About TOCW

Picture a father in a long-ago, faraway place bidding farewell to his son as the boy sets off to seek his fortune.

“My son,” says the father, “I am proud of you. You are smart and strong and vital. You have excelled in your studies of mathematics, the sciences, languages, and history. Yet, my son, there is still much you will need to understand to successfully travel the road of life.”

“First, you will need to understand yourself — who you are, what you truly want, and why. You will need to know how your mind works, how to make wise decisions, and how to recognize what is real and true in a world full of competing voices telling you what to think and want and be.

As well, you will need to know how to take care of your body, how to manage your time and money, and how to form relationships that sustain rather than diminish you.”

When the father had finished, the son looked at him with great concern. “But father,” he said, “I have no idea how to do any of those things.”

To which his loving father responded, sheepishly: “I realize that. Nobody taught me these things either. I’m still figuring them out. We can’t teach what we don’t know — so how could I possibly teach you? Good luck, my son. Fare thee well.”

Of course, this isn’t a fable from some long-ago, faraway place. It’s something we do every year, to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance. We call it graduation.

This parable takes me back to my own high school graduation in 1973 when, as wisps of clouds scattered across a late June sky, I stood behind a stately wood-grained podium, looking out over a sea of faces. I was speaking on the topic of Man’s Responsibility to Society.

I have a copy of that commencement address and just re-read it. It was little more than a circular cavalcade of polished platitudes and five-dollar words that said nothing of any merit or meaning. It said nothing because I knew nothing. None of us graduates did as we headed onto the road of life. Most notably, we had no idea of what we didn’t know — and needed to.

What followed were decades of what I call “the long course of trial and error,” a rich, adventurous, often instructive, though sometimes painful education delivered inefficiently and expensively by life itself. Over time, I figured things out. As I did, one question kept returning:

Why was none of this ever taught to me?

Because, as I had come to realize, so much of what I had finally come to learn from the “school of hard knocks” is otherwise eminently teachable.

More recently, having arrived at a point in life where I could see the terrain more clearly, and with concern not just for young people, but for society as a whole, I began asking a follow-up question:

What would we want our children to know and understand — and to be aware and capable of — as they set out on to travel the bumpy road of life?

In early 2023, following an extended period of intensive study and reflection, I published a Vision Statement that addressed that very question. I proposed a comprehensive curriculum of life-navigation skills for late teens and young adults that covered relationships, health, and finances, the three pillars of a capable, grounded life. I called it Conscious Choices.

I shared it with parents, educators, mental health professionals, and other adults. They gave it a standing ovation. “This is exactly what kids need,” they said. “But,” (there’s always a but!) “we don’t know this stuff either. Nobody ever taught us — we’re still figuring it out ourselves. How can we possibly model and support what you’d be teaching our kids? You need to teach us first, Jonathan. Write a book — for adults.”

They were right. We can’t teach what we don’t understand. We can’t model what we haven’t lived. And so TOCW was born from that recognition:

To teach our children well, we first need to teach the adults.

So, I wrote the requested book, which soon overflowed its covers and became two volumes. Then three and eventually enough content for five books — altogether, emerging as what is now known as the Curriculum for Living or CFL: a comprehensive, integrated body of knowledge encompassing the mindsets, skillsets, and practical know-how that constitute an aware, practical foundational education in how to navigate life.

But (yup, another but) as the books took shape, two things became clear to me.

The first was about the adults who had said “teach us first.” They weren’t just asking in order to become better parents or teachers. They sorely needed these insights for themselves — to navigate their own lives with greater awareness, less struggle, and more meaning. The Curriculum for Living wasn’t just preparation for teaching kids. It was something adults urgently needed in their own right because, like me, nobody ever taught them this stuff.

That insight became the driver of TOCW’s Empower Adults initiative — the recognition that equipping adults to live more competently and gracefully is both the necessary first step toward teaching our children well and a worthy purpose in itself.

The second was about delivery. The question that had been haunting me was: how do I scale the teaching of something as personalized as life-navigation skills? How do I reach not hundreds but millions of people — without sacrificing the quality, coherence, and intimacy that make this content transformational rather than merely informational?

The answer, I came to realize, wasn’t to build an institution. It was to restore something older, more meaningful, and more powerful. And it had just become possible!

For most of human history, children weren’t educated by institutions. They were educated by their parents, their families, and their community — what the Ubuntu people call “the village.” Children learned by watching, participating, and absorbing the values, wisdom, and practical know-how of the people who knew and loved them most. That inheritance was personal, contextual, and alive.

Public education — a necessary and largely noble invention of the Industrial Age — gradually displaced that model, moving parents from the center of their children’s education to the periphery. Not out of ill-intent. Out of practicality. But at a significant cost — one we continue to pay in the form of adults who are underprepared and know it, frustrated and feel it, and prone to the kinds of costly, avoidable mistakes and missed opportunities that come from simply not knowing any better.

What I came to see — and what TOCW is built around — is that this can change. The means now exist, through accessible media, online learning, AI-assisted personalization, and community, to put the Curriculum for Living directly into the hands of adults: parents, educators, and others who care about the next generation. Not as passive recipients of someone else’s curriculum, but as informed, equipped, and competent teachers in their own right.

This is the vision and promise of what’s happening right now in alternative education — in micro-schools, homeschool networks, learning pods, gap year programs, and on-ramp initiatives. Parents and educators in these spaces are actively seeking exactly this kind of integrated, life-navigation curriculum. They have the motivation, the access to young people, and increasingly, the tools. What they’ve been missing is a coherent, substantive, well-developed body of content to draw from.

That’s exactly what the Curriculum for Living provides. Ta dah!

TOCW has already created the foundational content — the Curriculum for Living. Now we’re building the platform, the programs, and the community to bring it to life:

Our All We Need to Know podcast brings the core of the CFL to adults in an engaging, accessible form — so that parents, educators, and others can encounter these ideas for themselves first and road test them.

Our online Learn it/Live it Briefings & Symposia turn the podcast’s core concepts and insights into structured, practical learning for adults who want to go deeper, more fully develop their understanding, and acquire the wherewithal and confidence to teach it.

AlluvUs, our community forum, is where adults, educators, technologists, and creators work together — sharing experiences, comparing approaches, and collaborating on how the CFL can be adapted to the needs of parents, teachers, and young people in their respective communities and learning environments.

And PREPAREnting addresses the deeper roots — the intergenerational patterns that shape how we see ourselves and our world, how we interrelate and, ultimately, how we parent — with the conviction that healing those patterns is among the most consequential things we can do for the generations ahead.

It’s been more than fifty years since I stood behind that stately wood-grained podium as wisps of clouds scattered across a late June sky, and droned on about Man’s Responsibility to Society.

Man’s responsibility to society is to educate ourselves and each other — to empower people to navigate life’s twists and turns, to elevate them, and afford them every opportunity to have a meaningful, contributory, extraordinary life — to teach our children well.

Everything TOCW is building is in service of that responsibility.

I invite you to be part of it.

— Jonathan Cleary, Founder, Teach Our Children Well