I see that this is my 700th blog and perhaps then it is apt that it is about the many Indias and a modern hero who should be known worldwide, the way kids are taught about John Muir and other naturalists who valued and protected the natural world — and Ravidra Singh Tomar is very [...]

There are no speed limits on Indian highways. That is not at all similar to Germany where high performance cars flash by at super speeds, leaving judgement to individual drivers. Just the opposite. Driving in much of India is a kind of symbolic representation of Indian society — everyone crowds together (there is, for example, [...]

Today we drove from Jaipur to the nature preserve at Rathambore. To days earlier we drove from Delhi to Jaipur. That trip showed me what a limited site of the new India we had on the road to Agra. India knows that the Taj is a unique treasure and to preserve it, no industry is [...]

The city of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, is about 3 hours by good drive from Delhi — which suggests a range of choices: get up early and brave the day, go by train but then live by its schedule, or go to Agra and spend the night, moving on to other Mughal sites. [...]

I went through 12 years of pure Progressive ed, straight from Dewey himself via TC to the New Lincoln School. As a result I have mixed feelings about Progressive Ed — recalling both the freedom to think and the lack of basic structures. But an experience today made me think I have not been as [...]

Sorry for this delayed post, I mislaid the log-in information for the blog, but all is well now. And in a way the timing is perfect. We’d had an easy two days in Delhi, so much so that our proto-anthropologist older son was complaining that it was too much like New Jersey. Although not quite [...]

I’d planned to use this post to make a personal announcement, and I will, but first I just could not resist directing your eyes to this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?_r=1&hp Google is making availalbe this massive searchable database of books –  and this has a direct effect on how we (authors, librarians, parents, teachers) need to think about [...]

In my last post I spoke about moral choice — what led a Protestant village in France to save the lives of thousands of Jewish children during World War II — the question of how to weight individual leaders, the history of Protestants in France, the location of the village, in understanding their heroism and [...]

Last we spoke I was burning up the keyboard, working on a book about the Chile mine disaster and rescue. Well that is just as true and more, and I am seeing, first hand, one of the great challenges of journalism — which again may be of use to teachers training young people to do [...]

We have a new rule in our Men’s book club — the host for that night gets to pick the book. That’s why last night we got together to discuss a book none of us had heard of before, Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. This is an older book, first published in 1979, [...]