Our system of compulsory classroom schooling was developed in the late 1800's - in a world that bears little resemblance to the world of 2009!  It is no longer developmentally relevant to the needs of today's young adult.

We sit our children in rows in classrooms under fluorescent lights from age 5 through age 22 and talk AT them - during the years when they are most physically active, inquisitive, and actively willing to learn.  This teaches them to be passive, disconnect their hearts and minds, disconnect learning and engaged action, and "dumbs them down."

We have systematically separated our children from traditional sources of wisdom, meaning and inspiration: from our elders (who we put on "reservations") and from spirituality.  In the words of John Taylor Gatto, "We have been schooled to have no inner life at all."

Our system of schooling focuses on the content of education, neglecting the more important context of education.   Our system focuses on our cognitive left brains, neglecting to educate our bodies, emotions and spirit.  We emphasize the mind to the detriment of learning through doing, cross-cultural and language learning and creativity.   The result is generations of confused grownups alienated from their bodies, their souls, their communities, and deep wellsprings of meaning and purpose.

According to a study done by Howard Gardner (Harvard 1993), "Emotional intelligence is a greater predictor of academic and life success than is IQ." A study by Daniel Goleman (1994) introduced the concept of "emotional literacy" - a "shorthand term for the idea that children's emotional and social skills can be cultivated, and that doing so gives them decided advantages in their cognitive abilities, in their personal adjustment, and in their resiliency through life."

LEAPYEAR is a place that a young person can go to learn self-motivation, integrity, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, service to others, and how to love. How can we cultivate these qualities if we spend our most vital years learning passively in a classroom?

As a society we have abdicated providing conscious rites of passage into adulthood.  LEAPYEAR focuses on the late teens because this is a natural time to quest for meaning and purpose, and firmly take the tiller of your life.  This is a time of crisis, which implies great opportunity for transformation - as we navigate multiple transitions: from family to independence; high school to college; and adolescence to adulthood.

Most teens simply follow the herd to college, replacing family with an institution which feeds and houses them and defines the boundaries of what they may study.  As a result many use the first year as "time off" for partying and procrastination, and experience "sophomore slump" as the realities of choosing a major hit them. 

How much better would we be served as human beings if, before undertaking four more expensive years of schooling, we took time to make a guided transition into adulthood, to discover "one great enthusiasm" and our life purpose, to immerse ourselves in some new part of the world, and learn vital life skills that we missed out on because they aren't taught in schools.

"Schools were established when kids were experience-rich and information poor. The world has changed; schools haven't."
-James S. Coleman

"The last two years of high school, particularly the senior year, are a waste of time."
-Leon Botstein, president of Bard College

"The collapse of traditional cultures, the loss of shared myths and rituals that enfold the individual into a group, and the spread of modern industrial societies are producing generations of unbonded children and adults who are not initiated to the purpose and meaning of their own lives."
-Michael Meade

"Old age is like anything else--in order to make a success of it you've got to start young."
-Fred Astaire

"Starting from the conviction that adolescents are looking for an arena in which to make an authentic contribution to the family and to the community, the first thing that we would notice is how few meaningful roles are available for young people to fill. Then we might see how, in the absence of a purpose greater than themselves, adolescents retreat to the sidelines as though their existence were inconsequential."
-Benjamin Zander

"Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object."
-Herman Hesse

"Don't worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."
-Howard Thurman

"Every human being has some handle by which he or she may be lifted; and the great work of life, as far as our relations with each other are concerned, is to lift each one by his or her proper handle."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe