Course Title

The Fantastic Truths Which Could Unite Us - A Counterbalance To Negativity

By Getting Along Academy Inc. (Copyright 2025)

Program Design and Delivery:

Intended for people considering piloting the program, as well as facilitators of the workshop

Background and Context:

“In 2020, Glenn Cort sat down to write his youngest son a birthday card as he was heading off to college. Glenn had become worried that the world was changing in ways that he couldn’t understand. He was teaching a high school class, and a general sense of societal noise and confusion dominated his classroom. Everyone could feel it, but nobody could place a finger on what it was. Feeling at a loss and unable to complete his letter to his son, he left his “day job” and set out on an exploration for any sources of truth that could explain what was happening and maybe even answer a question that had long been bothering him: Why is it that people should struggle to get along so badly, and for so long?  

After several years of research, he emerged more optimistic than ever. Having grown certain of finding recurring themes and patterns across cultures and time that represent pure objective truth, he was able to complete that birthday card, and it became a book: Letters To Mikey, Messages of Hope and Optimism for Young Americans, which is the framework for this curriculum. 

Mission, Description, and Goals:

The mission of the curriculum is to provide young Americans a unique perspective that will help them to recognize their great capacity for goodness, to bond around their commonalities, to help each other disagree better, and to live to see a more united America. It hopes to provide them non-contraversial, non-religious, non-judgmental, and non-preachy foundation of knowledge upon which the younger generation can build more trust in each other and better navigate differences. 

This course aims to provide a pedagogical structure of the overarching reasons we struggle to get along, particularly in America, and offers a unique perspective by which a future generation can improve things. The curriculum is based on years of academic research and synthesizes leading information across disciplines concerning the loss of natural affection for others, polarization, extremism, and hate. It has been uniquely designed:

1. To prove to young people that they are born with more good traits than bad ones, with tremendous capacity for virtue, and not to shield the bad, but to teach that our bad traits are learned and prompted, goodness is our true essence.

2. Help them understand the main ingredients that cause us to detach from our naturally born goodness.

3. We consider the virtues of humility, balance, and responsibility to be good for us, while loss of virtue is bad for us.

The workshop is geared to help teenagers, grades 7-9, to see more clearly what they have in common as people, and to understand how and why we lose our capacities over time, at no fault of our own. The course reinforces critical understanding of what we are capable of. It’s designed to supplement other social, emotional learning, or social science courses and to be provided in clubs, camps, non-profits, or places of worship.

Design and Delivery Details:

This curriculum or workshop is not meant to be “taught,” it is more designed as a set of ideas to be explored with a group of young, curious minds. To be reviewed, and potentially improved for wider distribution, that is, if the group believes, after taking the course, that the course materials could help a future generation live in a less divided, more hopeful, and trusting world. The materials were created over many years to speak common sense to chaos without being judgy, preachy, political, or religious. It does not underestimate the natural-born intelligence of its audience. In fact, its very foundation is built on evidence-backed underpinnings that each of us is born with a miraculously inherent sense of right and wrong. 

The materials, therefore, while providing facilitators with the newest, most profound, and proven “ingredients” known to mankind, which lead to misunderstanding and loss of trust between fellow human beings, the concepts should be very familiar to teachers and facilitators. They are a culmination of the most researched, talked about, and debated topics related to the subject matter. Therefore, the design of the course calls upon instructors to create a curriculum within a curriculum. 

It is well understood how unpopular it is to speak in terms of absolute truth about anything, particularly in America. We ask that our approach, in making a series of contentions, be viewed only in the context of the ongoing problems that society has had for so long. We ask participants to spend their time trying to disprove the contentions being made, and we ask participants to reserve judgment until all of the materials have been fully vetted and reviewed. 

Further background and context: The founder of this course spent over five years, prior to the creation of this curriculum, hiring independent researchers to find countering positions that would discount the contentions being made in the course. The harder we looked, the clearer the benefit of particular interpretations of human virtue revealed itself across cultures and time. That is why this course exists, and why we began to call the main contentions of the course, and the course itself, The “Fantastic Truths”.

Adults are being asked to explore the concepts, think of the course as a Pilot, use their personal judgment to decide which pieces they read directly from the script, which to shorten, add to, adjust or eliminate. Lastly, it is important for leaders to note that the whole of the curriculum is far more meaningful than the sum of its parts. I.e. individual sections may lack meaning and impact. In the end, proper use of the Ingredient Wheel, and a properly delivered lesson that ties it all together should culminate with a potentially world-changing perspective, from which young people can forge ahead more confidently in the goodness of themselves and their fellow classmates. 

Important note concerning program delivery:  All instructions and programming delivery suggestions for the teacher throughout the curriculum are placed in italics. 

Use of Participation Cards:

In an effort to keep this program interactive, thought-provoking, and fun, we suggest the use of Participation Cards (included with the workshop materials). You will see a programming note to hand out Participation Cards in advance, and ask students to read one bullet per student (rotating) and read them slowly and clearly. The rotation resumes throughout the curriculum. 

Use a Participant Card for each bulleted statement.

Where you see the note All Together Participation, please lead the whole class in reading that bullet aloud in unison. We understand this may seem corny, but we ask that, as you try to improve our course, please give this a try and work through it.

Use of the “Ingredient Wheel”:

(See the video instructions on how to use the Ingredients Wheel at www.gettingalong.com/curriculum. At the beginning of each Ingredient section, you are to handwrite the Name of the “Ingredient” in one of the available slots on the wheel. (using a dry-erase marker)  Starting with Ingredient One, “The Invisible Slip and Slide”. Please note the Invisible Slip and Slide is the only Ingredient which has three “sub ingredients” and therefore takes up a total of four spaces on the wheel.  You have just reached the first Ingredient. Therefore, write “Invisible Slip and Slide” on the wheel and discuss the concept. Followed by each of the “sub ingredients”, 1a“Poor Parenting, Trauma, Difficult Life Experiences” // 1b “Negative Thoughts and Anxiety” and 1c “Primal ‘Fight or Flight’ Instincts”. Write each Ingredient on the wheel as you begin to cover each topic. In terms of overall Ingredients, you will wind up with a total of fourteen slots filled in on the wheel.)

Use of Discussion Quotations: 

At the end of each section, you will find several quotations. These have been thoughtfully selected to stimulate discussion about the information in the module. We suggest that you draw on quotations to flesh out the core concepts within the section before moving ahead.

Length of the Workshop:

The workshop for students has twelve sections - an Introduction section followed by ten “Main Ingredient” sections, and a Conclusion. This is your workshop. After reviewing all our core beliefs, what we teach, and all the materials, you decide how long it will take and how best to deliver this workshop to your participants. We suggest that the curriculum run concurrently with full-semester courses, including but not limited to social studies, civics, or American History.  It is recommended that participants digest related concepts on our website, read the books, and all cited resources.

Leaders Preparation and Credentialing “Quiz”: 

Whether presented as a workshop or utilized to supplement a longer course (for example, Social Studies or American Civics), teachers and facilitators of the course (hereinafter referred to as “Leader”) should meet a certain standard of preparedness. Therefore, we offer a certification program providing the essential knowledge of background materials to achieve standardization of delivery and optimal success. For more information about this certification or credentialing “quiz,” please visit www.gettingalong.com.

Program Resources for Leader Preparation:

Gatekeepers, leaders, and facilitators should have a working knowledge and understanding of the core concepts in order to deliver the materials as designed and intended, by engaging in the following resources: Visit www.gettingalong.com/PilotTheCurriculum to prepare yourself to pilot and facilitate this workshop.

Resources included in the physical curriculum box:

• Three Books: 

• Letters To Mikey, Messages of Hope and Optimism For Young Americans, by Glenn Cort

• 5000 Year Leap, by Eric Skousen

• If You Can Keep It, by Eric Metaxas

• The “Ingredient Wheel” 

• Participation Cards

• Curriculum in a Nutshell Workbook

Expectations for Engagement:

We ask that facilitators and participants commit to the following: If, as time passes, you have not seen the type of improvement in society that you would like to see, we ask that you consider more deeply the materials, ideas, and contentions being made in this workshop. Thank you.