dr. paul’s blog

Please join Dr. Paul in his new Blog called “Founder’s Corner.” In this column, you will find short videos and other resources that support our shared and collective vision as a school and community, uniquely positioned in a rapidly-changing world. Dr. Paul welcomes your questions and comments. 

october 2, 2026

Why We Should Tell the Story of the Great Turning

We humans have a well-established negativity bias: threatening and disturbing information tends to command attention disproportionately. Modern news and social-media systems can magnify this because attention is economically valuable. The result can be an important distortion: what is most visible can begin to feel like what is most representative. War, political breakdown, ecological destruction, cruelty, and catastrophe, are real and deserve attention, but they are not the entirety of what humanity is doing.

The Great Turning is the emerging shift from a civilization organized around domination, hierarchy, and extraction, toward one grounded in equality, mutual responsibility, and respect for the living Earth. To understand how quickly the Great Turning is happening, we first need to understand what it is turning away from.

About 5,000 years ago, as large agricultural societies and early civilizations developed, a new way of organizing human society emerged. David Korten calls this the Empire model. Riane Eisler describes a similar pattern as the domination system.

For thousands of years, societies were largely organized around hierarchy and domination. Kings and Emperors ruled over their subjects. Men ruled over women. Powerful nations conquered less-resourced and less-military ones. Slavery turned human beings into property. Warfare became an accepted way to gain land, wealth, and power. And nature was increasingly treated as something humans could own, exploit, and control. This way of organizing society became so common that, for most of recorded history, it was simply considered normal.

That is what makes the Great Turning so remarkable. Compared with this 5,000-year history, the movement toward more equal and democratic societies is incredibly young. Many of the changes we now take for granted have happened only within the last 250 years. And the pace of change has been extraordinary. In just a few generations, ideas that had existed for thousands of years have been challenged, overturned, or radically transformed.

We can see this Great Turning in seven enormous changes:

1. The Abolition of Slavery

For thousands of years, slavery was accepted in societies around the world. Human beings could legally be bought, sold, and owned by other human beings. Then, over a surprisingly short period of history, abolition movements, slave rebellions, political campaigns, and international agreements made slavery illegal across most of the world. Something that had existed for millennia went from being considered normal to being internationally condemned.

2. The End of Colonial Empires

For most of history, powerful nations conquered weaker peoples and claimed their land as their own. During the 20th century, the vast European colonial empires rapidly broke apart. Independence movements across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, established a radically different principle: people have the right to govern themselves. Conquest was no longer widely accepted as sufficient justification for ruling another people.

3. The Expansion of Democracy and Voting Rights

For most of recorded history, ordinary people had little or no political power. Even early democracies usually allowed only a small portion of the population to vote. That has changed dramatically. Voting rights expanded beyond wealthy men to working people, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Women’s suffrage is especially striking. In little more than a century, the idea that women should vote went from being considered radical in many societies to becoming a basic expectation of modern democracy. And to go further, 

4. The Transformation of Women’s and Family Rights

For centuries, women in many societies had far fewer legal rights than men. In some legal systems, a married woman’s independent legal identity was severely restricted. That has changed dramatically. Women gained rights to own property, earn and control money, seek divorce, participate in public life, and receive legal protection from domestic and sexual violence. Marriage and family life increasingly came to be understood not as relationships of domination, but as relationships between people with equal human rights.

5. The Rise of Civil, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ Rights

Another enormous change has been the growing recognition that human differences should not determine who has rights. Civil rights movements challenged racial segregation and discrimination. Indigenous peoples around the world have fought for sovereignty, cultural survival, land rights, and self-determination. LGBTQ+ peoples have gained legal recognition and protections that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few generations ago. The deeper change is cultural: societies are increasingly recognizing human diversity rather than demanding that everyone fit into a rigid hierarchy.

6. The Rise of Workers’ Rights and the Social Safety Net

The Industrial Revolution created enormous wealth, but it also produced terrible working conditions. Workers -including children- often worked extremely long hours in dangerous factories for very little pay. Over the last 150 years, labor movements and political reforms created workplace safety laws, restrictions on child labor, shorter working hours, public education, social security, public health systems, and other forms of social protection. The underlying idea was revolutionary: an economy should serve human well-being, not simply the accumulation of wealth.

7. The Emergence of the Rights of Nature

And now the Great Turning may be reaching another boundary. For thousands of years, nature has largely been treated, in law, as human property -a collection of resources that people are entitled to own and use. That idea is beginning to change. In a growing number of places, rivers, forests, ecosystems, and other parts of the natural world are being recognized as having legal rights of their own, of having personhood, and a right to exist, flourish, and regenerate.

So, we are witnessing a shift away from a civilization organized primarily around domination, hierarchy, and extraction toward one increasingly organized around human dignity, equality, participation, mutual responsibility, and respect for the living Earth. And when we place these changes against 5,000 years of recorded history, what is most remarkable is not simply that they are happening. It is how quickly they are happening.

And I want to say that none of this means that history is moving smoothly or inevitably toward a better world. The same centuries that brought abolition, democracy, human rights, and environmental consciousness, has also brought colonial violence, industrialized warfare, genocide, nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, and new concentrations of economic and technological power. It is therefore possible to tell more than one story about the direction of human civilization. The Great Turning does not deny these contradictions nor guarantee where history will lead. It suggests something more modest, but still extraordinary: that alongside our continuing capacity for domination, a historically young and increasingly powerful countercurrent has emerged, one that keeps widening the circle of beings considered worthy of dignity, rights, and moral concern. 

This is why telling the story of the Great Turning matters. The stories we tell about ourselves do more than describe the world; they help shape what we believe is possible within it. If we see history primarily as an endless repetition of domination, violence, and greed, resignation can seem reasonable. But if we recognize that slavery has been delegitimized, empires dismantled, democracy expanded, women and marginalized peoples granted rights once considered unimaginable, and even nature itself increasingly recognized as worthy of personhood and protection, a different story becomes visible. Naming these changes as part of a larger Great Turning reminds us that profound transformations have already happened, and are continuing to happen. Telling the story of the Great Turning is itself part of the Great Turning, because what we believe is possible, helps determine what we are willing to create.

We live within an information culture that gives extraordinary attention to catastrophe, conflict, cruelty, and collapse. These things are real. We should never look away from them. But they are not the whole story. If our attention is continually drawn towards what is breaking, while the quieter transformation of human values remains largely invisible, we may mistake what captures our attention for the direction of history itself. That is why stories of the Great Turning are worth amplifying, not as comforting alternatives to reality, but as another part of reality that deserves to be seen. Hope grounded in evidence is not naïveté. It can be a source of human agency. If despair tells us that nothing can change, the history of the Great Turning reminds us that things already have, and that the next chapter remains ours to write.

At Manzanita School we’re proud to be able to talk about the Great Turning, and to introduce to our young students through many many layers of activity, curriculum, and daily engagement. Thank you parents. 

SEPTEMBER 25, 2026

There is No School Like This

When we imagine most schools these days, we expect classrooms where reading, writing, and 'rithmetic take place. There will be science study and some history lesson. We also think of PE, art enrichment, maybe a maker lab, and an occasional field trip, lunch and recess. These schools are filled with mostly compliant children buzzing through classes, waiting for summer breaks. “We'll put the kiddos through a solid 12 or 13 years of this and then off to college.” 

Our world has not been made better because of this model, but in spite of it. There are a host of developmental missteps in this model, and the school reform movement has come and gone, come back again and faded out again, joined to generations of scholars aging out in waves. It's wrong for 1,000 reasons, and the world suffers under our indifference to the fictions of this model. 

At Manzanita we care about supporting a child's literacy. We want articulate writers and lucid thinkers. And we build math competency and problem-solving skills. But when it comes to science and humanities, these are woven into a rich broth of embodied brilliance, destined to awaken sincere sentiments of symbiotic human commitment to earth engagement and an ethic of stewardship that will enhance the world in which we live for generations to come. 

A nature-immersed Forest Kindergarten becomes an Expeditionary Learning program by 3rd grade, with sleep overs in wild places, camping through mountain passes into middle school, and services trips in high school. Each week, the academic program is complemented by a full day of Nature Connection practices that ensure a love of place, and an appreciation of a Living Earth. Another day is dedicated to Stewardship in which our students, in cross-grade-level mentoring teams, tend to the creeks, fields, and hills of our campus, clearing, cleaning, beautifying, and gifting their hands and hearts to create beauty and health for the land. This intimate symbiosis between interdisciplinary academics and embodied engagement with the earth, awakens the future human, who builds a life of service to healing all that makes us human. 

Our days at Manzanita are bookended in circles, in which connection, community and common stories of gratitude grow our breadth of belonging. “We will love one another and love the earth,” while establishing life-long competencies, and intimacy with our origins, a voice that visualizes stories of what is truly possible for all of us. 

Children thrive here. They graduate with integrity and compassion, with hearts intact, minds clear, convictions intact, poised to bring goodness to their lives and their work. 

Expeditions to wild places together, immersive nature-connection experiences each week, systems of stewardship sending students towards mutual symbiosis as their value set, circles of gratitude and story to bind hearts in common communities of care, each class a temple of integrity. Academic content that reinforces feelings of purposeful engagement with place, land, wind, and wilds. They are nourished not just from these designs and destinations, these dedications and deliberate dances with the numinous earth, but also from food fashioned with love, harvested wholesomely, and crafted with care. A nutrient dense lunch to mediate a rich and nuanced world of learning. 

This is Manzanita. There is no school like this! 

September 18, 2026

“Mentoring Relationships” and “Intrinsic Gift” -Two of Manzanita’s Guiding Principles

Despite every parent’s best intentions, we cannot mentor our own children. This doesn’t mean we can’t teach them, guide them, or advise them. We can. We just can’t ‘mentor’ them. Mentor is a very special role in one’s life. The mentor sees our genius, acknowledges it, welcomes it, and helps us to bring it into the world. 

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with this, but a parent must first love a child unconditionally, right? Because of this biological dynamic, this unqualified connection, the child will seek to have their gift seen by someone other than mom and dad. If a parent tries to bless the gift, the child will rebel and shut down. “Of course you see me! You love me!” The blessing, for it to activate the gift, must come from someone who is rather less invested. That kind of blessing proves that the genius is real. An auntie, an uncle, a grandparent, a neighbor, a teacher. They can all mentor your child, but you dear parents, cannot. There is so much you can give to your child. This includes giving them an environment full of potential mentors. The more loving, caring, engaged, and compassionate adults who work with your child, the more opportunities there will be for mentoring moments. It’s often as simple as, “Hey, I saw the way you listened to your peers in that circle. You are a compassionate listener.” or “I notice you are consistently engaged when we are writing. You have a gift for focus.” or “Wow, you make lines with such intention when we are using oil pastels. That confidence can produce real art!” These noticings by compassionate mentors open up the qualities of the intrinsic gift in young people, especially as they move towards adolescence. 

At Manzanita, two of our Guiding Principles are “Intrinsic Gift,” and “Mentoring Relationships.” We believe every human being comes into the world with a unique genius. Once activated through mentoring, it will serve the world as a gift to community and the world. This is an old story. A part of the story is that the gift is seeded by ancestors at the moment of birth. It is the role of mentors to awaken the gift and help a young person to cultivate the competencies that will help the gift to flourish. And a part of the idea is that this gift is needed by the world in the time a person is living. 

May we all bless the gifts of the young people around us, and let’s remember that we are responsible for one another’s children, to serve as mentors, witnesses, and the ones who will see and bless the gift. In its most simple form, mentoring is authentic noticing. Look for those gifts, and bless them. Do this with your nephews, nieces, neighbors, and the friends of your children. This is one beautiful way we can continue to heal our communities in these times. Thank you dear parents. 

September 12, 2026

Dr. Paul Visits Farmer’s Market with School of Lunch

This past Wednesday morning (September 9th, 2026), I was grateful to join our Kitchen Manager, Pam Nears as she shopped at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market located near Ocean and Arizona avenues, just a block from the beach. I tagged along, carried some boxes, helped load the truck, and admired her tremendous rapport and connection with so many local farmers. On our visit to the market, we also ran into Chuck Barth, one of the co-founders of our food program. He was shopping specifically for proteins (meat and chicken) for the school, his area of expertise. Our tremendous “School of Lunch” (SOL) program was founded by Hilary Boynton and Chuck, and provides the most nutritious meals imaginable. There may not be a healthier school lunch program anywhere in the country. Every day, our Manzanita students are served these super flavorful, nutrient dense, locally sourced, and largely organic meals, made with great care and creativity. The food in MNZ’s meal program is extremely fresh, and is included under the tuition umbrella for all families. Both snack and lunch, as well as sandwich bars for Hawk Day students, are carefully crafted by loving hands. And our kitchen staff is comprised of a beautiful group of hard-working and super compassionate people. The students love the SOL team, and we do too! If you’d like to express your gratitude for the food, send an email to Dr. Paul, and I’ll pass it along to the SOL Team! 

September 9, 2026

Stories Between the Worlds