Our son Eric and daughter Emma found a profound landscape for exploration, adventure, and development, beyond the realm of school and “formal” education, on the Internet. Now in the 21st Century, our kids are exploring a “World Wide Web”, as virtual as the experience of the “Wild West” has been to the wannabe cowboys of the 20th Century, and perhaps as profound.

In the 19th and 20th Century Americans were inspired by the mythology, if not the reality, of the old west. For those few people who actually blazed the trails and “settled” the wilderness (often at the expense or even destruction of the native population), their lives were surely difficult and their world dangerous, but there stories were compelling and inspired American culture. Continue reading →