Arlene will be in conversation with Nina Simons, co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and author of Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership

What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels.

Her book, In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated? explores issues of education itself through essays and personal portraits of the key minds who influenced her. She sees each of her 'angels' as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.” Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place—and failed. Readers will learn about the author’s own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.