Green School - Bali, Indonesia

Key Influences:

Jürgen Zimmer
Alan Wagstaff
Steiner-Waldorf educational paradigm

We believe that academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil or opportunity life's vicissitudes bring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits--some might call it character--that also matters immensely for our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Of course, there are many paths to success in life, and many domains in which other aptitudes are rewarded. In our increasingly knowledge-based society, technical skill is certainly one. There is a children's joke: "What do you call a nerd fifteen years from now?" The answer: "Boss." But even among ‘nerds’ emotional intelligence offers an added edge in the workplace... Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept - who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings - are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics. People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.

From Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ
Daniel Goleman
Bloomsbury Press, 1996, p. 36

Alan Wagstaff, the author of our curriculum, and Johnny Ryan, our Lead Year 3 - 4 Teacher, wrote a document which helped to inspire Green School entitled "Three Springs". Download it here.

VIDEOS:

Sir Ken Robinson Talks: Do schools kill creativity?	Miniature Earth	Exponential Times

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