#EdJourney

Chapter EightSchools Are More Permeable: Where We Meet, Not Where We Learn

Sunrise, five miles west of Salina, open road but for a few early morning long-haul truckers, bottomland rich in ripe alfalfa bounded by rising buttes of banded red and white, Neil Young’s “Helpless” the first song of the day. A morning like this will buckle your knees, driving or not. It is high summer here, yellow flowers trace the highway, stubby pines dark dots of green, and even the sage is more olive than gray. Quaking aspen choke every low draw and creek. Over one hundred million years these mountains raised their deep-sea sediments, bruised upward by forces as far away as Mexico and the Pacific Rim. For ten thousand years this must have been Eden for Native ...