To use a city as a classroom and workshop is to do more than take advantage of urban cultural offerings or contribute to a community project, it is to find active ways to partner with small businesses.

If you spend time in a healthy small business you learn about trust and hierarchy built on understanding and getting it done rather than on certificates and degrees.

Where else might you hear, “Oh, I told my boss to do it?

Healthy small businesses mill patrons into neighbors.

And since good work for our kids and grandchildren requires small businesses more than it does big tech, big banking, or big ego, schools ought to help small businesses begin, grow, survive and flourish.

Thus, Post-COVID, I urge you to try this: Run your class out of a locale cafe or coffee place (one owned by a person who works there) to observe (and emulate) what good customers do, consider what it means to be “well met” and, without hassling them or adding to all they have to do, gently increase the profits of the owner as you study your history, complete your essays, or finagle your project.

If you want lifelong learners, environments worth learning in long term, where the vanity of advancement will not be the chief lesson that empowers the well-learned, will be a prerequisite.