By telling his own story in Ceremony of Innocence from the setting of a Japanese Maple Garden at Sandy Springs, a rural community in transformation from a tobacco economy to one of vineyards and nursery crops, Roger Sharpe addresses what society owes its youngest generation, especially with respect to a humanities education, i.e. an education for freedom. He expresses a genuine and well-informed concern for the influence of political and religious extremists' attacks on public education, its consequences for children of poor and working class families, and long-term implications for democratic government. Proposing any imaginative solution that argues boldly for reconciliation among people of good will in American society before public education's role in a democracy be enhanced has required an extraordinary range of cross-cultural experiences and multidisciplinary studies. Roger Sharpe discusses the best of his learning from imminent scholars and practitioners, and from his own research, work and reflective observation in fields of criminal justice, education, history, politics, government, civil rights, religion, the arts and sciences, and the sociology of community problem-solving. Advanced studies at. Harvard's Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, for example, afforded him the luxury of reading the history of the politics of American education as very few others have been given. In Ceremony of Innocence Roger Sharpe proposes creation of an institute for training small group leaders who would welcome dialogue among participants, invite reconciliation, and encourage the rebuilding of American communities across economic and social class lines.
