DANCE of UNITY

How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students

Named as a 2001 Notable Book in Education by the American School Board Journal

This book offers a highly revealing—and troubling—view of today’s high school students and the ways they pursue high grades and success. Denise Pope, veteran teacher and curriculum expert, follows five motivated and successful students through a school year, closely shadowing them and engaging them in lengthy reflections on their school experiences. What emerges is a double-sided picture of school success. On the one hand, these students work hard in school, participate in extracurricular activities, serve their communities, earn awards and honors, and appear to uphold school values. But on the other hand, they feel that in order to get ahead they must compromise their values and manipulate the system by scheming, lying, and cheating. In short, they “do school”—that is, they are not really engaged with learning nor can they commit to such values as integrity and community.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the groundbreaking book Wherever You Go, There You Are, has written what has to be the most comprehensive book about mindfulness published to date. Coming To Our Senses is over six hundred pages of pure spiritual gold, offering a definitive look at the connection between mindful awareness and our current physical and mental states of well-being.

Kabat-Zinn, founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and popular author and workshop leader, brings ancient Eastern teachings into the Western light by focusing on the power of being aware and paying attention to the moment at hand, based upon Buddhist teachings. The book is divided into eight sections, each focusing on a different aspect of how we can, and must, come to our senses in order to heal, to find our purpose, and to live the life of our dreams. In other words, a life spent in the present and not agonizing over the past or worrying over the future, which is where most of us spend, and waste, our lives.

Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect

Earth in Mind is a must read for anyone interested in environmental education. Orr presents the relationship between the nature of education and how the environment is treated by the very professionals that are the future. The original introduction began with a list of facts and statistics that will shake the foundation of ones belief system, to put them in the context of being ten years old and to know that things have only become worse begs one to investigate the balance of the text.

The book is a series of essays organized in four parts. The first of which deals with the problem of education with regard to the lack of environmental awareness and the problems that will persist with a new generation of efficient vandals of our biosphere. Part two delves into guiding principles for education reform, those relationships of the human condition that are being lost through an increasingly specialized education process.

In this influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation—he calls it nature-deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression.

Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults. More than just raising an alarm, Louv offers practical solutions and simple ways to heal the broken bond—and many are right in our own backyard.

The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists – who describe a pre-human world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths – Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

A revolution is underway in today’s organizations. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end “business as usual” tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today’s most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary—not just incremental—changes in the way we live and work.

Building on the astonishing success of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity: He implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity.

Tolle tells us there is good news, however. There is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one.

Presence is an intimate look at the development of a new theory about change and learning. In wide-ranging conversations held over a year and a half, organizational learning pioneers Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers explored the nature of transformational change—how it arises, and the fresh possibilities it offers a world dangerously out of balance. The book introduces the idea of “presence”—a concept borrowed from the natural world that the whole is entirely present in any of its parts—to the worlds of business, education, government, and leadership. Too often, the authors found, we remain stuck in old patterns of seeing and acting. By encouraging deeper levels of learning, we create an awareness of the larger whole, leading to actions that can help to shape its evolution and our future.

At a time when people around the world see education as the highest form of leverage to improve society, and when more people than ever are concerned about the ability of today's institutions to live up to that goal, Senge and his colleagues have released Schools That Learn. This book of almost 200 pieces of writing from more than 100 educators, parents, and students Ð represents the first coherent effort to apply the principles of the "learning organization" to institutions of learning.