Nitai Deranja co-founded the first Living Wisdom School in 1972 with Swami Kriyananda, author of Education for Life: Preparing Children to Meet Today’s Challenges (published under his given name, J. Donald Walters).
Nitai now serves as President of Education for Life International. He directs the online International Living Wisdom High School. which also offers homeschool partnerships.
Q: Adolescence is a special time in young people’s lives, when they are transitioning from being children and living largely in their heart quality, to young adults who will soon be responsible for their lives. What do teenagers need in these important years? What kind of education is most beneficial and fulfilling for them?
What Teenagers Need
Nitai: In Education for Life, Swami Kriyananda talks about the stages of a child’s development. It’s exactly as you said – adolescence is a time of tremendous transition, and as adults we need to be ready to guide young people through these important changes – and it’s unfortunately not a primary focus in schools today, because we tend to treat our teenagers the way we treat kids when they’re nine or ten.
We force the teens to sit at desks all day, and maybe some of them will be engaged in after-school activities, but they will tend to be the few who are involved in sports, music, theater, journalism, and so on.
So lots of teens are missing important growth opportunities, because they are not challenged to exercise their will power in positive, meaningful ways.
As adults, our role is to create those opportunities for them. Because what teenagers need above all else is to be challenged to stretch their edges and explore areas that they aren’t necessarily comfortable with.
Ananda Village, where we started the first Living Wisdom School, is located in the Sierra foothills, about fifteen miles from the nearest town. It’s an amazingly idyllic place for children to grow up in, with a pond for swimming, beautiful trails to explore, horses that the kids can ride, wild animals, and lots of space to roam in. Yet by the time they’re twelve or thirteen, the kids are starting to look for something more – they’re getting restless and bored, and unless the adults can offer them adventures that will challenge them to grow and learn the lessons their nature is craving, they risk becoming cynical and rebellious.
So even in those ideal surroundings, there is a serious challenge for the adults to create adventures that will invite teens to discover the happiness of exercising their will power in constructive ways.
Helping Teens Grow
How can we help them? There are countless possibilities. The first thing we tried was to create service travel adventures, where we would accompany the teens to places where the dimensions of their world would be drastically expanded.
It had to be a place where they were not going to be entirely comfortable, where they couldn’t just cruise along passively, and where they might not even know how people’s lives worked.
In the early years, we ended up taking them to Mexico once a year. We spent two or three weeks living in a Mexican orphanage, and it was a vastly different environment for the kids, where they didn’t really know what to do or how to behave.
The orphanage kids would get up at six in the morning to sweep the floors, do the laundry, and perform other chores, and our kids quickly jumped in and started helping.
It was a wonderful experience for them to face a challenge that was self-expansive and rewarding, and where they were utterly baffled at first – “Wow, what IS this?” But we found that they would quickly grow into the new reality and break down the walls of their habitual consciousness so that they could get oriented and participate and have lots of fun and learn. And the fact that it was a different language helped, too.
We’ve continued to create adventures for the kids, and it’s been tremendously successful in terms of working with their own natural desire to stretch beyond their previous self-perceived limits.
The trips happened just once a year, but we found ways to extend the experience for them. We told them that we would not be handing them the travel adventure experience on a silver platter, and that they would have to earn the money to pay for the trip.
It meant that they would have to find creative ways to make money, even though they were living out in the country.
The teachers would work with each student to help them figure out how they could start making a little money to contribute. They earned money by chopping kindling for people who had woodstoves, and they ran a thrift store in the community. Some of them would help out after school at the little market at Ananda Village. The teachers would meet with each student once a week to ensure that they were making progress, and to encourage them to explore various options.
So there were two challenges. There was the trip itself, and there was the year-long adventure of earning the money to pay for it, which was a stretch for them in itself.
There’s an extremely sad trend today that has had very unfortunate consequences for teenagers. Before the 1920s, there was an urgent need to create child labor laws to protect young children from being forced to work in factories and coal mines. But nowadays those laws are mostly outdated, to the extent that they just get in the way.
It’s particularly unfortunate in countries where it’s actually illegal for teenagers to work at all, because a part-time job is an immensely rich arena where they can develop vital life skills, such as self-discipline, punctuality, follow-through, perseverance, service, and other positive qualities that will serve them in their adult lives.
Equally important, it helps them feel that they can play a useful role in the grown-up world. But nowadays that path is blocked to them, and they’re treated like babies, where everybody wants to give them whatever they want.
At any rate, the travel adventures were a starting point for helping the teens transition from childhood and prepare for independent adult life by challenging them to flex their inner strength and push the boundaries of their awareness.
The Tools of Maturity
Over the years, we’ve developed a number of tools that our teachers and parents can use to help the teenagers grow in the area of personal development. For example, we created a Maturity Chart that maps approximately thirty qualities of body, feelings, will, and mind, to track their progress.
Starting at age twelve, we ask the teens to do a self-analysis twice a year and score themselves on these qualities. The teachers will score them, too, and if the parents are willing, we’ll ask them to submit scores so that we can all look at the child’s “tools of maturity” together – their body, feelings, will, and intellect – and learn how they see themselves performing and growing in those areas.
The idea is for us all to be aware of these areas of personal growth, so that we can know what each student needs to work on in those four dimensions.
For example, looking at the body, one of the things we can evaluate is posture. The students can rate their posture on a scale from 1 to 12, so they can see “Oh, my posture isn’t what I’d like it to be.”
In my childhood, nobody talked to me about posture, and as a result I developed some bad habits. I would have benefited if somebody had pointed it out, because good posture is a positive trait – it reflects our self-confidence, self-worth, and personal integrity. Good posture tends to indicate a positive, optimistic approach to life, and you can work on it, if you’re aware of the need.
Personal Excellence
Aside from the Tools of Maturity – body, feelings, will, and mind – we look at Personal Excellence.
Again, we became aware of this need through our hands-on experience with the teens.
We realized that the teens who had the hardest time in high school were the ones who were letting themselves be pulled along by the fads of the day. They were nearly always the kids who didn’t have anything positive going for them – they weren’t really good at anything, so they didn’t have a strong inner self-identity to empower them to stand up to the social pressures.
It’s why we decided that it would be important, by age twelve or even earlier, to identify at least one area where each student could develop a special sense of skill and proficiency.
During adolescence, there’s a need to develop a strong ego. We do help the teens understand that we are happiest when we include others’ happiness in our own. But before we can transcend the ego, we need to have a strong, healthy ego to be able to function in the world. And a very effective way to help teens build that kind of inner strength is by helping them develop a feeling of proficiency. “I’m a good artist.” “I’m an excellent cook.” “I’m a good athlete.” “I’m a successful scientist.” “I excel in math.”
Whatever it is, it becomes a pillar of our self-identity and our self-esteem, and it can help us avoid falling into the pit of going along with others just because you want them to think well of us.
One of our core goals is to help the kids develop a certain independence, where they are capable of turning within and reflecting from their own strong inner center about whether they are doing the right thing.
Personal Expertise
We track these strengths as part of what we call Co-Curricular Activities. One of the dimensions of this broad area is Personal Expertise, where for three to five hours a week we will guide them in putting out energy toward their personal development, and then the teacher will track those qualities with the students individually from week to week to help them stay on course.
So those are the first three things that come to mind, to answer your question about how we help teenagers make the transition from childhood. It’s by developing strength, confidence, independence, and positive values so that they will be able to function well when they are out in the world and on their own.
To summarize, we do it through the service adventures, by helping them develop their Tools of Maturity, and by mentoring them in skills that contribute to a strong sense of Personal Excellence.
Restoring the Youthful Excitement of Discovery
If we walk into a preschool and watch a group of three-year-olds, we will immediately be struck by how excited they are, because the world is completely new to them, and they’re thrilled by a wonderful sense of adventure. And when they enter adolescence, we have found that we can help them recover a great deal of that original joy and enthusiasm.
Of course, they aren’t going to be getting excited about flowers and birds in the same way they did when they were three. They’ve outgrown the small world of childhood, but the sense of wonder can still be there, and one of the shining successes of our system is that we are able to help teens regain a great measure of their original pure curiosity, enthusiasm, and sense of adventure. We do it in the ways I’ve described, but we also do it with the curriculum, and I’ll have more to say about that shortly.
Teachers Who Model a Strong Adult Identity
Q: When you’re dealing with seven-year-olds, I imagine it’s easier to form a close relationship with them, because they are living very much in their hearts at that time. But when you’re working with teens, I’m guessing that you can still form those relationships, but your approach needs to change.
Nitai: Yes, and it will vary with the teacher. For me, with my personality, the relationships tended to be a little more impersonal. I saw my role as modeling adult attitudes, and helping them direct their energies appropriately, so there wasn’t going to be a lot of hugging. (Laughs) But there was a teacher in our school who had a more heart-centered approach, and she was able to enjoy closer personal relationships with some of the kids.
I don’t think you can make a blanket statement about what makes a good teacher, because to a great extent we will always do it in our own way. I see this as a positive, because we are encouraging the kids to be independent in their own way, too, and it’s very helpful for them to have role models of independent, self-confident adults who may be very different, but who are strong in their center.
However, I do think that because teens are working to develop their will power and independence, they will need a little more of the father kind of energy.
A Unique Approach to Academics
Q: What about the daily classroom instruction? Is there a difference in the way you’re offering teens a solid academic curriculum, compared to other schools?
Nitai: Our approach is very different. Where most traditional schools will have a goal of teaching the students to score well on a test, our goal is to help them cultivate their consciousness. And because it’s such an unusual idea, it needs some explanation.
Let’s take a course like history. Every high school student studies history. When I was in school, history was presented as a series of events and names and dates that we were expected to memorize. So it was all very mechanical and external, and it didn’t connect with us as people, because it was just one more set of facts we were supposed to master. You were supposed to keep all of these things in your head, so that you could check off the right answers on a test.
In our schools, we see history as a wonderful opportunity to explore a broad range of human behaviors – for example, when we’re studying the dream of the American Founding Fathers to include ever-larger cross-sections of people who would live together and have the freedom to pursue their goals in their own individual ways.
What we’ve come to understand is that in every series of historical events there were courageous people who stepped forward to stretch the existing boundaries, even though it was almost always unpopular, and it could even be dangerous, depending on which boundaries you were challenging.
By emphasizing these people’s lives and putting them at the forefront of history, instead of the cold data of names, dates, and places, we are able to offer young people wonderful models for what it means to have integrity and courage and compassion. It brings history to life at a deeply personal level that they will not easily forget, and that they will treasure.
Two of my favorite figures in American history are the Grimke sisters. They were born in Georgia in 1795 and 1805, when slavery was the predominant way of life. They were part of a family that held hundreds of slaves, yet even as young teens they had already begun to reject the practice, and when one of the sisters was offered her personal slave at age twelve, she refused to be involved with the system.
The Grimke sisters were eventually forced to leave the South, but they remained active in the anti-slavery movement, and they wrote a book about their experiences.
When we’re teaching U.S. history, we focus on heroic people like the Grimke sisters who were able to influence events in positive ways. And even if some of the politicians and generals were not inspiring, they can serve as cautionary examples, and we are always able to find admirable people who had a powerful and lasting impact.
Our purpose in approaching history from a human perspective is to awaken the students’ idealism and give them examples of their own very real possibilities for modeling their lives on high principles.
We want to show them that people do act in noble ways, with courage, compassion, and creative initiative. So we are always on the lookout for opportunities to bring those role models to the fore in the curriculum.
A project that came out of our Palo Alto school had to do with homelessness. One of the students talked in the classroom about how you’ll be out shopping and you’ll see a homeless person who’s asking for a handout, and maybe you don’t have anything to give them, or maybe you don’t just want to hand them some cash, so you end up driving by.
The students came up with the idea of creating homeless bags. They bought small, practical items, and the bags weren’t big, but they gave them to their parents so that when they pulled up to a stop sign they could hand them a bag.
We want to help them recognize the many opportunities to use their will power in positive ways, and to give them the satisfaction of acting on their expansive feelings with will power and creativity.
In English class, we’re extremely careful to select books that offer positive examples. There are many low-energy, low-consciousness books that are considered “classics” because the authors were able to write cleverly. But it’s ridiculous, because those books are riddled with negativity and permeated by a philosophy of hopelessness, and if you look at the authors, you find that they were very often people whose lives were falling apart.
When we choose books, we’re looking for works that will give them a sense of life’s meaning, and their options to be strong and influential and fulfilled. We’re looking for books that will have a certain light in them, and that will inspire them with feelings of hope and optimism.
For example, there’s a wonderful biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Lead, Kindly Light, that captures his extraordinary self-offering to the cause of helping others. Over the years we’ve assembled a wonderful reading list of fine books we can use in our classrooms.
We approach each academic subject with a view to figuring out how we can pick it up from the perspective of consciousness, as a way to support the students’ inner growth.
In math, for example, the traditional approach is to be narrowly focused on the curriculum and tell the kids that they’ll be expected to master a set of concepts in a fixed period of time. And maybe it will work for the ten or fifteen percent of the students who are mathematically inclined, but there will always be many others who will develop a fear and hatred of math because they feel lost and inferior to the top students.
But if you approach it in terms of personal qualities that each one can develop at his or her level, such as perseverance and concentration and creativity, and if you’re teaching to the individual, then you can help the students who are math-challenged in wonderful ways, too.
If you’re teaching each child at his or her level, and you’re helping them move ahead at their own most challenging pace, then you’re able to give them success experiences in math every single day at school. We’ve seen that it’s a very powerful way to help them develop a personal sense of confidence and accomplishment, even in a subject where they were struggling.
Our approach is to teach math in a way that all of the students can come out of math class feeling good about themselves. Of course, some will be able to fly faster and farther, but you want every student to come out of math class with the confidence that they can conquer their challenges and move ahead.
Even if they aren’t among the math wizards, they can feel good about their victories. “I’m really good at solving problems.” “I’m really good at coming up with different ways of finding solutions.” “I’ve learned that by applying my will power and focus I can solve all kinds of problems in my life.” I don’t think those experiences are common in most traditional schools today.
Helping Teens Balance Their Strengths
Q: Education for Life adapts its methods according to the age of the child and the developmental stage they are in, starting from birth to age six, when children are developing their ability to use their bodies.
Then, from six to twelve, the kids are dealing with their feelings. It’s a time when they’re doing lots of imaginative adventure play, and when they enjoy stories and music and drama and art – the media of feeling.
But then they come to the will power stage from twelve to eighteen, and you’ll still have some students who are oriented more toward their feelings, or toward the body or the intellect. How do you adjust your teaching for the students whose natures are individual and unique, and who might not be strongly oriented toward will power?
Nitai: I’ll share a story from the early 1970s, when we were in the early stages of developing our first school.
I was searching for clues to how I could get started, and I came across an article, “The Balanced Life,” by Paramhansa Yogananda. In his book Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda describes his experiences starting a school in India, and he talks about how, if you want to find success and happiness in your life, you’re going to need to have a healthy balance between the body, feelings, will, and mind.
So yes, people are going to have one or two areas where they’re strongest, but you want to make sure they are able to function in all four areas, and a basic principle of Education for Life is that you can use your strengths to build up your weaknesses.
For example, if someone is intellectual without a lot of feeling, you can have them use their mind to read books, or sing, or make art, or play an instrument, and you’ll want to make sure they’re playing music that will bring out their feeling quality, and that they’re reading stories that will give them examples of heart quality, so they’ll know that it exists and what it looks like. And then you can look for opportunities to have them work with animals or with younger kids, or whatever.
I’m thinking of a boy who had a very strong intellect and lots of will power, but I was having trouble figuring out how to help him activate the feeling side of his nature.
We were doing service projects in town one morning a week, and every student had a separate project. This boy was working in a special needs classroom, where the teacher assigned him to work with a little girl who had Down Syndrome. So, unlike the boy, she was intellectually not terribly sharp.
I wasn’t sure how it would work out, but he would go and interact with the girl week after week, and they would find things they could do together, and it was beautiful to watch the softness come out in him, to the point where he was looking forward to his time in town, and he was definitely building that part of himself just by being with her.
The joy of Education for Life is that you can get to know the kids, and you can take the time to relate to them as individuals, so you can help shape their school experience in line with what they need.
Q: That’s a wonderful story. Now I’m wondering what happens to the Living Wisdom graduates after they leave high school – when you’re releasing them into the wild, and saying, “Okay, kids, you’re on your own.”
I’m wondering if you’re giving them a framework to help them steer their own course. Where maybe they’ll try certain things and they’ll realize, “Well, this isn’t making me happy,” and they’ll be able to figure out why. Perhaps it’s making their heart feel narrow and contracted instead of expanded, and I wonder if you’re giving them a inner road map for values and a happy life.
I’m thinking of a book that Swami Kriyananda wrote, Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t, where he lays out a road map for values, based on simple principles that can help us know which actions will make us happy and help us avoid suffering.
Nitai: Out of the Labyrinth would be over the heads of most seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds, because it’s aimed at college students and intellectually curious adults, and it deals with the principal figures of Western intellectual history – people like Freud, Sartre, Kant, and Marx.
There’s a lot to be gained by figuring out some things for yourself. For example, one of our graduates was accepted at a respected college on the West Coast. She had been a straight-A student in our school, so she was shocked when she received a C on her first college paper.
When she asked the professor what she’d done wrong, he told her that her writing was fine, but he’d lowered her grade because she had included her own ideas, and he was only interested in a report on what she had read in the books he’d assigned.
She realized that the teacher’s perspective was very different from Education for Life, where creativity is encouraged. She deleted all of the original ideas from her paper and received an A, and she was able to adapt to the new reality. But she kept in touch with her creative side, and after graduation she found success and personal fulfillment in a leadership role at a company where the guiding principles were aligned with her own.
I’m content to send our graduates out with the tools we’ve given them to make sense of the world. We’ve collected many wonderful stories of how they’ve applied EFL principles to create fulfilling careers and lives for themselves, in business, government service, dance, scientific research, the military, and – most meaningful to me – as Education for Life teachers.