What Does the Future Hold for Our Little Valley in the Foothills Above LA?

There definitely is a lot of reason these days for uncertainty and anxiety about the future. Nuclear war is closer than any time since the Cuban missile crisis. The recent fires that devastated Altadena brought the escalating climate crisis so terribly close to home. 

In these times, I am reminded of the wisdom of my ancestors and the strength that saw them through tricky times. My dad’s mom came out to California during the Dust Bowl, half a century before my parents found their home in the foothills. At the tender age of 12, her family sold off the farm and all but a few of their worldly belongings. They packed up the car and with a few hundred dollars and a hope of a job at the port they drove West. 

Imagine that! That is truly something. I can only imagine being the dad behind the wheel of that car with the very real risks of being able to put food on the table. Today it’s easy to get anxious about what we see scrolling through these “glass bricks” and contemplating what might happen. I find these types of stories provide useful perspectives as we prepare for the future.

I’m biased though; I find that La Crescenta has lots of wonderful qualities that are timeless assets in navigating uncertainty. I love the “do it yourself” gumption and enduring pioneering spirit you see all over the valley. This community has over five hundred flag lots and tons of DIY home additions – a testament to the deep culture of La Crescenta’s community rolling up its sleeves and building the future wanted for families.

La Crescenta has wonderful world class public schools. I was lucky to go to great universities for my undergraduate and graduate education, as well as benefiting from many informal opportunities for learning. I’ve always prized what I learned in Glendale Unified and informally from the parents of friends growing up in this community. I feel that La Crescenta at its best is a living testament to the timeless adage that it’s important to never let your schooling interfere with your education. I saw that in the recent tragic passing of Coach Gossard, a wonderful Falcon and a great human whose mark you could see in these pages as well as in the wonderful comments left on Facebook.

How humans – young and old – learn is clearly changing. I’m not exceptionally handy but find that the wonderful array of how to videos and resources online provide varied tools for self education in everything from home improvement to trying the latest data science tools. The dazzling (and often overwhelming) array of new artificial intelligence tools provide the means to access and navigate even more information – though not always accurately. Of course, just because something is written in a book doesn’t make it the capital “T” in truth, either.

I have long been optimistic that interactive digital tools will provide the means for nurturing inquiry based education. About a decade back I wrote an essay for the leading education technology magazine EdSurge daydreaming how tools in the not-too-distant future might enable and encourage the type of curiosity driven learning that was one of my favorite parts of growing up in La Crescenta. The piece shares the story of a young boy exploring a local canyon and building water works while dialoguing with an AI agent about how the Romans built such waterworks.

“Rather than getting bogged down in arbitrary distinctions between ‘academic’ and ‘trade’ learning, the community recognized the value of going both up and down the ladder of abstraction. They found unity in focusing on the deeper issue of releasing human potential. The emphasis on ‘meeting standards’ began to fade, replaced instead with the idea of ‘developing purpose,’ or finding deep meaning in an individual life and in the value that a student seeks to add to our broader human civilization.”(https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-04-02-a-radically-practical-vision-of-education)

I love La Crescenta and would love to see the schools here blaze a trail through this new frontier. I know a lot of that is already happening. Some of that though will require courageous reform. Simple things, like how we teach history, require common sense updates. We learned U.S. history from the Revolution to the Civil War three times in fifth, eighth and 11th grade. But we never got to WW2 or the Korean or Vietnam War – episodes of U.S. history with obvious relevance to today!

The world is changing fast but I deeply believe in the capacity of this community to adapt. Each of us is heir to powerful stories of sacrifice and grit – like my grandmother’s journey in the depths of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression – to build the quality of life we enjoy today in these beautiful foothills. 

Let’s honor that legacy and those learnings by making sure La Crescenta doesn’t just remember the past – it leads boldly into the future.

Patrick’s a husband, father, son, brother, avid cyclist, fervent reader, enjoyer of adventures, lover of board games and the author of A New California Dream. He is writing here in his personal capacity.