The Learning Project: Rites of Passage
Ever since your schooling began you have been frustrated by its failure to inspire or demonstrate its importance. It did not tell you what was most important, and what it told you certainly was not. You heard about genocide, the assassination of JFK, the World Wars and others since. You have asked about these and other things, and you've been told what but not why. Every year you expected truth to be revealed... but it never was. The question of why is never answered.
Your 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 you reached middle school, you were angry, numb, and indifferent. At this point, you started to search for wiser counsel and a deeper understanding of education, the world, and yourself.
For six decades I have been asking interesting people to answer the question of meaning, growth, and change. I have returned to my wisest mentors, classmates, partners, and their teachers, students, and children looking for answers to the question of what lies at 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 struggled with adolescence in a broken, immigrant family. Another trained to be an astronaut. A third learned craftsmanship from a grandfather who lived during the Civil War. These rites of passage echo a mythology that goes back thousands of years. In them are the secrets to growing your humanity.
This is not the sanitized version, reduced to self-help aphorisms 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 yours: confusing, complex, uncertain, and in the process of finding root. This is the story of your own transcendence and the transformation of us all.
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2019 Book of the Year Award Winner, from the Independent Book Publishers Association.
"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, recipient of Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom, 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
"Authentic learning comes from living as much with passion as with intellect. 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 sheer diversity of the stories in this massive work, from individuals who forged their own trails, shows there are so many more ways to learn than the model our culture currently supports. How wonderfully inventive we are, we humans - our differences are our strength. Message to all: accept yourself as you are, take yourself seriously, and keep going!"
-- Wendy Wolosoff-Hayes, psychotherapist and founder of spaciousheartguidance.com
"The Learning Project explores processes of learning through a fascinating variety of interviews with people diverse in age, experience, and social standing. The transformative power of learning and knowledge are recurring themes. This informative, entertaining book should benefit readers from any discipline."
-- Raymond C. Russ, PhD, Editor of The Journal of Mind and Behavior
"A physicist by training and philosopher by inclination, Lincoln Stoller asks a fascinating collection of people about how they make key decisions in their lives. With simple questions like, "I don't know, tell me..." he opens discussions about deep life experiences. This book, intended for young people reflecting on how to live, is relevant for anyone considering their personal narrative and life philosophy."
-- Rachel Harris, PhD, psychologist. Co-author of Teenagers Learn What They Live
"Anyone interested in the actual mechanics of lifelong changes, success, and growth will realize that The Learning Project offers an unprecedented, invaluable key to achievement that no growth-oriented learner should bypass."
-- D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
