How can we create a just, healthy, and humane world? What is the path to developing sustainable energy, food, transportation, production, construction, and other systems? What’s the best strategy to end poverty and ensure that everyone has equal rights? How can we slow the rate of extinction and restore ecosystems? How can we learn to resolve conflicts without violence and treat other people and nonhuman animals with respect and compassion? The answer to all these questions lies with one underlying system―schooling. To create a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world, we must reimagine education and prepare a generation to be solutionaries―young people with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to create a better future. This book describes how we can (and must) transform education and teaching; create such a generation; and build such a future. If we are putting hope for the future of our planet in our young people, then they must have the tools and feel empowered to take on the world's greatest challenges. The World Becomes What We Teach offers such direction for the very educators who are working with these young people today. I applaud such efforts and hope to see many educators and young people alike gain important insight from what Zoe Weil offers in this book.--Jane Goodall, DBE, Ph.D. Founder, the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace I believe we all have a unique capacity for contribution. However, too frequently schools stifle children's resolve to express it. Zoe Weil's approach to schooling, as laid out in her book The World Becomes What We Teach, skillfully identifies how to nurture this seed of goodness while simultaneously providing students with all of the tools required to flourish in the twenty-first century. Her collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to education could very well be the prescription needed to cultivate a generation of 'solutionaries' ready to take on the greatest societal challenges of our time. --Ariel Nessel, Founder, The Pollination Project Imagine if Zoe Weil's vision was the default setting for a system of schools and communities creating learning environments rich with joy, curiosity, complexity, and an undeniable belief that we are all capable--from student to community--in making a positive, long-term impact on the world around us. Better, imagine if you--the reader--realizes that this book is your invitation to be both a solutionary in your own life and a co-conspirator in creating a system of solutionary schools in communities far and wide. This is Zoe Weil's belief. And this is your invitation to co-design a remarkable future for students, teachers, schools, and communities ahead. --Christian Long, Founding Partner, WONDER, By Design: A learning and design expedition In light of the need for lifelong learning in a changing world, Zoe Weil's call to 'adopt a more relevant and meaningful purpose for schooling; make schools real world- and solutionary-focused; and prepare teachers to educate their students to be solutionaries, ' is logical and essential. The evidence is clear that this kind of teaching and learning is already happening. There are a great many stories of children and young people contributing to a healthy, humane, and sustainable future through school, and many examples of what educators can do to make this happen. Zoe illustrates why schools need to change and then shows us what the new narrative looks like. It is compelling. This book will change you --Jaimie P. Cloud, President, The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education The World Becomes What We Teach may be the most important book, with both the simplest and most powerful answers, to address the challenges we face in our world effectively, meaningfully, and positively. If we heed Zoe Weil's call to educate a generation of solutionaries, we will witness the unfolding of a truly just, compassionate, and healthy world. Read this book for the sake of any children you love and the future of us all. --Matt Goldman, Co-founder Blue Man Group and Blue School This book takes on conventional reformist thinking, unfetters the educational imagination, and repositions the very notion of 'relevance' in schooling to meet the critical issues of this era on Earth. Zoe opens a doorway onto a new landscape for teaching, learning, the development of curriculum, and the purpose of schooling itself. Then she hands us a map, a GPS, and travel guide. This book, once well dog-eared and coffee-stained, should grace the shelves of any educator or transformational leader truly committed to children, the Earth, and a just, sustainable society. --Khalif Williams, Director, The Bay School This is an important book from an important thinker in the field of education. Zoe's original ideas are based on decades of practical hands-on work. She creates an optimistic vision of what can be if we are willing to rethink educational models to meet the needs of our twenty-first-century world.