Green School - Bali, Indonesia

Our innovative curriculum combines rigorous academic content taught through a holistic approach that aims to draw on all of a child's capacities. Talented faculty apply classroom lessons to real life through a range of entrepreneurial and agricultural projects. Our goal is to foster in students a spirit of inquiry and a love of learning that prepares them to compete in the challenging, complex 21st-century world.

The Green School curriculum weaves together strands from the best of traditional and progressive educational theories. Every day, Green School students will be challenged according to Three Guiding Frames:

1. Core Competencies:

Students at Green School will learn the essential skills and content appropriate to each class level, from fluency with letters and numbers in the younger classes to critical thinking and analysis for older children. Our students will be exposed to great works of art and literature from different historical periods and many cultures, and they will become comfortable and highly competent with science and technology. Objectives are clear and based on widely-accepted standards for English, mathematics, social studies, and science. The curriculum also includes art, music, and several languages.

2. Holistic Approach:

Our Steiner-inspired philosophy is integrated and student-centered, bringing together each child’s major talents, making learning both fulfilling and joyful. Based on Professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, our goal is to help students develop equally well in the areas of rational intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ), spiritual intelligence (SQ), and kinaesthetic intelligence (KQ). Like engines firing on all four cylinders rather than one (when only IQ is challenged), students enjoy a deeply satisfying, broadening, and affirming learning experience, growing as whole people and remaining engaged learners as adults.

3. Authentic Motivation:

Green School students will apply their classroom lessons to real-world situations through various entrepreneurial and agricultural projects in our Learning Village, making abstract ideas come to life with results they can witness on a daily basis. Students will be involved in activities from manufacturing and marketing their own chocolate to helping to manage the animal husbandry and gardens integral to our campus. Other planned enterprises include a ceramics studio and a publishing house. By working with dedicated teachers and experienced professionals, students learn to solve problems while developing managerial and economic skills that will inform and empower them to become the leaders of their generation.

Results

Our curriculum has been designed over a 13-year period and has been successfully implemented in modified versions at schools in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Students educated within this model consistently achieve at a high level. No matter what age our students are when they leave Green School or where they move on to, they will be competitive with their peers across the globe and will remain enthusiastic learners able to prosper within and help solve the issues of their time.

International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years and Diploma Programs are planned and Green School will also seek accreditation from the Council of International Schools (CIS).

Green School's Year 3 - 4 Lead Teacher, Johnny Ryan, shares his thoughts on the Three Guiding Frames:

Balance is a word that may sometimes be underestimated in the western world, particularly in our modern times as we rush headlong down our rocky road. However, this word as unbalanced as it may look itself (I have often tried spelling it with two ells at least…), is a key to our proposed education and curriculum at Green School.

We see childhood as a progression of three phases: till school age a time when the body is busy growing and finding itself within the world; from there till the teenage years a time when emotional life develops in its colorful richness; and through high school, a time where the powers of reasoning and thought become paramount. Our curriculum reflects this in three balanced ways. In the busy, active ‘home’ the kindergartens will develop around our children, filled with activity and the opportunity to explore through play and work the natural world and our human place within; in the artistic and exciting way curriculum will be brought to the middle school through legends and stories of the world, biographies of the people who have changed it and subjects filled with a ‘wow’ factor that attaches the subject to the right place to start with – the feelings; and in our upper school where powers of reasoning and deliberation will be called upon across a wide, broad range of interest and enquiry.

At another essential level we see a child not just as an intellect to be filled but someone with a heart to be warmed and a body to be coordinated down to her or his fingertips. This will be seen in the daily life of the class where during the first part of the day subjects will be brought through the sparking of interest and the kindling of warmth for a topic or ability; in the second part of the day the mind will be called upon in a more structured and measured sense, where lessons are more subject orientated; and the third where limbs will be brought into action through sport, art, working with the world and the practicing of skills or trades.

This three part wholeness will also be seen within each lesson itself, typified by the first part of the day where movement, music, drama and a host of other skills will be practiced, growing through the years in technicality, to warm and enliven the students; then the heart and mind will be called upon in a multitude of ways and a variety of means during the working through of lesson content in reflection and production.

We actively work with these three frames at these various levels because by doing so we hope to achieve a balance in the child’s day, in their year and eventually in their life. This is one of the pictures of what a holistic education means – to educate in balance. This balance too may then be seen working within all other levels of what we do here at school: in our architecture, in our pedagogy, in the way we try to walk and breathe upon the Earth.

This balance of course, is also a fundamental principal of the daily life we see around us in Bali; which is why, although a newcomer to the island, I believe there is not a place in the world better suited to appreciate the kind of school we are trying to build and the curriculum we are hoping to implement. Here in Bali it is not ‘alternative’ to imagine a child as a microcosm of the macrocosm, on a journey through life attempting to hold sway across the trials and tribulations of good, bad and the middle path. It is a fact of life – a powerful picture that will allow us to give each child every gift they need in order to go out into the world, as a balanced individual, free to make up their own mind, as well as follow their own heart with a measured tread and a gentle hand.

More about Johnny Ryan