Economically privileged parents may think of school as a pipeline to success, but they can be so much more. How underperforming schools can offer a type of education that money could never buy.
Author
Courtney E. Martin
Courtney E. Martin was a columnist for On Being. Her newest book, The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, explores how people are redefining the American dream (think more fulfillment, community, and fun, less debt, status, and stuff). Courtney is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and a strategist for the TED Prize. She is also co-founder and partner at Valenti Martin Media and FRESH Speakers Bureau, and editor emeritus at Feministing.com.
Courtney has authored/edited five books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women. Her work appears frequently in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Courtney has appeared on the TODAY Show, Good Morning America, MSNBC, and The O’Reilly Factor, and speaks widely at conferences and colleges. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics and a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre. She lives with her partner in life and work, John Cary, in Oakland, and their daughters Maya and Stella. Read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.
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Courtney Martin examines the "tragic gaps" in the creative life — between our hard realities and what we dream is possible.
Courtney Martin reflects on the end of five years of breastfeeding her daughters, and the wisdom and the weirdness of the body.
Rejection is hard. When it happens, it’s important to not let it stifle your creativity, your work, your vision for what you want the world to be.
As a parent of privilege, the decision to send your child to an underperforming school can be met with judgment and worries about safety and lack of resources. But what if these concerns aren’t as true as we believe them to be?
Suffering is universal. It’s time I grew wiser about how to sit alongside it.
Courtney Martin considers the ethical questions parents face when trying to decide where their kids should go to school — and calls us to ask ourselves if the questions we ask match our values.
In our conversations about echo chambers and the necessity of speaking across difference, we often forget the importance — and difficulty — of disagreeing with the people most like us. On what's lost when we don't make that effort.
From #metoo to Black Lives Matter, what does deep healing — and sincere, honest reconciliation — look like? It's time to make space for soul work; for reparations; for ritual.
New research reveals that trauma experienced in childhood has longterm damaging effects on quality of life and lifespan. But the same research shows that adults play a critical role in helping children overcome this damage.
It's easy to see self-promotion as an exercise in narcissism. But when exercised with the right intentions and oriented toward societal good, it can be a powerful way to connect with and contribute to the world.
How do our duties as citizens map onto our duties as parents? Courtney Martin on the tensions between what is best for her children and what's best for the world. The first in a reported series on ethical parenting.
Learning to accept the anxieties of motherhood can help bring in wonder and gratitude for the mundane moments of parenting.
An opportunity to embrace not just life as it is, but also life as it could be — if not in this life, then in the next.
It is not enough to view social injustice as simply a problem to be solved, or a series of data points to be analyzed and understood. Allyship and activism require a deeper compassion, one that creates space for us to sit with each other’s pain.
Courtney offers seven searching questions to help you enter the coming year primed for growth.
The pain and gift of the end of life, and the truths that dying reveals at the heart of being human.
Courtney Martin delves into America's dysfunctional relationship with sex, money, and power — and calls for a rethinking of sex education, to reflect the actual complexity and broad range of how human sexuality gets expressed and must be honored.
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