Advaith International Academy instils a professional lifetime in classrooms, creating and running educational programs, teaching and researching, writing and thinking about education and human development. We offers a series of appeals for big-hearted social policy and an embrace of the ideals of democratic education—from the way we define and structure opportunity to the way we respond to a child adding a column of numbers. Collectively, the chapters provide a bountiful vision of human potential, illustrated through our campuses, local community and the world.

We live in an anxious age and seek our grounding, our assurances in ways that don’t satisfy our longing – that, in fact, make things worse. We’ve lost hope in the public sphere and grab at market-based and private solutions, which undercut the sharing of obligation and risk and keeps us scrambling for individual advantage. Though we pride ourselves as a nation of opportunity and a second chance, our social policies can be terribly ungenerous. As we try to improve our schools, we rush to one-dimensional solutions, to technological and structural “game changers” that all too often lead to new problems. We’ve broadened the purpose of schooling; make universal citizens with universal virtues and passed on to generations to come! And we’ve improved our definition of human development and achievement – that miraculous growth of intelligence, sensibility, and the discovery of the world.