Quotes from Ben Hewitt

We've created a system that demands almost no engagement with our food; we've wrung all the responsibility and sweat equity from the process. It's not that we're getting something for nothing - after all, we do pay for our food, and we suffer the consequences of dining from the industrial trough. But charging a package of center-cut pork chops to your Visa is a hell of a lot different than facing down the source of those chops with a .22 in one hand and a well-honed knife in the other.

What if the point were not to know as much as possible but to feel as much as possible?

We are all interconnected and interdependent, and because of this, we are all only as rich as we enrich those around us. I

When we carry a safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to slip through our fingers.

Many parents aren't all that accustomed to being patient and present for their kids anymore, if only because they're simply not given the opportunity to be patient and present. Jobs get in the way. School gets in the way. After-school activities get in the way. As I have learned—as I am still learning—patience and presence are muscles that must be developed and exercised regularly.

My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being.

I wonder if we have it all backward. And I wonder how the world might be if we viewed the very reason for our existence as being not about control and security but about surrender. Not to our fears and insecurities but to our sense of what is possible, to the belief that we all have the ability to shape the world as we imagine it, and that our actions reflect this imagined world until it becomes not imagined, but real.

the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have.

Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent(and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I've learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children.

the business of being a child in this country is rapidly disappearing into an abyss that consists not only of programs and tests but also of extracurricular activities.

Like all of us, children just want to be needed. It's our job to make sure they actually are.

colloquialism for the affliction that strikes a certain

I dropped out of high school to pursue a self-designed study program in excessively loud heavy metal music and extreme partying. - From his blog

If there is value in the standardized, performance-based curriculums utilized by the vast majority of schools, that value is realized primarily by the institutions themselves and by the economic and social structures that are fed by standardized learning.