Dr. Grauer's Column - The Mexican Fisherman and the Businessman

The Mexican Fisherman and the Businessman
2024 Founder’s Day Remarks
By Stuart Grauer

Twenty-five years ago, around our 10th year as a school, we hosted our first Founders and Grandparents/Grandfriends Day in the center of our campus. Since then, I’ve embraced the roles of both Founder and grandparent.

Founding The Grauer School always felt more like an organic and personal extension of who I am than it did a plan. It felt natural, untouched by political motivations, though none of us can escape the prevailing currents and tides of the era in which we live.

Among the first items I purchased for the school—alongside desks and cabinets—was the American flag. At the time, I felt more like an artist than an activist, amazed that creating a school could be such an artistic act. Yet, even today, flying the American flag can feel like activism, reflecting competing visions of freedom. What a wonderful paradox that is.

1991 was a year of freedom. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, and many Eastern Bloc nations declared independence. Nirvana and Pearl Jam ushered in grunge rock. Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to their first NBA championship, while Magic Johnson courageously announced he had HIV. The United States ended the Indian Reservation Era, to some extent, by granting tribes more sovereignty.

Up in Los Angeles, the beating of Rodney King by police unleashed a wave of violence. That year, The Grauer School was the only school I knew that traveled into the heart of the riots to spend a day with a school and its kids in the middle of it. Ukraine declared independence. The U.N. released its first Climate Change Report. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion.

Those were our winds and tides. It’s been 34 years. How are we doing now?

Not all has evolved as we might have hoped. Childhood has, for too many, become a time for resume-building, stealing the free time young people need to play and explore as they are biologically designed to. Sports have become adult-supervised bureaucracies. Pressures for constant achievement have mounted.

Elders, this is why we are here: to remind the youth not only that they can trust us, but that they have permission to live freely—and they must. Intentionally, small schools like The Grauer School have become some of the world’s best proponents of this philosophy.

So let’s declare Founders Day an expression of freedom. Grandparents and elders are in the best position to model empowerment for students and teachers alike. We are here to inspire courage in our youth and show them that amazing opportunities arise from self-motivation.

Older age is a chance to live more idealistically. That’s why people can trust elders—we answer to our highest values. We can live discorrupted.

Walt Whitman celebrated this lifelong openness:

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

It’s easy to think of youth as carefree. But for me, it was often filled with insecurities and fear—fear of trying new things, saying what I felt, or staying playful. Youth, for many, is the time when we gather our hang-ups, and aging becomes the process of letting them go: bureaucracy, flattery, and other people’s dreams. Elders, we have work to do.

Only in retrospect does founding The Grauer School seem like a radical act. And today, we elders are here to give the younger generation radical permission for freedom and joy—to insist that such things are possible. That is our charge.

Let me share a parable I’ve always loved.

The Tale of the Mexican Fisherman and the Businessman

A wealthy businessman was vacationing in a small coastal village in Mexico when he saw a fisherman pulling his boat in to shore with several large, fresh fish.

The businessman complimented the fisherman. “How long did it take to catch those?”

“Only a little while,” the fisherman replied.

“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?”

The fisherman shrugged. “This is enough to feed my family—and maybe even the neighbor.”

The businessman pressed. “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening, sip wine, and play guitar with my friends.”

The businessman scoffed. “I’m a Harvard MBA, and I could help you. If you fished longer each day, you could sell the extra fish. With the profits, you could buy a bigger boat, then a fleet of boats, and eventually own your own company. You’d control production and distribution. Then you could move to the city, run everything from there, and make millions!”

“How long would that take?” asked the fisherman.

“Maybe 15–20 years,” said the businessman.

“And then what?”

The businessman laughed. “Then you could retire to a small village, sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll into the village, sip wine, and play guitar with your friends.”

The fisherman smiled, picked up his fish, and walked away.

I think differently now about the life of the surfer and the small independent school than I did in 1991. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s memoir Let My People Go Surfing describes his journey from young climber to head of one of the most respected and environmentally-responsible companies on earth. No matter how peaceful your existence or beautiful your beach, there may come a time when you have to fight or struggle for it. The Grauer School, a small and liberating place for kids, has had its share of those times.

In the end, freedom has surprised me—it turned out to be the most activist cause on the planet.

We are here to laugh, listen, and smile our children and grandchildren into their own, unobstructed lives—whether their clothes are purple, their hair curls wrong, or their words come out awkwardly; whether they think our kimchi, natto, or pickled herring is weird. We have learned that most of the “shoulds” they are told may be of no use in the end.

Let’s help them grow up a little wilder and freer—with room for laughter. And remember what it says on my coffee mug: Grandpas are Dads without rules.

Elders have fewer agendas, fewer people to answer to, and fewer things to prove. We live closer to the unknown and the eternal. Teens sense this. And because of that, they trust us.

Returning youth to our young people—that is our founding gift to the future. This is what makes Founders and Grandfriends' Day a magnificent event, along with celebrating with our wise and grand elders.

Welcome to this beautiful season!

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