About me
CEO, Entrepreneur, Educator, Humanist, Father
Toronto is the city that made me.
I was born in Etobicoke, grew up in Mississauga, and spent my early twenties in various apartments downtown. I attended the University of Toronto, where I took six long years to complete a 4-year degree. In addition to studying literature, philosophy and neuropsychology, I formed deep friendships, engaged in activism, wrote for multiple newspapers, worked sundry jobs, and experienced the full measure of diverse personalities and experiences the city has to offer. My character was formed in the stormy billows of that great metropolis, as was my reverent humanism, and it is all a part of me still.
“Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy [Toronto].”
— Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
My career has been the singular, all-consuming focus of my life after graduating. I started my work in education as an SAT tutor, and my first job after college was as a math and science teacher / curriculum developer. In the years since, I have gradually shifted to educational entrepreneurialism, and have twice built the largest Montessori school network in the United States.
I work today as the founder and CEO of Higher Ground Education, the organization behind Guidepost Montessori schools, the Academy of Thought and Industry, and the Prepared Montessorian teacher training center. My work is characterized by a striving to articulate and create a third alternative to two historical trends in education, the various manifestations of the Prussian “factory” model in education, and the equally varied progressive alternatives to that model. I’ve over the years come to reject these as two sides of a false dichotomy, in favor of a third alternative: an education that is at once knowledge-rich and child-led.
Education, I believe, must embrace the full reality of the nature of a developing, learning human being. Both that knowledge is the means of pursuing any goal, understanding oneself, and living to one’s highest abilities, and that learning is a voluntary choice which every child (and every person) can only make for herself. As an educator, an entrepreneur, and a father, I have dedicated myself to the spread of Montessori education as the foundation of this third alternative, and the means of uplifting new generations of children worldwide.
Quotes I love:
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
— Teddy Roosevelt
“If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning good morning at total strangers.”
— Maya Angelou
I live in Texas with my wife Rebecca and three sons. Rebecca and I both left the east to find our fortunes out west. We have worked closely together in education for over a decade, co-founded Higher Ground together, are raising lions together, and have long since recognized the virtues of putting every single egg in the same basket. Along with my work and a few lifelong friendships, my family completes me.
