On Monday LREI hosted the sixth evening in our LREI:Ideas speakers series when Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good For You, spoke to a large crowd made up of members of the LREI community and a good number of people from NYC’s tech world. Earlier series events featured:
- John Merrow
- Christy Turlington Burns
- Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Gabriel Orozco
- Marian Goodman
- Jaimie Cloud
The goal of hosting this series was to honor the School’s 90th anniversary by highlighting the spirit of innovation, intellectual engagement and curiosity that were integral to the School’s founding and which remain essential to LREI’s work today. By all accounts, we accomplished this. These conversations challenged us to look to the past to find future solutions to the world’s intractable problems, to press on in the face of adversity, to work together to ensure a sustainable future, to be creative, to serve the cause of social justice and to harness the power embedded in the differences that threaten to separate us.
In important ways these are similar to the challenges that LREI’s students are asked to confront on a daily basis, communicated in age-appropriate ways and approached with the support of LREI’s fantastic faculty. Our students are asked to accomplish tasks that are akin to the work that talented and innovative people do each day in their professional lives. These tasks are open-ended, require specific skills, demand collaboration, and invite the use of a critical lens. This is how it has been at the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School for 90 years, and how it will continue to be as we anticipate the needs of the coming decades. Thank you to all of our speakers and to those of you who attended some or all of these presentations. I cannot think of a more fitting way to honor Elisabeth Irwin’s founding ideals.
We are planning on continuing the series next year. If you have suggestions for topics or speakers please be in touch.