By Mick Quinn and Debora Prieto | Co-Founders
The school year began and all of our bright students returned to our class. The main school holidays in Guatemala last for three months from October to January and we wanted to make sure that they used some of their time away from class in deep questioning, reading, and thinking. To do that, we assigned them a unique homework assignment.
We asked them to read “Philosophy Is Not A Luxury” by teacher and philosopher, Jeff Carreira, and to write a one-page report of each of its 12 short chapters. This book is based on the philosophy of the American Pragmatists and has many deep points.
We were greatly honored when over 70% of the class returned with very extensive reports on the book. They loved the book and many of them asked us if they could keep it in order to read it again.
The most amazing story was that of Emily, whose face, attitude, smile and self-confidence had improved so much that we hardly recognized her from last year. In her own words: “This book to me was like talking one on one with a therapist. I learned that I am not who I always thought I was because others convinced me that I was a different person. Now I want to work at knowing myself and I know that with my actions and choices I can choose to be whoever I want to be.”
We are very excited about this New Year and all the new possibilities that it opens. As part of this program we are already working on an invitation of a very well known teacher to visit us and our students later in the year as part of our Wisdom Speakers Series. We are also planning to expand the curriculum and will be offering more books of great depth to our dear students.
The Integral Heart Foundation is deeply grateful to all of you, our donors, who make this work possible and as always, we are open to all your suggestions, comments and ideas.
Much love to all of you,
The Integral Heart Foundation Team
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
