Background notes on "What We're About..."

In 1991 I was asked by an administrator at NOLS to write a piece called "What We're About" for the 1991 State of the School Report. She had read my "Marketing the Sacred Space," liked the part about "Big Things" and thought maybe I could do something along those lines.

I thought I pulled it off fairly poetically. But for whatever reason, (and I do not know if this came from her or from above) she told me that they could not use the piece because it was too radical. That was one way I discovered that there was a whole "other" NOLS besides the one I knew, a world where the school was not about the unknown, reflection on one's life, soul and escaping from the system.