Education is currently a foremost concern for many Americans. Education, however, is about more than teaching children skills for earning a living and how to function in life. It is really a means of transmitting both a culture and a heritage.

William Irwin Thompson, one of today's most innovative interdisciplinary thinkers, talks about how to transform a cultural legacy in the course of transmitting it. His visionary approach takes education far beyond the bland, watered-down curricula so many students face today in public and private schools.

Thompson offers us a mind-rattling tour of...