Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/nourishing-our-souls/5023476/
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
When the intellectual gatekeepers of our teaching profession launched me with the obligatory charge to “go forth and do good work” over 30 years ago, I can clearly remember having contradictory feelings of bubbling enthusiasm and unsettling dread. I could certainly account for the bubbling enthusiasm. After all, as a fairly engaged undergraduate student, my professors had introduced me to the path-finding thinking of such towering education minds as Jean Piaget, Marie Montessori, John Dewey, Horace Mann, and many other European and American scholars. With this exciting knowledge in possession, I — a young ...