David Brooks of the NY Times is one of my favorite writers. He’s best known for writing on politics and policy, from a center-right perspective (mine is center-left).  But my favorite columns usually reflect his broader interests, which closely match my own. These include neurobiology, psychology and personality.

This morning’s column The Arduous Community profiles Erica Brown who teaches adult education classes in Jewish thought. These sentences really struck a chord:  Americans obsess about K-12 education. But adult education is an orphan, an amorphous space in-between. This nation is probably full of people who’d be great adult educators, but there are few avenues to bring those teachers into contact with mature and hungry minds.

It made me realize that the TI Discussion Forum is among those rare ‘avenues’ he describes. It draws new mature and hungry minds each day. From among them emerge a steadily-growing group of adult educators in the “Practice of Swimming as a Vehicle for Self-Knowledge.”

There’s something especially uplifting for me in thinking of TI as an adult education community more than as a swim coaching organization.