Our Mission
“To manifest the educational ideals of Paramhansa Yogananda as articulated by J. Donald Walters through the Education for Life philosophy. This is accomplished through providing students with a balanced education of body, feeling, will, and intellect in preparation for meeting life’s diverse challenges and opportunities.”
About Paramhansa Yogananda
and Education for Life
In the Living Wisdom Schools, we are dedicated to offering children and their parents an intensive, academically rigorous, individually focused education in a safe, loving atmosphere, leading to personal happiness, academic accomplishment, and success in career and life. Our educational philosophy is based on the ideals of Paramhansa Yogananda and our founder, J. Donald Walters, as described in his book, Education for Life. (The link leads to the online book.)
The Origins of Education for Life
On March 22, 1917, a young monk in India named Swami Yogananda started a school for boys. In his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, he wrote:
“The ideal of an all-sided education for youth had always been close to my heart. I saw clearly the arid results of ordinary instruction, aimed only at the development of body and intellect. Moral and spiritual values, without whose appreciation no man can approach happiness, were yet lacking in the formal curriculum. I determined to found a school where young boys could develop to the full stature of manhood. My first step in that direction was made with seven children at Dihika, a small country site in Bengal.”
A generous land grant from a private donor enabled Yogananda to transfer the school to Ranchi, Bihar, where it flourished beyond his wildest expectations.
“At the end of the first year at Ranchi, applications for admission reached two thousand. But the school, which at that time was solely residential, could accommodate only about one hundred. Instruction for day students was soon added.”
Yogananda called his institution a “How to Live School.” Central to the curriculum were skills that enabled the students to be happy and successful. He taught them to meditate and to cultivate positive, inclusive attitudes – life skills that, a century later, have begun to exert a powerful appeal for unprecedented numbers of educators and students at all levels.
When Yogananda came to America in 1920, he started a second How to Live School – but it failed; not because the children were unhappy but as he put it, because parents in the 1920s were unprepared for his ideas. India had offered more fertile soil, in a culture where instruction in the art of happiness is considered an indispensable part of a well-rounded education.
Fifty-four years later, in 1971, an American disciple of Yogananda’s, J. Donald Walters (Swami Kriyananda), started a How to Live School in Nevada City, California. The school flourished, because the time was right. The original school has since spawned schools in America, Europe, and India, under a new name, Living Wisdom Schools, and a new philosophical banner, “Education for Life.”
For an inspiring, fuller explanation of the mission and methods of Education for Life and the Living Wisdom Schools, you may enjoy reading “The #1 Question Parents Ask About Living Wisdom School.”