What if leading our students on an inner odyssey took precedence over disseminating theories?

Our education system is dangerously outdated. While the changing times are placing more and more emphasis on creativity, adaptability, and global consciousness, the current system continues to transform too many of our audacious and curious young people into 21st century cogs for yesterday’s machinery.

Knowing this, how do we get our students to shed their submissiveness, rediscover their uniqueness, and share their vision of the world with the rest of us?

Rewild School puts forward a daring answer.

Part memoir and manifesto, award winning educator Shawn Humphrey shares his decade-long quest to reimagine education. Weaving insights from pedagogy, mythology, and the field of social innovation, this paradigm-shifting manifesto gives educators a 10-step process for guiding their students and themselves on a journey of self-discovery – a journey to meet their inner genius.

Who’s Rewild School for?

Filled with ideas and activities for transforming courses into fire-walking rites of passage and classrooms into mythologically-inspired liminal spaces, this book is for professors looking to recast their campuses as hubs of student-transfiguration and social change. However, this book is not only for professors. It is also for:

• Teachers at all levels interested in innovative pedagogical approaches.

• Campus administrators responsible for curriculum development and policies.

• Researchers and scholars exploring new perspectives on education and pedagogy.

• Advocates for educational reform passionate about reshaping educational systems.

• Parents seeking alternative educational methods and approaches for their children.

This book is for anyone with an interest in education who feels that the ways our schools are currently engaging our students is no longer working and, in many ways, detrimental to their personal development and our collective survival as a species on this planet.

What two books would Rewild School sit between on a shelf?

Between Parker Palmer’s “The Courage to Teach” and Seth Godin’s “Linchpin”.

Parker Palmer’s seminal work makes the profound case for reconnecting teachers with the inner spiritual foundation of their purpose amidst institutional constraints. It champions authenticity and heart in education. Seth Godin’s manifesto gives permission to do work that matters, inviting generous allies on adventures, and dancing with fear. Rewild School makes Palmer’s humanism and Godin’s provocative mandate to ship work that matters radically actionable for educators.

What is School for?

It is the task of Rewild School is to reimagine education. Its purpose, it’s why, and our role as teachers in the classroom. With industrialized education so embedded in our laws, customs and popular culture, answering the question “What is school for?” is harder than you may think. It can be challenging to imagine education any other way than the way we inherited. However, we perpetuate our outdated system of education to the detriment of our relationships with our students, the kind of work we can do with them, and how we and our students and our schools can engage the larger world, the wider world outside of our campuses.

Backed by a decade of experience developing the revolutionary La Ceiba class, Rewild School invites readers on a paradigm-shifting quest to reimagine the purpose of education. With vivid storytelling and principles rooted in mythology, it provides professors an adaptable framework for transforming themselves and their students into individuals with the courage to reshape the world by embarking on an inner journey of self-transformation first.

What ARE STUDENTS SAYING?

I asked my former students “How would you compare our class (La Ceiba) to your other classes in college?” Here are some of their answers:

• “Incomparable. More life-changing than any regular class can be.” - Christine

• “La Ceiba was far and away the most significant class I had taken at any level. It is head and shoulders above any class I've seen at the undergraduate level.” - Brian

• “La Ceiba was the educational experience I had longed for but school had yet to provide. I learned through experience. You let me make mistakes and it was in the moments where I stood back up and pushed through that gave character. It was this experience that has in many ways attributed to who I am today.” - Daniel

• “La Ceiba completely broke the box on my understanding of what an undergraduate course could be.” - Tatiana

• “I think this is a loaded question. It’s like comparing apples and oranges, but the oranges are ripe and sweet and the apples are a little too ripe and that one kind of apple you don’t really like. Of course, my time in La Ceiba was the single most important and lasting experience, let alone class, in college.” - Will