Grinell Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Elementary Education at San Jose State University, where he teaches a range of courses on topics such as school curriculum theory, classroom management, research methods, educational psychology, technology integration, and science methods. His scholarly activities seek to redefine the purpose of education away from current mainstream conceptions of schools primarily as economic resources governed by market mechanisms and that view children merely as consumers and future wage-earners, and toward a conception of schools as places that strive for the Jeffersonian ideal of producing an informed citizenry of critical thinkers and that help children become happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and fulfilled people who understand how to live balanced lives in the context of their families, communities, cultures, and ecosystems. Grinell believes that paying attention to the fundamental purpose of schooling is foundational to this sort of education and subsumes this view in all the courses he teaches at SJSU. He elucidates these views further in some of his recent publications, including Modern education: a tragedy of the commons (Journal of Curriculum Studies), Teaching care ethics: conceptual understandings and stories for learning (Journal of Moral Education), The way we educate (Schools: Studies in Education), and Stories from five decades (Action in Teacher Education).