ABSTRACT
What we do with our children will determine what we are, collectively, as a society. Accordingly, Wendell Berry once noted, “There can be no greater blow to the integrity of a community than the loss of its school or loss of control of its school.”1 Our failure to see the connection between schools and healthy communities, and, one step further, the connection between healthy communities and the well-being of democratic processes, was perhaps the most serious intellectual shortcoming of the twentieth century. The great sins of that century-racism, prejudice, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, environmental degradation, ceaseless wars of dubious merit, and a generalized indifference to the sanctity of human life beyond the fetal stage-they can all be connected to our failure to come to grips with the centrality of community to the human condition.
