Keen On

“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She discovered her own meaning not in what she could get out of life, but what life was asking of her. And so she founded the Harlem Village Academies — a collection of K-12 charter schools in New York offering both free Montessori and the International Baccalaureate education. Kenny’s new book, The Well-Educated Child, is the distillation of what she’s learned in twenty-five years as a teacher. But it’s simply summarized. Read books, she instructs. The more the better. Kenny’s three-part definition of a well-educated child — quality thinking, agency, ethical purpose — requires reading fifty books a year. She did i