I liked this book a lot. One of the things I was thinking about as I was walking this morning was this passage, a passage that would be a great discussion generator in class:

The one central truth that liberals know is that the effective reform almost never happens as the result of big ideas sweeping through the world and revolutionizing life. Whenever we look at how the big problems got solved, it was rarely a big idea that solved them. It was the intercession of a thousand small sanities. A thousand small sanities are usually wiser than one big idea.

This is completely true in education. Maybe I’m old, or maybe I’m jaded, but big ideas mean nothing next to the thoughtful classroom practice where each day you go, and, in a thousand small gestures, actions, decisions, and sanities, make your classroom a place where good things happen.

This was one of those books where I took many pictures of various passages. I’ll keep posting them here.

Gopnik, Adam. A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019.