different. You know, what is it that I did that was so crazy? I spent a big chunk of two years going out and finding people who were not me, who were unlike me, other than the fact that they were willing to talk and I was willing to listen.
Debra Wilson: Well, in fairness, some of us still think the RV thing is kind of crazy. That part we can actually– It's the RV, Grant, for a couple of years.
Grant Lichtman: That I don't expect everybody to do it over weeks, over dozens of weeks, over two years. What I think is possible are many wisdom roads. I think that finding people who are substantially different, and…Look, there's a lot of folks out there who teach good listening skills and I'm connected with some of them and I'll use some of their materials when I do workshops and that. There's lots of good stuff out there.
But you have to go find people who are substantially different. Getting outside of our bubbles is not going to be easy, particularly because the big powers in our country are hugely invested and have huge self-interest in driving us further into those bubbles, not bringing us together. And we can talk a little bit more about that if you want. But I heard this from everybody. I mean, people who are not more educated or not richer, not more sophisticated about news media, everybody I've met with said, Look, when we turn on the news, I look at my telephone, I'm always being pushed to the edges, not being pushed toward the middle. And people are eager to talk with folks who are different, but how do they go about doing it?
Am I convinced that a bunch of bright educators could figure all kinds of great ways to do that? Sure I am. Most of our schools are surrounded by incredibly diverse communities of people who are willing to tell their stories and share and sit down and talk with students and bring those folks in. I know many of our schools are doing that in fabulous ways. Not nearly enough, but again, this should not be something we do as a senior internship project. This is something that should be a core embed in our curriculum, which will then become much richer for it.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. Well, Grant, it's been such a pleasure to have you with us on New View EDU. I can't wait to see how you pull all these materials together. I cannot imagine how much material you must have from this trip. And it's just always such a pleasure to talk with you. So thank you for coming on today.
Grant Lichtman: Well, thanks so much and thanks for all you're doing with NAIS and for K-12 education, Debra. We sure appreciate and notice.
Debra Wilson: Thank you.