By Helen Purcell, Director Emeritus
Living Wisdom School of Palo Alto
Confronted with the whole-child curriculum at Living Wisdom School, parents often wonder if taking the time to get to know each child in order to adjust the curriculum to match their unique individual strengths might actually just be wasting a great deal of time and energy that could be better spent on academics.
The short answer is that throughout the fifty-plus years since the first Living Wisdom School opened its doors, we have found the exact opposite to be true: learning becomes far more efficient when we bring the whole child into the process.
Here are five reasons this is so.
- Many schools today operate under a mandate to “teach to the test.” But a one-size-fits-all, rigidly scheduled curriculum tends to leave perhaps only a third of the students challenged appropriately, while another third find themselves struggling, and the last third are under-challenged and bored. Large, impersonal classes and a rigid curriculum leave a significant portion of the students frustrated or idle, creating a breeding ground for discipline problems and disengagement, both of which interfere with learning.
- When we teach the children individually, each at his or her own level of ability and pace, school becomes a place where the children can enjoy success experiences every day. As they realize that they are understood and that they are able to succeed, they begin to enjoy their schoolwork and become enthusiastically engaged. A happy fringe benefit is that discipline problems virtually disappear.
- In a Living Wisdom classroom, the teacher’s first priority is to gain a deep understanding of the individual child, so that they will be able to guide the children appropriately, according to their unique learning styles, interests, and abilities.
A classroom where each child experiences the joy of overcoming challenges and succeeding every day becomes an engaging learning environment for all. It is why visitors to our school are amazed to see children of every age, from kindergarten to eighth grade, enjoyably absorbed in their schoolwork. They see students of all ages working together in small groups, not bored or inciting each other to mischief, but happily engaged in what they are doing, because they find joy in accepting challenges that they stand a good chance of mastering.
- There is no bullying at Living Wisdom School. From the first day of kindergarten until they graduate, the teachers are continuously monitoring the children’s interactions. When they observe contractive behaviors, they immediately step in. The teachers are experienced in helping children resolve their conflicts realistically and harmoniously. A school and classroom environment where each child feels safe, acknowledged, and loved is a wholesome incubator for learning.
- We approach learning in a spirit of joyous adventure and discovery. We hold high values and are eager to expose the children to academics in ways that they can individually relate to, and that will inspire and engage them for all their lives. We approach books and media by carefully unpacking the positive, uplifting messages behind whatever human suffering is described. We avoid those that offer a cynical response to life.
An All-Round Education Engages the Whole Child
Parents sometimes ask us: “While it seems wonderful to address all sides of a child’s nature at school, doesn’t it place their future success at risk?”
There seems to be a widespread assumption today that school should be only for the brain, and that everything else should be set aside during school hours and addressed elsewhere, if at all. This assumption holds that if we focus on training the children’s brains, we can assume that they will be happy and successful at some future point in their lives, after they have acquired financial security, material goods, and social status. But a strong and growing body of evidence, which we will shortly discuss, has clearly shown that the opposite is true – that happy people are much more likely to be successful in whatever they attempt.
The Five Dimensions of a Child
We humans have been gifted with five instruments through which we can perceive and interact with the world: body, feelings, will, mind, and soul. Science today is increasingly discovering how these five instruments are inextricably linked, and how a deficiency or malfunction in one is bound to compromise the healthy functioning of the others. For example, researchers have found that the physical body, including the brain and heart, functions more efficiently in the presence of calm, harmonious, expansive feelings such as love, kindness, and compassion. When the Institute of Heartmath taught heart-harmonizing methods to students in a Washington, DC public school, their test scores improved significantly. Many similar findings are described in our book Happiness & Success at School: A Magnificent Synergy.
Let us consider some simple examples.
Body
When the body is unwell, we feel less able and eager to attack our challenges, because the supply of energy to our brain, feelings, and will is diminished. Conversely, when the body is healthy, we feel wonderful, and we have abundant energy and enthusiasm to meet our life’s tests.
Feeling
Similarly, if our feelings are compromised – if we are sad, depressed, resentful, or feel unrecognized and unloved – we will be less able to bring our full energy, enthusiasm, and willingness to meet our challenges.
Will Power
If our will power is compromised, due to a lack of strong desire, confidence, or proper understanding, we will be unable to bring our full energy and volition to our activities.
Mind and Soul
During more than fifty years in the Living Wisdom Schools, we have seen that children who are healthy, happy, cheerful, enthusiastic, confident, focused, and strong-minded are best-equipped to learn at the peak of their individual ability.
Each Child Is Unique: We Must Teach to the Individual
Our philosophy of education is based on an understanding that every child is unique. Each child brings an individual blend of strengths to school that demand appropriate consideration – as the following stories illustrate.
There was a boy in the original Living Wisdom School who had an uncanny, almost intuitive gift for understanding how tools and machinery worked. Unfortunately, he was little interested in the standard school curriculum. Instead of forcing him to learn in a way that was foreign and unpalatable to him, the teachers worked with his strengths. They created learning challenges that engaged his mechanical skills and his interest in learning how things worked. As a result, he began to have a happier experience of school.
When he realized that the teachers understood him, and that they were on his side, he was open and receptive when they introduced him to math problems and other lessons related to his personal interests. The boy grew up to be a highly paid, in-demand metalworker and welder.
A young girl in our school dreaded math class because she associated it with many past failures. Year after year at her former school she had fallen hopelessly behind in math.
When she came to LWS, the teachers worked with her at her own level. Very carefully, they gave her math lessons and assignments that she stood a good chance of “winning.” In this way, math gradually became associated with positive experiences. In the compassionate, loving school environment, her classmates celebrated her successes. She spent so much time working on math with her teacher and the math aides that her book became frayed at the edges and looked very “lived-in.”
Her story has a happy ending – while she didn’t become a world-class mathematician, she was successful in a college major, genetics, where math was a strong prerequisite. Best of all, she gained tremendous self-confidence from having defeated the math bogeyman and conquering her fears in a way that was fun, engaging, and personally rewarding.
How Do Our Graduates Perform After They Leave Our School?
A strong proof of our methods is how our students fare in high school, college, and career. Before we look at some broad trends, here are two recent anecdotal examples.
One of our graduates, Krishav Gandhi, is now a senior in our Living Wisdom High School. We recently learned that Krishav qualified as a semifinalist for the National Merit Scholarship Program. Just 1% of high school seniors achieve National Merit semifinalist status. Of this group, 95% will attain finalist standing, and half will receive a National Merit Scholarship.
In spring 2023, another graduating senior in our high school scored a perfect 1600 on her college boards. To understand what this says about the quality of instruction and guidance at the school, of the 7 million college-bound high school seniors who take the SATs annually, just one in every 7,000 (0.1%) scores a perfect 1600.
Are these rare exceptions? Of course. Perhaps a better measure of our approach is our graduates’ average high school GPA, which hovers around 3.85. Also worth noting are our graduates’ successes in college and beyond. (See the links below.)
But first, an explanation is in order. Unlike many schools today, we are not focused on training our students to “test and forget” what they learn. We are intent on giving them a solid foundation in the knowledge and problem-solving strengths to find solutions and be competent and successful in high school, college, career, and life. We discover and nurture their unique talents and enthusiasms, and we show them how to bring their best to everything they do. The result is that they do very well when they leave us.
- How Well Do LWS Graduates Adjust to High School?
- Living Wisdom Graduates’ High School and College Grades
- Living Wisdom Graduates Enjoy Varied and Exciting Careers
The “Disaster Factor” in Schools Today
In most schools today, the almost total lack of instruction in life skills has resulted in an epidemic of disconnection, alienation, estrangement, sadness, loneliness, and bitterness – with the unfortunate result that many young people feel deeply betrayed and lash out in rebellion through drugs, violence, cynicism, and self-harm.
The problem is too serious to be lightly dismissed – “Oh well, young people have always managed to land on their feet – life will be their teacher!” Even if our children are not inclined to rebel – how will it help them to keep daily company with those who are?
Rather than toss the dice with our children’s future, it is our strong conviction that we should do everything in our power to offer them a better way.
When we started our schools a little more than 50 years ago, we realized that the solution to the deficiencies of modern “deaducation” was actually close at hand. The question we needed to address was not “How can we force our children to get good grades so that they will be happy and successful in some misty distant future, after they have achieved wealth and status?”
Instead, the questions we asked – and answered – were:
- “How can we work with our students, by understanding their unique skills and what motivates them individually?”
- “Once we have gotten to know them, how can we give them the wisdom, maturity, and life skills to be happy and highly successful now, so that they will stand an excellent chance of succeeding at every stage of their lives?”
Education Reform – Baby Steps at the University Level
At America’s elite universities, a new movement has begun to acknowledge the problems in education, and to take small, tentative first steps toward finding solutions.
- At Yale, students can now take a course called Life Worth Living.
- Notre Dame offers students a course called God and the Good Life.
- Harvard offers an online course called Managing Happiness. The in-person version of the course has been astonishingly successful. The course, Positive Psychology 1504, taught by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar Ph.D., will enter the books as the most popular course in the history of Harvard University. In the spring of 2006, more than 1400 Harvard students enrolled in both Positive Psychology 1504 and Ben-Shahar’s Psychology of Leadership course.
Positive Psychology 1504 consists of 22 lectures around 75 minutes each, with a guest lecture on humor by Harvard graduate and professor Shawn Achor, author of the bestselling book The Happiness Advantage. The course focuses on the psychological aspects of life fulfillment and examines empathy, friendship, love, achievement, creativity, spirituality, happiness, and humor. (From positivepsychology.com.)
- At Stanford, Fred Luskin and Carole Pertofsky teach a happiness course that they created in response to a number of student suicides.
It’s gratifying to see that neuroscientists, social scientists, psychologists, and educators have begun to understand how vitally important happiness is to success in school, career, and life.
Yet when we view these developments against the backdrop of history, we find that the principles have been known for a very long time.
Ancient Principles for Success & Happiness
Wise people in all ages have given us the keys to a happy, successful life. The first principle is that happiness increases when we live “expansively” – that is, when we use our five human instruments of body, heart, will, mind, and soul in ways that bring us greater health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy, instead of their opposites.
This is our goal for the children at Living Wisdom School – to create an environment where they can thrive in each of the five dimensions of their being.
While academics are an extremely important part of a child’s life arsenal, researchers at America’s great universities are finding that people who are happy, healthy, emotionally stable, mentally focused, and strong-willed are most likely to succeed at school.
A pioneer in the field is Shawn Achor, mentioned earlier as a guest lecturer in Harvard’s Positive Psychology 1504 course. Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, forever changed how we understand the link between success and happiness.
As a graduate student at Harvard, Achor served as a proctor, a role that required him to have hundreds of conversations with incoming freshmen over cups of Starbucks coffee.
Achor soon noticed an unexpected difference between the students who thrived and those who struggled. The most successful Harvard freshmen were not, as he might have expected, the ones who buried themselves in the library stacks, determined to grind out good grades. They were the students who were happiest and who were most socially engaged. They were enthusiastic, curious, and formed study groups, asked questions, and approached their studies in a spirit of joyous discovery.
Achor’s research revolutionized how he understood the relationship between success and happiness. It seems that our cultural assumptions are wrong. Happiness is not something we can expect to enjoy after we have gained a measure of financial security and status. Instead, the people who are most likely to succeed in life are those who know how to be happily engaged in the present moments of their lives. Achor now consults with corporations to help them create happy success cultures at work.
What Stanford and Harvard Can Learn from Living Wisdom School
While these initiatives are promising, it is worth noting that the first Living Wisdom School predated the present faint stirrings by a century.
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, are exerting a powerful appeal for unprecedented numbers of university students.
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 weren’t prepared for his ideas. India had offered more fertile soil, in the context of a culture where instruction in the art of happiness is considered an indispensable part of a well-rounded upbringing.
Fifty-four years later, in 1971, an American disciple of Yogananda’s, Swami Kriyananda, started a How to Live School in Nevada City, California. The school has flourished, because the time is right. The founding 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.
Education for Life in Action
A shining example of the way we incorporate the philosophy of Education for Life in our curriculum is the annual all-school Theater Magic performance, where each student plays a role in producing a professional-quality theater event based on the life of a great soul who has blessed the earth by his or her presence.
Subjects of past Theater Magic productions have included the Dalai Lama, Joan of Arc, the goddess Quan Yin, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Rabiah (a renowned Indian woman saint), Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis, George Washington Carver, St. Bernadette of Lourdes, and botanist Luther Burbank.
In twenty-two years of plays, we have found theater to be a powerful medium for bringing history to life in a personally engaging way that remains with the students as a treasured memory throughout their lives.
It has been inspiring for us to witness how the students benefit personally. Theater not only teaches them vivid lessons in history, geography, political science, literature, music, and dance – it offers them opportunities to develop high-value life skills. The children learn to take responsibility and use good judgment, and they develop personal strengths in self-confidence, leadership, cooperation, self-control, and perseverance.
They learn to project their presence through their voice and bearing, and to speak clearly while being respectful of their listeners – for example, waiting for the laughter or applause to fade before resuming their spoken lines.
They learn breathing and self-regulation methods to calm any feelings of fear or over-excitement. They experience the fulfillment of supporting each other through the challenges of preparing and performing. Finally, they experience the rich satisfaction and pride of pulling together a project of profound beauty, meaning, and inspiration. The plays have acquired a reputation as events of great inspiration and joy and draw rave reviews from packed audiences of parents and guests.
We should not forget to mention the many lessons they learn about the joys of cooperation and social engagement.
This is Character Development at its finest. By portraying exemplary lives, history becomes real and inspiring. Many of our graduates have taken the time to tell us how the skills they developed through Theater Magic helped them succeed in high school, college, and beyond.
The experience of mounting an event of deep significance every year from kindergarten to graduation is unique in education today. It is a perfect example of how life skills and the academic curriculum can, and should, be melded together.
“What kind of education enables people to be happy and successful throughout their lives, and not just in some far-off, imagined better future?”
The research is clear and it is growing: people who know how to be happy and successful in the present are more likely to be successful at every moment of their lives.