Question 1: In traditional schools the children spend most of the day on academics. At Living Wisdom School, there are many other activities – field trips, theater, music, art, and so on. How do you find time for “serious learning”?
Gary: As parents, I’m aware that you may have little or no experience that would prepare you to relate to what I’ll say; but perhaps you’ll find that it simply makes sense.
The arts play a large role at LWS. They bring the curriculum alive by giving the students many direct, personal, firsthand experiences of history, culture, literature, and science.
The world is changing. Major corporations, confronted by an accelerated pace of innovation, have realized that many of the old assumptions about education are no longer valid. For example, the assumption that a sterling transcript from an elite university guarantees that you’ll thrive in a fast-paced modern business or technology workplace.
The assumption that if you put a child in the classroom for eight hours a day, he/she will be brighter and more likely to succeed in life than a child who sits for only six hours is not supported by research or experience.
Much of what we understand about the work of schools and educators is based on an older, outdated industrial assembly-line model which assumed that a strong focus on academics would prepare leaders and managers, and that it would sort-out the rest of the students who would receive sufficient preparation for less demanding jobs, and who would essentially be sorted out by number grades, like second-rate bottles being pulled from an assembly line.
Little attention could be given to the human needs of the individual students because class sizes were set at 30 to 40 students based on economic factors determined by governments in collusion industry.
In stark contrast, education in an Age of Innovation in business and technology needs to go much deeper, academically and in human terms. It needs to be 95 percent focused on working with the needs and energy of each child and challenging them at their own, unique level. In addition to technical expertise, the modern workplace needs highly developed human skills. Nurturing the whole child in the classroom, and not exclusively their brains, is far more effective for helping each student realize their highest potential.
In our school, we start each morning with Circle Time. Then, before we begin the serious business of academics, we go for a walk and do energizating and centering exercises, and only then do we dive into math.
A parent might say “Wow, you could be doing vocabulary or some other academic subject instead of wasting so much time!”
But Circle Time is at the core of EFL. More than anything else we do during the day, it prepares the children to be thoroughly immersed and engaged in learning. On rare occasions when we’re unable to have Circle Time, it always impacts the children’s energy for the day.
Our approach to teaching is about creating energy and using it efficiently. It’s also about raising consciousness – bringing each child into the very best physical, mental, and emotional state to be enjoyably successful at school.
Hard research suggests that the most effective approach to educating children is not about piling on homework or grilling the kids, and it isn’t about making education stressful. It’s about helping the students thrive in a school environment where they are inspired to think, contribute, and integrate the curriculum with body, heart, mind, and soul, instead of just memorizing facts and spitting them out on a test, then forgetting them.
Our approach is about preparing kids to master every academic challenge. It’s about teaching them to learn, and to enjoy learning.
One of our school taglines is “Where learning and joy merge together.” For more than thirty-five years at our Palo Alto school, and more than fifty-five years at the original Living Wisdom School, we’ve shown beyond any possibility of doubt that when children feel cared for, they are happy and do well academically.
It’s not just our experience; it’s common sense. If you compare us with schools that take pride in stressing academics with extreme single-mindedness, I would gladly put our kids up against them on standardized testing or any other measure of achievement.
Education isn’t about cramming information into the brain. It’s about helping children be enthusiastic thinkers and problem-solvers. It’s about helping them learn “How can I think about this problem?” “How can I manage my time?” “How can I find my center, so I can be calm and focused when I’m asked to do many challenging things?” “How can I stay focused until I finish what I’m doing?”
Our annual theater performance guides the students through an engaging process of developing the poise to deliver an inspiring theater experience to an audience of several hundred adults, while they’re learn about the culture and times of the heroic subject of the play.
The truth is that we are every bit as rigorous as any of the schools that pride themselves on academics. The difference is that there is a tremendous amount of support for the individual student here.
Our classrooms are not competitive, in the negative sense of students wanting to beat each other. We encourage the students to face their own challenges and overcome them, because in doing so they discover strengths they weren’t aware of. This approach creates far more success and happiness than ruthless competition based on comparing and ranking. In our school, the students are aware of the challenges their friends are facing, and they love to encourage them and give them support and guidance.
We strive for excellence, but we also strive for excellent behavior and citizenship. For example, we are deliberately concerned to create caring, dignified, mature relationships between the students and the teachers.
We stopped at a restaurant on the way home from a field trip. As we were leaving, the manager came up to Helen and me and said, “Lots of school groups come here, and I want to commend you on how well-behaved your kids are. Middle-school kids play with their food and leave a mess that we have to clean up. We’re used to it, and we don’t mind. But your kids are really, really well-behaved.”
At a retreat center where we often stay during our field trips, the staff always comment on how well-behaved our kids are. We think of it as common courtesy, and we instill it in the children as a mature, dignified, fulfilling way to live – and we insist on it.
It isn’t that they behave because they fear they’ll be punished if they don’t. It’s because they understand that they feel more noble, mature, strong, and happy in themselves when they understand the dignififed self-restraint that allows them to understand the realities of others and given them sincere respect and caring.
My experience is that when I am very strict with the students, and I’m asking a lot of them and challenging them, they thrive. Our drama coach does the same. She treats the children as professional actors, and Helen does the same in language arts.
When you ask a great deal of people, they respond and grow. It brings out their best and they enjoy it, even when you have to discipline them.
During our field trips, we’re with the kids around the clock, and we set clear, firm boundaries. They love it – they enjoy it, because it brings out their best and it feels good.
Our annual Theater Magic program, with three two-hour performances during a week in March to audiences of two or three hundred adults, is always about a great figure from history. This year the play was about the life of the Dalai Lama. The plays are about individuals who have faced great challenges with courage, wisdom, and compassion.
We are always trying to get our kids to be compassionate with one another, to be courageous, and to have mental clarity about what they are learning. Enacting the life stories of great people is deeply inspiring to them, and it has a lasting impact as they recall their noble words and actions for years after.
There is no research that supports bombarding children with information and cramming their heads with facts as the school’s only focus. It takes courage on the part of our parents to understand how our way might work – it takes imagination, and thinking about education in a new way.
The schools that market their academic rigor are playing on parents’ fears. Parents naturally want their children to be well-prepared and succeed. This is, of course, entirely as it should be, because life is competitive today, and our sacred duty is to prepare our children to be successful and happy in those environments.
Many prospective parents wonder if we are being just a little too soft and nice. When the kids reach high school and adult life, will they melt down and wash out? But that has never been our experience.
Parents may assume that what their child needs in order to be a high achiever is to have a box of facts of a certain size. But we have shown that success in school and life simply doesn’t work that way.
The body of available information is growing at a relentlessly accelerating pace. In every field, there is a rising tide of breakthroughs, discoveries, and fresh information.
How can we keep up? What’s needed is to train the students to navigate information. You don’t have to know it all, but you must know how to find what you need, and how to understand it and work with it.
One of our graduates was accepted at Stanford but turned them down to enroll at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, because music is her passion. She wrote to us, thanking us for training her. Again, here was college student thanking her elementary school for training her to navigate the real world. She took time specifically to thank us for training her in common sense, “Because, as a performer, once I have common sense on stage, I always know what to do.”
She’s singing with the San Francisco Opera – not in roles for young people; she was accepted into the full Opera chorus. Her mom rolled her eyes – “I couldn’t believe her turning down Stanford!” But she had found a music teacher that she believed in, and she is following her passion with great success. It is inspiring that our kids are finding their way and achieving success by figuring out where they need to go.
Throughout the world today, there are many signs that the older school models are no longer working. Here in Palo Alto, several teenagers committed suicide on the railroad tracks because of the unrelenting pressures to be the best in their rigorous schools. They’ve posted crossing guards to prevent further teen suicides. Suicide is now the fourth leading cause of death among teenagers in the U.S., for the first time in recorded history.
These are signs that the system isn’t working. I would challenge parents who express doubts about what we are doing, by asking them if the other systems are working better. Are the kids enjoying greater success, fulfillment, personal growth, maturity, and happiness than ours?
Our philosophy is based on the book Education for Life which begins with a question: “What are your hopes for your child’s education?” Of course, we want our children to be successful. But then the question becomes, what’s the best way to prepare them for success?
The old model is tempting. Most of our parents were educated in that system. They’ve been successful; and now we are inviting them to place their child in a school with a very different approach. But once you understand what we’re doing, it’s compelling, and not terribly different in the end. It’s simply common sense. It covers the same ground academically, and much more, but it’s finding the best way to bring the child’s whole being into their studies, and not just their brain.
What’s revolutionary is that our schedule isn’t crammed to overflowing with academics. We challenge our students in math and science, and they do well on national tests and in high school and college. But we notice the special gifts each child brings, and we support them in developing those gifts.
We give them time to blossom, whether their unique gifts are in math, science, sports, the arts, entrepreneurship, or elsewhere. And because they feel supported and guided into success experiences every day, they find it deeply enjoyable, and they become powerfully motivated to study hard and learn – and that’s when our approach proves itself, as we see them speeding ahead and enjoying it immensely.
Keith Devlin is a famous mathematician who visited our school. Keith has authored more than 30 books and was a commentator on National Public Radio (NPR) as “the Math Guy.” He’s the co-founder and President of BrainQuake, an educational technology company that develops mathematics learning games.
He expressed his approval of our approach, where we work with the children in math individually at their level. He told us that he didn’t enjoy math until he got to college. His primary interest was biology, but a professor told him, “If you’re going to major in biology, you’ll have to know math.” So he reluctantly signed up for a math course, and that’s when he discovered, “Wow, this is so much fun.”
In our school, our entire focus is not on delivering the curriculum. We look at the bigger picture and the longer rhythms of the child’s development. We are intent on discovering “What are this child’s gifts?” Maybe it’s art, and it doesn’t mean that it cannot be both art and math. We want the kids to be themselves, and to become their own best version by leveraging their unique strengths.
There’s a term that’s become deeply engrained in modern education research: “integrated thematic curriculum.” It acknowledges that children learn best when they can have more than one hook to grasp each new piece of learning. When the children can form new connections in their brains by approaching a subject from different directions and contexts, their brains grow more dendrites than if they were doing rote “workbook memorization.”
The theater experience is another tree that bears rich fruits academically, by connecting the kids with academic curriculum from many directions. It’s part of an academic landscape at LWS where there is a significant, deliberate overlap between subjects. While they prepare for the play, the students are learning history, geography, literature, and world cultures, while they are acting out the lives of inspiring people in three-dimensional space and time, which drives the lessons deep in very personal ways.
It’s a vivid learning experience that creates countless fresh connections. This is the deepest kind of learning, where it is integrated with their academic work, but not through rote memorization. It is a direct experience of history, art, and much more, and the children love it, because it’s about real three-dimensional people and experiences and feelings, so the learning is remembered, because it’s heart-deep.
It nurtures an amazing attitude toward writing from the earliest school years, because children love to write about what’s real for them, visually and emotionally, and not just as mental abstraction. The skill of making knowledge real and alive through words gives them an major advantage when they get to high school and college.
It’s natural for small children’s writing to be highly personal, but in middle school there’s a shift toward less personal writing, where instead of only writing about their own experiences, they are writing about ideas that matter to them. It’s a prime time for learning to write analytical essays that are intelligent, creative, and that express their ideas and arguments with crystal clarity.
We never forget the groundwork that was laid in the early years. If a middle school student is assigned to write about Shakespeare, with an analysis of the motivations and personalities of the characters, the teacher will make sure they bring forward the experiential element that they’ve grown used to in the earlier grades.
They may read the play aloud as part of a “reader’s theater.” They may watch the play being performed. In these ways, the teacher guides the students as they struggle to get inside the characters, so that when they begin to write, it will come from a felt experience, and a clear mental understanding of the characters’ motivations and inclinations. As a result, their essays are alive, and the learning stays with them, because it is deeply felt.
This is important academically, because it sets the stage for teaching the technical aspects of writing that might otherwise be boring and poorly absorbed and remembered, if they aren’t connected to a heartfelt need to tell a good story.
It’s a level of learning that they receive in middle school, that most students don’t receive until their first year of college, when it’s presented in a purely intellectual context as a way to organize a paper or report with a thesis statement, topic sentence, and so on. We find that it gives our students a tremendous advantage, by honing their ability to make their writing come alive and communicate.
There’s a great deal of emphasis today in business on the importance of “story” – the art of selling products, attracting and retaining loyal customers, and persuading colleagues, the media, and customers to your point of view by telling a magnetic story from real life that is humanly moving.
In middle school, whether their writing is argumentative, creative, descriptive, etc., they are continually referencing their own experiences and tastes – that is, what they value. If they are writing a research paper, it will not only be cold facts presented as abstractions. It will be about relating the facts to their own burning questions about how life works.
I remember a middle school student who turned in a terrible research paper. I tried to help him improve it, but at a certain point I had to realize that it was beyond saving. It was partly my fault for not guiding him toward a more clearly defined topic.
The next year, I invited him to write about something he was personally interested in. His family were from India, and he wrote a brilliant paper on the caste system. Because he was keenly interested, he was on fire when it came to picking up the skills to write a credible research paper. He was eager to learn how to document his findings and format his references. It was a landmark learning experience to realize that he could trust his sense of what was important, and present it with calm, clear arguments that conveyed his fiery interest.
This is our approach in all the academic subjects in an EFL school – that if you can help a child have daily successes that set their enthusiasm ablaze, they will make tremendous strides in academics without becoming burned-out and disengaged, as predictably happens when you’re only trying to cram their heads with enough quickly forgotten information to score an impressive grade on a test.
Question 2: At Living Wisdom School, do you present academics in a way that gives the students a sense of life’s deep meaning and positive opportunities?
Gary: It’s what we’re always doing. When people talk about school, they naturally think of math and science, given the urgency of those subjects today. But in our school, we broaden the meaning of education.
While we give them superb preparation for high school algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, and biology, we are intensely focused on helping them grow in the personal strengths and wisdom to navigate all kinds of situations related to their academic schoolwork and their lives more generally, including how to work cooperatively, which is an increasingly valued skill in the workplace today.
We also give them the wisdom to understand and deal with the negative challenges of the world, including politics, social issues. the environment, addiction, violence, crime, dishonesty, etc.
But the greatest gift children receive through EFL for dealing with their life’s challenges is a clear, deeply embedded understanding of the positive values that lead lawfully to success and happiness. We help them develop the insights and self-discipline to deal effectively with the challenges they’ll face throughout their lives, and it serves them well as they prepare for high school, college, and beyond.
Question 3: How important are the life skills you give them to their success in academics now and in high school and college?
Helen: If you’re only trying to engage their minds, without the slightest effort to nurture their enthusiasm, curiosity, engagement, perseverance, and will power, the results are bound to be sub-optimal. When you bring the child into academics as a whole person, you very quickly find them firing on all cylinders in the classroom.
To help them achieve their own highest academic success, you must engage the whole child in the learning, with the utmost intensity of their energy, enthusiasm, interest, and curiosity – bolstered by an understanding of the high purpose and inspiring meaning of life, and its opportunities for glowing achievement.
People are sometimes tempted to categorize us as no more than a “precious” little idyllic, dreamy school for kids up until third or fourth grade.
They imagine that it’s perfectly fine for very young kids to be individually cared for as they make the transition from babies to, say, age eight or nine. But it can’t possibly be preparing them for the harsh realities of the upper grades, what to speak of high school, college, and the “real world.”
What they entirely overlook is that the people who manifest the greatest skill at overcoming life’s challenges are those with extremely high energy, enthusiasm, inner strength, laser-like mental focus, and self-confidence, combined with a comprehensive understanding of how to get along with and create cooperative relationships with all kinds of people.
These are not wispy, gauzy “precious” skills! They are skills that mark people who are strong, centered, and possess the high degree of maturity, energy, and inner strength and resilience to succeed in whatever they do.
These so-called “soft skills” are born of a realistic awareness of how life works, and the personal qualities required to thrive. They are skills that we take great pains to help our students develop and strongly interiorize from their first day in kindergarten.
Parents and educators who visit our school are stunned to meet five- to fourteen-year-olds who demonstrate an inner confidence and mature self-restraint that is very rare even among adults today.
The intensity of learning here reflects the high energy we bring to everything we do. Casual visitors who unaware of the training that enables these enthusiastic children to go so happily about the serious business of learning may be tempted to think, as one parent actually put it, that perhaps these children are “too happy.’
But the solid understanding upon which we base our approach to bringing children into their own full, individual maturity is that it takes great energy, courage, mental focus, and strength of wisdom to be shiningly successful in life.
Does developing the self-discipline to be strong in oneself and genuinely kind and compassionate contribute to a child’s academic success? The results speak more eloquently than words every could – and the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
Parents who visit our school often comment about the “hum” in the classrooms – the happy buzz and intensity of focus in the children.
You will not always find the classrooms silent and subdued, because the children are engaged and busy with energy and enthusiasm. When I lead parents on a tour of the school, we may walk into a classroom and find the children on the floor doing math games in quiet voices. The parents are stunned by how the children barely notice us as we walk through, because they are so fully engaged.
When I bring the parents into the middle school classroom, there’s a different hum. We might find groups of students collaborating on a math chapter, or working one-on-one with a math tutor, or working on their own. But there’s always a positive, productive hum of magnetic energy generated by their concentration and focus.
The parents are impressed that our students aren’t intimidated by meeting and speaking with adults. Often the children will walk up and greet them with a smile. If I ask the students what they’re working on, they may very confidently give the visitors a mini-lesson, without being the least bit intimidated. Our kids know how to treat and connect with people of all ages and sizes, with respect, relaxation, and genuine interest.
I can’t count the times when high school admissions directors have called me and described how a graduate of our school aced the entrance interview, and how impressed they were by the student’s ability to talk with them naturally, perceptively, genuinely, and maturely.
This year, a graduate of our school entered Gunn High School in Palo Alto, which has an excellent academic reputation. He and his brother were with us since kindergarten, and the parents wondered how the boys would fare when they left our “safe” school to enter a high school with 2000 students.
His mother told us that after their first day, a friend called and told her, “Your son Zachary met a lot of students today.”
The parents eventually learned the story. On the first day, one of the boys saw someone he’d been in orchestra with, and he went over and said, “Introduce me to your friends.” So he did, and Zachary gave them each a stick of gum. During the day, when he saw one of the boys from the first group, he would go over and do the same. In his first day of high school he met over a hundred students!
His father asked, “Did the idea just pop into your head?” The son said, “No, I gave it some thought. It’s why I had you get the gum.” When he was little, he was cripplingly shy, but his experiences here had taught him to relate to others naturally and unselfishly.
Question 4: In a big school where there might be thirty or forty students in the classroom, the teachers have to spend a lot of time with the slowest students. How does an EFL school deal with students who are less academically gifted, without holding back the gifted ones?
Helen: Above all, we don’t judge. We don’t demand that they all jump the same hurdles – that they get a passing grade on the same test, or be left behind and labelled in their permanent academic record as having failed.
There will always be a broad range of abilities and effort in the classroom. On the other hand, we aren’t the slightest bit interested in “dumbing-down” the curriculum to accommodate the slower students. Instead, there’s a school-wide attitude of welcoming the differences. You can only help a child succeed if you start by recognizing, honestly and squarely, what’s there, and our low teacher-student ratio at Living Wisdom allows our teachers to help each student individually.
We also take a long-range perspective. If a first-grade student isn’t adding and subtracting as rapidly as the rest of the class, the small class size lets us give the child many small success experiences in an atmosphere of goodwill and relaxed encouragement, while they achieve at their own best level.
Because we don’t harbor a desire to make everyone the same, we are able to help each child grow in the ways that are most realistically possible for them, given their unique gifts, and to encourage, inspire, and support them in doing their best, and sincerely celebrate their successes.
Question 5: Does EFL prepare children to meet the academic demands of high school and college? Does EFL ever spend too much time developing the whole child, and giving individual attention?
Gary: Parents ask this regularly – “How well will my child be prepared for high school?”
Our graduates have excelled at the Bay Area’s most rigorous high schools, including Harker, Menlo, St. Francis, Bellarmine, and Woodside Priory. We have a wall of letters from our graduates, describing their successes and thanking us for preparing them well.
When they visit, we ask them, “How are you doing? Did we prepare you well enough? Were you ready for high school?” They invariably tell us that they are doing wonderfully, thanks to the education they received here.
One of our boys was accepted by Woodside Priory based on his interview. The admissions officer was impressed by how the boy conducted himself and was able to talk with an adult with intelligence, maturity, and natural good manners. We feel it was his theater training that gave him the poise and awareness to make a favorable impression and be accepted by an extremely well-regarded, academically focused high school.
We have dozens of similar stories. Our graduates are accepted in honors programs, they take AP *(advanced placement) courses, and they graduate from college. One of our girls is majoring in physics at UC Berkeley. Another is at Berkeley with a double major in political science and art.
Another recent graduate is at Stanford, where he is thriving academically and playing on the baseball team. When Stanford accepted him, he called to thank us for preparing him well. LWS had such a deep impact that four years after he left us, that he called to thank Helen for her help.
Our graduates often come back to visit. They rave about how well Helen prepared them in language arts, and they thank her for teaching them to write well, which gave them a tremendous advantage in high school and college.
One of our recent graduates is exceptional, although he isn’t too far outside the norm. He was the first student at Woodside Priory to be allowed to take calculus as a freshman, because he had finished Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Trigonometry as an eighth grader at Living Wisdom.
The math teacher at Woodside Priory recognized that he needed to take advanced calculus in his first year, and even then he surprised them, because halfway through the school year he had finished the math curriculum. The school is now wrestling with how to help him go even farther.
(Update: Not long after the boy entered college he realized that he had learned all the math that a U.S. university could teach him, so he entered a doctoral program at the University of Bremen, Germany, where he thrived. He now teaches math, including advanced math tutoring, at our Living Wisdom High School.)
Another of our graduates is at Gunn High in Palo Alto, where he is in the most advanced math course for freshmen, Algebra 2 and Trigonometry. He was allowed to take the class based on his SAT scores and his performance on the entrance exam.
Aside from academics, our school prepares the students in other vitally important ways through the field trips, the theater program, and the overall school culture.
Energy has an enormous effect on the quantity and quality of learning, and on the students’ school experience, and even the school environment. We are therefore constantly working with the students’ energy, encouraging them to discover the rewards of bringing all of their energy, willpower, and perseverance to overcome their challenges.
We teach them to be responsible and accountable, so that when they enter high school they will be ready to work hard, engage with others, find their place, and succeed.
Some students struggle at first when they come to LWS, because it takes time to adapt to our approach; but when they enter high school they do extremely well, earning 4.0 GPAs at the Bay Area’s most demanding schools.
Some of our students may not be spectacularly gifted, but they often do surprisingly well by leveraging strengths of perseverance, curiosity, enthusiasm, and social skills. Their successes are real – they are not rare exceptions, or the result of dumbed-down challenges.
Helen: We understand the need for testing, but we face it differently. Our students are never just cramming for grades or test scores. Instead, we challenge them to understand the subject matter in depth, because we find it gives them a major advantage at the most academically challenging high schools. We find that the best preparation for testing is to know the subject deeply and develop a genuine enthusiasm for it.
This naturally affects our culture. From spelling, math, and reading tests in the early grades, our students progress to taking national standardized tests in middle school. In math, the middle schoolers participate in the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) and the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools. In Language Arts, they take the WordMasters Challenge.
For a small school, it’s remarkable how many of our students are operating in the 96th to 99th percentile on these national math tests.
The WordMasters Challenge requires them to solve extremely difficult verbal analogies. Learning to master the challenges prepares them for the analogies that will crop up in private school entrance exams and the SATs. The WordMasters test items are amazingly sophisticated – they would stump many adults. We teach the children strategies to solve the analogies by understanding roots, usage, and context.
Question 6: When children graduate from a small school such as yours, how do they adapt when they enter a high school with 1000 or 2000 students? Do the life skills they learn at LWS help them thrive in high school regardless of size?
Helen: One of our graduates who’s at a big high school expressed how astounded he was by the lack of awareness among his new friends, of how their words and behaviors impacted other people.
He said, “They banter back and forth, and I can tell when somebody’s feelings are hurt, but when I bring it up, they haven’t even noticed.”
He said, “This is something you taught me.” By “you” he meant the school culture, because we are seamless in our commitment to helping our students expand their awareness to include others.
One of our students told us about her freshman orientation at Menlo School. She described how the teachers were bending over backward to assure the freshmen that they didn’t have to be afraid of their teachers.
She was thinking, “Why would a student be afraid of a teacher?” because in our school there’s tremendous respect and affection. We have created a healthy environment, and we are profoundly aware that it has been built up over time by the quality of the thousands of interactions that happen in the course of a school year.
Our students thrive in large and small high schools and colleges. They make the honor role, they succeed in sports, and they find like-minded friends. The character development and life skills we teach them are success tools that serve them everywhere.
Question 7: How much individual attention are you realistically able to give each child?
Gary: Several years ago, a girl from our school left because she wanted to experience a large public school. At the end of the school year, with just two weeks remaining, she returned to LWS. Later, she told us that she had learned more in two weeks here than in the entire year at the public school.
Our teachers are sensitively aware of children’s individual differences, and they are trained to nurture each child’s unique strengths.
The curriculum at the public school was nothing but workbook learning. It may have reassured the parents: “They must be doing okay, because they have lots of homework.” But there are much more important questions that parents should be asking.
What, exactly, are the kids learning? Are they enthusiastic about learning? Are they challenged to apply their learning creatively? Or is it just a blind and boring chore to be gotten through – just grinding through the workbook?
This girl approached her teacher at the public school, “I really understand this stuff, and I can prove it to you. Do I really have to do all these exercises?” Because it seemed so mechanical and boring. The best the teacher felt she could do was to cut back a certain amount of the rote work, even though she agreed that the student had mastered it. It’s a huge problem with a one-size-fits-all, state-mandated curriculum.
In middle school math, each child here works at his or her own pace. We correct their tests and go over what they don’t understand, and if they show real competency, they’re encouraged to forge ahead. This is how we’re able to accommodate kids who may be at very different levels in math, all learning at the same time and being supported at their level.
We are blessed to have an amazing student-teacher ratio. In middle school math on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, we have three teachers for 15 students, a 5:1 student-teacher ratio. On Thursday we have two teachers for a 7.5:1 ratio.
It’s phenomenal, and it works for all the kids. It works for those who are struggling, it works for those who are doing well, and it works for the kids who can go much faster.
During the nine years when our son was here in this school, I always knew that he was doing fine. I knew it by watching Bryan’s energy. When he came home from school, and when school resumed after a break I always saw how his energy would soar. (Update: Aryavan Bryan McSweeney is now the school’s director.)
Parents know their children, and they need to ask “Is my child happy?” and “Is my child learning?”
There will be challenges at any school. A play date won’t work out, or they’ll argue with a friend. These things happen at LWS. But if parents reflect – “Is my child happy?” – I believe that’s ultimately what counts.
When our son was here, I never had any doubts about how he was challenged and cared for at school. The years have proven my judgment correct. Bryan did very well in high school and college, and I knew it was his years at LWS that made the difference.
I encourage parents to watch our play, come to a concert, and talk to the kids about their field trips.
Our teachers accept the children sitting before them exactly as they are. Not every child will take calculus to start high school. We believe there is no child on earth who doesn’t have a gift. We’ve found that if we help them do their best at being who they are, they discover their gifts, whether in academics, art, music, dance, theater, or personal relationships.
Education today is wound too tight. I encourage parents to remember: “These are children. They need time in nature. They need time on field trips. They need time to do math. But they also need time to sort through the things that are humanly important to them.”
I believe that if parents keep asking that question – “Am I doing the best for my child?” they will find that their child would thrive academically and be very happy at Living Wisdom.
Teachers in most schools today, public and private, are forced to teach to the middle. But in our math classes, for example, we don’t have to teach to the middle. Teaching to the middle leaves the super-talented underserved and bored, and it doesn’t serve the ones who need support. Because our classes are small, the teachers can shoot high and still bring all of the children along while making the very best of their abilities.
Question 8: What about the spiritual aspects of Living Wisdom School? Is the instruction religious, or is it truly nonsectarian?
Helen: Our parents generally accept that we are nonsectarian, although they will sometimes wonder what “nonsectarian” means.
How do we infuse spiritual principles without taking sides?
The answer is that if we look at all true relgions in their purest form – that is, close to the time when they were revealed by great seers – we find that they taught universal principles that can be tested and verified by people living anywhere, at any time.
An example is Jesus’ simple saying that it is more blessed to give than to receive. We can test this claim scientifically in the laboratory of our lives. When we give lovingly and compassionately, how do we feel? Science has confirmed that expansive attitudes of generosity, compassion, and loving kindness spread health-promoting chemicals throughout our bodies that make us feel wonderful and empower us to perform better, mentally, physically, and emotionally.
These are the universal truths that we impart to our students, because we know that they are indispensable for a happy, successful life.
Our students learn nonsectarian scientific breathing and concentration techniques to calm their bodies and minds and focus their attention.
The answer to the question about whether we are truly nonsectarian is that we share universal principles and test them in the laboratory of everyday life. If spiritual principles are real, they must work repeatably, everywhere. We are not teaching rigid spiritual rules, or the unscientific demand for blind belief and rigid dogmas that attend fundamentalism – “If you do such-and-such you will burn in hell forever!” We are focused on what works in the laboratory of human life.
The same is true for values. What will be wholesome and expansive for one student may be a step backward for another. A student who is unselfish and giving by nature might feel offended if we told him, “If you treat the other children well, you can have a special treat.” But a student who lacks energy and initiative might be well served by being urged to set up a play store where he can sell play goods for play money.
In our school, we measure values and success by forward progress in a positive, expansive direction. “Look at how far you’ve come! Look at the successes you’ve had! Look at the positive direction you’re taking!”
The most “spiritual” direction is that which takes us toward greater happiness, and away from suffering.
It is a deeply spiritual approach to life that most parents would endorse. Spiritual truths give us keys to success in all our actions. One of our school rules is “Choose Happiness.” The children learn that happiness grows by growing in health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy.
Happiness is directional. A fundamental principle of all spiritual teaching is that our happiness increases when we cultivate thoughts¸ actions, feelings, and attitudes that expand our awareness through the instruments of our body, feelings, will, mind, and soul.
When adults try to “practice kindness” and “choose happiness,” they soon discover what a challenge it can be, depending on the people and circumstances in their lives.
So our school rules aren’t rigid statements to be memorized and followed blindly; they are simple suggestions that the children can test for themselves. Our first two School Rules – “Practice Kindness” and “Choose Happiness” – are qualities of successful people everywhere.
Question 9: Your school is in Silicon Valley, two blocks from Stanford University. Is the student body skewed toward students from highly educated, wealthy families?
Gary: In a conversation with parents about our students’ academic achievement, someone remarked, “Well, you’re a private school, and you guys are all rich.”
I said, “I work on the budget, and I see people’s finances, because we offer financial aid – and nothing could be further from the truth.”
One of our parents is a single mom who works two jobs to keep her son in our school. We have parents who are CEOs, and parents from all income levels.
Our social and cultural diversity is one of our chief selling points. We are not about status or adjusting our philosophy to cater to the children of the super-rich or super-intelligent. We are about helping each child find happiness and succeed regardless of their background.
Question 10: Parents are anxious for their children to gain a solid foundation in math and science. Do math and science require more focused traditional teaching methods than the integrated curriculum you’ve described?
Gary: It’s good to remember that we are not interested in “teaching to the test,” which would require that we emphasize drill and memorization. Individual instruction allows us to make sure every LWS student graduates with a deep grasp of math concepts, not just quickly memorized and forgotten techniques and tricks.
Helen: If a child has a special talent in math, they can go as far and fast as they are able, so long as they are showing mastery at each step. Yet we can keep them with their own social group, because our approach frees us to advance all of the children at their own pace. A student in third grade can leave the classroom and visit the fourth and fifth grade classroom for math, if they are sufficiently advanced.
The same goes for students who have challenges. We are able to give them all the help they need to go forward and reach their highest potential.