Ray on the purpose of education and its challenges:

I think that the story of the last couple of hundred years has been the story of a lack of insight and a lack of awareness of how we accomplish the purpose of education, which in my view is imparting a definite set of content and skills that adult human life requires, that a human success in adulthood requires while respecting the individuality and the agency and the self-creation of each human being.

Ray on what is education:

Education is neither indoctrination nor creation nor opinion. It is discovery. It is discovery, it is truth seeking, it's discovery about an independent world out there, how it works. The world of nature, the world of human beings, the world of industry and technology.

Ray on the distinctions between education and learning:

I think that there's a distinction between education and learning that is not well understood. Education is the attempt to systematize the process of human development, of growing up from a child into an adult. So a lot of people, first of all, do not even believe that we should be systematizing it. They don't believe in a system of learning. And so there's a lot of skepticism from the best people that learning can be systematized. I think it has to be.

Ray on what is human flourishing:

So the simplest way that I would put it is making the most out of your life. You have this one life to live, view it as something precious and make the most out of it. And the kind of bedrock principle, even underneath our values, is that the individual human life fully lived is an end in itself, is its own reward. That process of life, that joy of life is the end, at least for us. That doesn't mean an individual can't decide that they want to, the form in which way they want to accomplish that. That's really up to them. But what we are trying to do is give every child the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the inspiration, the environment that he or she needs to make the most of our life.

Ray on his three underlying pedagogical principles:

One is, we call it a culture of knowledge. So truth seeking, a respect and reverence for the role of knowledge in life. A desire to get to the bottom of things, to understand, to discover, to know. Having that internalized is really important to the good life. The second is a culture of work, which means a love of activity, a love of the doing, a capacity to pursue goal-directed action, to choose goals and to pursue them. A life of purpose, a life in which motion and activity is the core. And then the third we call it is a culture of humanism. A love of the good, a love of the beautiful, a love of humanity.

Keep Going: 

Read:  How these schools create problem-solving optimists 

Watch: Ray Girn’s HGE 2019 Leadership Summit Keynote address