What's it like to become fully human? In The Learning Project 35 people of all ages and backgrounds, from the celebrated to the unknown, recount lives of ecstasy, tragedy, success, and despair. Welcome your rites of passage, because without them you are unchanged.

The Learning Project is a search for the kind of learning that is most important. It presents in-depth interviews with people of all interests and walks of life, races, cultures, and political perspectives. Each person answers the question of how learning changed their life. The interviews are separated into 11 areas of interest and three stages of life: youth, middle age, or elder.

Those interviewed include artists, athletes, tradesmen, soldiers, scientists, and politicians, some of whom you'll know by name. They range from Nobel Laureate to street vandal, from physician to drug addict. Some have disabilities, many suffered trauma, all are survivors. They speak of learning through schooling, family, struggle, work, and hardship with stories that are personal, frustrating, and sometimes horrific. All are inspiring.

Some of these stories go back 15 years, others go back 150. They are stories of modern rites of passage echoing a mythology that goes back thousands of years. Locked in them is the secret to becoming human. I cannot give you the key, but you can find it.