Our new school director, Aryavan McSweeney, is no stranger to Living Wisdom. He entered kindergarten at age four and graduated nine years later. (For the story of his early school experiences, see A Conversation with LWS Graduate Aryavan McSweeney.)
His high school, college, and work experiences also prepared him to return to his alma mater as its director. After graduating from St. Francis High in Mountain View, Aryavan majored in video production at California State University at Fullerton. He and his wife, Ishani, also a talented filmmaker, created our school’s beautiful 6-minute introductory video.
After college, Aryavan spent several years in India as a documentary filmmaker. He then helped create successful Education for Life programs at public schools in New Delhi.
Back in the U.S., he taught for a year at the original Living Wisdom School in Nevada City, California, then joined our Palo Alto school as its director-in-training.
Q: How did you transition from video production to directing the school where you spent your first nine years?
Aryavan: The founder of Education for Life and the Living Wisdom Schools, Swami Kriyananda, told me several times that I needed to be a teacher. He also told a number of people that I respected and couldn’t ignore what he’d said to me. (Laughs)
I knew I would teach someday, but I couldn’t imagine how it would happen. Then I received a call from the director of our high school in Nevada City, California, who said, “We need a teacher.” I could see the writing on the wall, and I very happily agreed. I had two things going for me – I would be teaching subjects that I was familiar with, and I had spent nine years in an EFL school as a student and believed in the philosophy and methods.
After training for a year, I began teaching on my own, and of course I made lots of mistakes, which were valuable lessons. But there were also lots of successes. I taught seventh and eighth grades, then I taught high school.
They say that the first three years are the most difficult for a young teacher, but I loved the challenges. I loved the kids, and I loved that each day was completely new. Teaching stretched me in countless ways and showed me what I could do – that I could be improvisational and think on my feet, and that I could be adaptable and form connections with these wonderful young people.
Q: You’ve said elsewhere that if we can create a school environment where the prevailing energy is loving, we will have accomplished our most important goal as educators. You added that the opportunity to present academics in a loving atmosphere is an enormous advantage.
Aryavan: It was the secret to our successes in India. The key is that if you can adjust the curriculum to the needs of the individual child, the students become tremendously motivated. First, because they feel that you know them and are on their side, and second because you can give them lots of success experiences at their own level.
So taking the time to get to know the students actually ends up making the learning more efficient, because the children find their success experiences deeply satisfying and enjoyable. It also goes a long way toward eliminating the discipline problems that occur under a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach, where perhaps a third of the students are learning at a level that matches their preparedness, while another third are struggling to keep up, and another third are bored out of their minds. So you end up with lots of pain, detachment, disappointment, and loss of motivation and inspiration in the classroom, and it can end up being disruptive
Getting to know each child is the first step, and this side of EFL is deliberately messy. It’s unpredictable and individual, because it revolves around each student’s uniqueness. On the other hand, the academics in EFL are extremely well-organized, disciplined, and purposeful – all the more so, once you’ve formed those loving connections. But the process of making those connections is completely individual, so you have to respond creatively to what each child might need from you.
Q: If you have the heart of a teacher, it seems it would be liberating to work directly and lovingly with your students, and to humanize the classroom in creative ways.
Aryavan: It’s very liberating. It’s teaching with respect for the deeper nature of the child. It’s about their soul nature, and it’s something we all want to weave into whatever we’re doing. In India we found that the teachers were cautious at first and fearful that the students wouldn’t perform well on standardized tests. But when they experienced the power of connecting with the individual child, they all wanted it, especially when they saw the test scores beginning to improve.
A child may not want to expand at first, but if you can give them a few small experiences of success, at their level, they suddenly realize, “I like this!” When you teach them individually, so that they’re having these small experiences of success every day, it’s very satisfying to them, and there’s a feeling, “Oh, this is nice. I want to do this again.”
So it connects the child to the curriculum in a way that rigid instruction can never do, and in fifty years of Education for Life we’ve found that this is true for children everywhere.
The particular form of their experience of personal expansion will be unique for each child, but the experience of expansion is universal, and profoundly satisfying.
It’s why parents who visit our school are shocked to see children of every age, from four to eighteen, enthusiastically engaged with their studies, and not wanting to be distracted, lest they lose the enjoyable experience of absorption and expansion.
The children become happier at school, and the teachers also take more enjoyment when they discover that they can help their students academically by giving them happy experiences of learning. The school environment then changes dramatically – it becomes a dynamic, loving space, based on the simple connections between the students and their teachers. It explains why our teaching staff has been stable, because of the feeling of lightness, success, and joy.
Q: If there is one thing that the EFL schools have shown, it’s that happy children do well academically because they love school. Our kindergarten teacher, Suryani, said that her kids will weep bitterly when they can’t come to school because they’re sick, or for other reasons.
Aryavan: The idea of educational efficiency is powerfully persuasive. When the present generation of adults were in school, every child was supposed to cover X pages and take the same test. But what happened is that it was like a wire with too much resistance, and the learning moved forward slowly. Whereas if you take the resistance out because you’ve got very efficient little enthusiastic kids who are squared away and happy and have all of their human faculties engaged, you find that the learning becomes more efficient, and as a fringe benefit, more enjoyable. And, as I said earlier, most of the discipline problems go away, because the children are enjoying school and no longer want to waste time acting up.
Often it’s the parents, and particularly the grandparents, who are indignant. “Why are you wasting all this time getting to know the kid? School should not be happy! It should be hard! It should be painful!” But what we’re doing in EFL is making a very fast, efficiently conducting wire, a very superconductor kind of wire that enables learning to happen quickly because the kids are happy.
Q: Once you have gotten to know the individual children, does the learning happen in a structured and disciplined way?
Aryavan: Yes. The children thrive when there’s order and they know what’s expected of them. You cannot only have unstructured time, because it would be deeply unsettling for them, and they would feel very insecure and unhappy. They thrive when there is focus and order, and when they are doing meaningful things that give them a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. It’s a critical part of the foundation that allows the more flowing, creative, individual kind of learning to happen.
Q: Let’s talk about your transition back to the U.S. – when you returned, and why, and where you landed.
Aryavan: The short answer is that my father, who’s a founding board member of our school, asked me to come back. He taught middle school here for twenty years, and now he serves as the office manager. So it’s his fault that I’m the director and can tell him what to do. (Laughs) But we knew that our founding director, Helen Purcell, would retire at the end of the school year in 2024, and the subject of my stepping in as her replacement was in the air.
If I hadn’t spent a great deal of time “selling” EFL in India, I might not have been ready, but it helped me understand the needs of teachers in today’s schools.
The India experience deepened my understanding of EFL and how to apply it in situations that might require extremely creative solutions. It forced me to grapple with what EFL means in the world outside our own schools, and how it can help people in unique and unfamiliar contexts. It showed me also how grateful and receptive people are for these simple solutions.
The first week after I landed in Palo Alto, we began rehearsals for our enormous all-school theater production, and I suddenly found myself directing the play and having to meet seventy kids and figure out how to work with them in the best way, as the rehearsals became increasingly complex and challenging.
When we were finished with the play, I transitioned into admissions and other activities more typical of a school director. I spent a great deal of time helping our retiring director, Helen Purcell. When parents would visit to see if our school was a good fit, Helen would talk with them while I listened. Then she began asking me to lead the discussion, and finally she had me greet the parents on my own. Because of my long familiarity with EFL, I was able to slip naturally into the role, and I found that my experiences in India helped enormously, because I’d spent so much time talking with parents and teachers.
Q: Any concluding thoughts?
Aryavan: The more we can share EFL, the better off our children will be. Our founder’s book Education for Life makes a strong case against cynicism and atheism, two poisonous influences that have ruined the school experience for countless children, starting at the university level. I deeply believe that Education for Life is the antidote, because we’ve now demonstrated for more than fifty years that children thrive when they can learn that life is meaningful and that our natural birthright is joy.
