Online Reading Group with Kirk Schneider, PhD

First of a Series of 4 Reading The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age

Parenting and Education Re-visioned: A Vibrant Centered Approach

Facilitated by: Kirk Schneider, PhD

Date: Thursday, September 3, 2026
Time: 10AM – 11:30AM Pacific Time | 6PM – 7:30 PM (BST)
Fee: Pay What You Can for Live Access the Guide Price is £20.00; Recording Access is separate at £9.99

Online Live Access via Zoom & Recorded for Later Viewing
Hosted by: UK Online Events

Registration >>

The series opens with the chapters closest to home: parenting and education. Kirk explores the “grace points” in family life, the small openings where awe, rather than anxiety, can take root, and asks what it really means to raise children who are present, open, and able to think critically without losing their sense of wonder. In the classroom, he turns to what he calls an “experiential democracy dialogue”: a way of teaching that trusts young people with complexity rather than shielding them from it. He’ll offer a brief introduction to these ideas before opening the floor for a conversation open to parents, educators, therapists, and anyone raising or shaping the next generation.

In The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age, Kirk makes an urgent case: that the extremism and polarisation fracturing our politics, our workplaces and our closest relationships can’t be healed from the top down alone. It has to be built from the ground up, in how we parent, how we teach, how we work, worship, and govern. Wendy Smith, author of Both/And Thinking, has called it ‘one of the most important calls to awareness I have encountered in years.’ Rather than a call to a mundane middle ground, Kirk’s ‘vibrant center’ is dynamic and alive to complexity: a practical, hopeful vision for shifting from a fear-based world to an awe-based one.

This autumn, Kirk joins UK Online Events for a four-part online reading group to explore that vision together. Across four sessions, spanning parenting and education, work and spirituality, government and politics, and a closing vision of an awe-based world, Kirk offers a brief framing of each part of the book before opening the floor to discussion and questions. Although it is recommended, there is no requirement to have read the book in advance, and no need to attend every session: each stands alone, though together they trace the full arc of his argument. Sessions run fortnightly on Thursdays at 6pm UK / 10am Pacific, and are open to the public on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a recording ticket also available for anyone who can’t join live.

About the Facilitator

Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D. (USA) is a leading spokesperson for existential-humanistic and existential-integrative psychology, an adjunct faculty member at Saybrook University and formerly Teachers College, Columbia University, and a cofounder and current president of the award-winning Existential-Humanistic Institute. Dr. Schneider is the author/co-author of 16 books, including his latest The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age.