Underlying Principles

We believe that our model for education will lead to the kind of future that people desire in this country and beyond.

Our research shows that:

we can reach far greater heights of consciousness than we do currently – there is no reason why what is regarded today as outstanding citizenship, leadership and achievement cannot be reached by many if not all.
when students are allowed to be deeply engaged in their work, learning is extremely rapid and permanent.
most of our youth hold inner values which are deeply caring, but are increasingly plagued by feelings of hopelessness and despair for the future.
education greatly affects the character and the capacity of its students – character strengths and virtues can be taught, large capacities which are currently shut down, can be opened up.

From our research, we identified three important principles of education
which we believe need to be implemented in today’s world:

Whole person development
Full engagement learning
Re-connection with nature

These principles have now been developed into the model that we wish to establish as the role model for education across the country.

Why Whole Person Development?

All of us live by using our four distinct, but inter-related parts or “bodies”.

The first of these is the physical body, your fundamental “vehicle” in this life.
The second is the emotional body. This is what you use to feel, to experience your life.
The mental body gives you the ability to think, to navigate your way through the external world.
The intuitive body is the inner you that looks through your eyes, that dreams your dreams, that deep down inside knows who you really are, what you really want to achieve in your life. It is your spirit.

We estimate that humans typically develop less that 30% of the capacity potentially available through the balanced and integrated development of these fundamental bodies. A glance around society shows the prevalence of poor physical health, repressed emotional life, lack of individual thinking and problem solving ability, and denial of individual spirit.

To live a richly fulfilling and satisfying life, that enables you to realise your own unique potential and develop the ability to engage with the challenges presented to us today, all aspects of self need to be developed in balance with each other.

Why Full Engagement Learning?

There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products by soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test?” – Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: “Crisis in Math and Science Education 2005”.

Thinking and learning are not just in our head. In fact the body plays an integral part in all our intellectual processes. The basic truth about learning is that it comes from our experiences (this is why we’re here folks), so developing our senses is a fundamental need. Our feelings and emotions mediate the extent to which we are open to learning - we have many more neural pathways from our heart to our brain than vice versa.

When something has relevance, meaning and challenge and we are able to become fully involved in it, we learn rapidly and deeply. Central to this is a safe environment, one in which experimentation without fear or repercussion of failure or judgement is crucial.

Carla Hannaford, a leading educator, kinesiologist, biologist and counsellor with over 30 years of experience writes that in three weeks we can get ten times more proficient at anything if we are emotionally engaged with focused interest.

Why Re-connection With Nature?

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”. H. G. Wells - Outline of History (1920) In our drive for progress, we have gathered more information about the external, material world than at any point in our known history. On the other hand, our connection with the natural world that hosts us, and awareness of the interconnected nature of all things has diminished as we pursue isolated fragments of knowledge.

This path has brought us to an extremely precarious place. At an increasing pace, we are destroying the ecosystem that supports our life on planet Earth. We live with the threat of nuclear devastation. We are poisoning ourselves with our own inventions and creating our own devastating illnesses and diseases. We won’t move beyond this danger by retreating to the past, but by learning to connect our brilliant intellectual skills and knowledge with our innate awareness of the greater forces of the natural world that is our home.

It is vital that we tune in to and align with the forces, cycles and rhythms existent in the big, wide, real world. To continue ignoring them, or resisting them, is the path to catastrophe.