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Micros once wrote this, I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line.

This then is something I know, the thought it takes to do physical work.

Micros died after a short illness in August, yet the particular way he saw the world resonates more than ever before,

as our debates about standardized testing, the information economy, and the future of school only intensify.

He argued with care and eloquence that we risk to narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the cognitive blend in all kinds of learning and in all kinds of labor.

His insights from our 2010 conversation, a conversation I cherished, offer much to enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects that are newly alive about the heart of who we are.

Including class dynamics, we still scarcely know how to speak about in-US culture, and the deepest meanings of intelligence and of vocation.

You and I both know people who are doing work that the culture at large from a distance when say is really meaningful and they're miserable.

There is unhappiest can be, you know, the miserable lawyer, the unhappy neurosurgeon, the right, meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept, I think, than we tend to imagine.

I'm just a tipit, and this is on being.

My grows was a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

He authored several books, including The Mind at Work and Back to School, why everyone deserves a second chance at education.

He grew up in Pennsylvania among Italian immigrants. His father was chronically ill, and his mother supported their family as a waitress.

How would you start to tell the story of how and when you became attentive to what you would call the spirit of education?

Maybe you wouldn't have called it that then, but what you now think of is the essence of education.

That's a lovely question. And you're right, I wouldn't have talked about it that way at the time.

I've got to say that it began for me in my senior year in high school. I didn't do so well in school.

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