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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.