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Room One

I am in Room One, the first on the left at the top of the wide marble steps, with the rest of the first-graders. The mothers are beginning to leave. A lot of kids are crying. It still has not occurred to me to be afraid.

Why Schools Don’t Educate

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and others to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

The Trip To Manmad And Other Stories

This dusty, hot Saturday, I have the privilege of meeting a very significant person: a mad, starving, nearly naked little girl who picks through the garbage outside a whorehouse on the outskirts of a dusty Indian town.

Second Thoughts

I had seen the boy many times before, but never really looked. I did not actually know his name until the day he was being escorted to the front office by a smug-looking assistant principal.

Discipline

The double-entry ledger system, pliés, a workable bicycle

Radical Steps

Both of them hit me so frequently that I still flinch at sudden movements. I learned in my bones that alcoholics don’t have relationships; they take hostages.

When The Teacher Fails

The press reported recently that Osel Tendzin, the successor to Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, has had AIDS for years. Tendzin made love with some of his students without telling them they were at risk, and passed the virus on to them and their unknowing partners.

Graduation

It was a perfect day, the sky clear, as blue and true as a pledge of love. On the campus, the magnolias were in bloom, the huge, creamy-white flowers richly fragrant. Spring was everywhere, shamelessly beautiful, wet lips laughing, hair unpinned.

The Politics Of Radical Clarity

Helen Palmer And The Enneagram

I need to get clearer and clearer with my clients, and train as many people as I can to look at their projections and eliminate them. All I can really do is keep my corner of the world clean, and teach others. Good political work is not concerned with the consequence or the outcome; you pay attention to the process, to the quality of your work at every step of the way. That’s very different from trying to take out the top man by assassination. The problem is that a new top man will always succeed the one you get rid of, if the root psychological problems of the society remain unchanged.

On Writing

Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.