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I attended a Vision of Excellence tour of top-notch schools in the Bay Area last spring. On the last day, we talked with the executive director of New Leaders Academy, a program that specializes in training principals to turn around struggling schools. We talked at length about his philosophy and experience being a leader. Most of it boiled down to vision, flexibility, and self-efficacy.

We had dinner at Delancey Street, a self-contained campus on the edge of the Embarcadero. On Delancey Street, there is a moving business, a trucking company, a café, a restaurant, a catering company, a digital printing company, and a landscaping company, all of which are managed and staffed entirely by former drug addicts, convicts, and felons who live on the campus.

Some of the residents gave us a tour. They explained the history of the enterprise and the joy that it has brought them to be able to give back to society. Their professionalism, positivity, and care for one another showed in their eyes, and was infectious.

At Delancey, I stood next to the philanthropist who made the trip possible. He said, humbly, “Doing well is good, but it is better to do good.”

He said that he can’t change the world in the same way that the educators standing in the room can over the course of their lives. But he was glad that he could at least make it possible for us to do that work. He expressed remarkable and sincere understanding of his own limitations despite all of his accomplishments in life. And that was a reminder that even the people who we assume live at a great remove from society’s problems often remain very much attuned to them.

Recently, I was house-sitting for a successful friend. He’s a professional guy with an awesome apartment in a high-rise building. I was riding the elevator one day with one of his neighbors, a nice, older gentleman. The man took a look at the bicycle that I was about to ride, and he asked me if I had lights and a safety helmet.

I assured him I had the proper equipment and asked him what his plans were for the evening. He was headed to the art museum. I couldn’t help but feel that his civic concern for my safety, professional success, and appreciation of art were inextricably related inside his psyche.

The common thread among all of these people is that they are smart, successful, wholesome, and hopeful. In short, they are the sort of people we are trying to raise our kids to become.

Our children have every bit of the potential necessary to become thoughtful and dedicated adults, successful professionals, and forward-thinking leaders, but our education system doesn’t seem to be geared toward helping them to fulfill their potential.

We can’t access our students’ potential by focusing solely on reading and math. That is one of the reasons why arts, music, and languages are so important. Teachers’ shift toward focusing on other areas — such as science, technology, and engineering — is a positive move in terms of economic competition. That said, we are still leaving kids developmentally behind in the areas of life that make people whole.

As a society, we talk about teaching the whole child, but we neglect arts education. We talk about preparing our kids to be successful in life, but we don’t focus on teaching them how to be reflective, emotionally stable, or empathetic. And we talk about educating students for jobs that don’t exist yet and solving problems that we don’t even know are problems yet, but we don’t have any classes that focus on modern problems and issues even though doing so would actually capture the attention of our students.

Before reading a story in class, I tell my students what Joseph Campbell said about stories being road maps to understanding and contextualizing their own lives. At such moments, I have their undivided attention. And when, before assigning a paper, we discuss modern issues — like how much students can expect to be discriminated against based on their names — they articulate beliefs that they didn’t even know they believed.

In those cases, I succeed in grabbing students’ attention because these are issues that shape and develop them as human beings. It isn’t just knowledge of subject matter.

But many teachers don’t focus on that kind of developmental insight, and our school schedule doesn’t have a single class built for the purpose of that kind of intellectual exploration of self, or that kind of articulation.

For an individual to change their thinking, they must change their actions. And for our schools to change from what they are now into institutions that focus on the skills that students really need for the future, they have to start changing how the schedule is set up and what the class descriptions are.

We can’t just stick to the same antiquated assembly line of math, science, and English, and expect well-adjusted adults with the skills necessary for the future to pop out of the other end. The scary part is this: I don’t think that most bureaucrats in charge of our education system are personally self-actualized enough to know what any of this even means.

But here are some suggestions. We should start by bringing back arts education. Beyond that, the DOE needs to create a think-tank for some really bright teachers to start devising curriculum for a pilot class that focuses on students developing vision, reflection, values, and ideas about some of the problems that affect — and that matter — to our students.

Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a forum to talk about such things in our schools.