On his first day of school, Eric was shocked when he saw students in his class unashamedly napping with their heads down on their desks. How could the students do well when they were sleeping in class, he wondered? He also marveled at how comfortable the students seemed in the classroom itself, making themselves very much at home. Eric was allowed to leave school after two p.m. and asked another student what would happen after he left. The student told him that classes finished after four, then the students performed chores around the school such as cleaning the floors. Test-prep classes happened after that, then dinner at school, then a study period, then everyone left at 9 p.m. to go to private classes until 11. Then they went home. "Suddenly, he understood what he had seen in class that day," Ripley wrote of Eric. "The kids had acted like they lived in the classroom because they essentially did. They spent more than twelve hours there every weekday – and they already went to school almost two months longer than kids back in Minnesota. His classmates slept in their classes because they were exhausted."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
