When I was a kid, I sat every day in a concrete block without windows. The prevalent theory at the time was that windows were distracting (this wasn’t in the Dark Ages, but the 1980s). I like to think I turned out okay, despite my windowless education. But how much better could I have evolved if I had experienced a living classroom? A place where I could have hands-on experience in permaculture, and where I was educated in sustainability? What kind of education do our children need to meet the challenges of this century? More basically, how do we instill environmental values in our kids?
These were a few of the questions sparked in my mind as I walked through the campus of the Green School in Bali. Constructed largely in the past year, and just opened this fall, the Green School is one of the few places in the world that is making a calculated and passionate effort to tackle these kinds of questions.
They have built an extraordinary campus on a fertile eight-hectare plot of land, entirely out of low-impact and sustainable materials. It is a place for children and everything else to grow. Everything you see in the photo above is part of Green School: gardens designed by a resident permaculturist, classrooms and living quarters for faculty and staff. Looming in the distance in this photograph is what will be one of the world’s largest bamboo buildings. As you can see, this “Heart of the School” is still under construction: when it is finished, it will host school assemblies and other events.
A mud pool is built on purpose: here students can practice Mepantigan, a Balinese martial art that incorporates gamelan music, Balinese dance, and drama.
Students do sit at desks and learn academically rigorous lessons along with their environmental education. The school may be in the heart of the jungle, but it is still a school, with equations to be solved and stories to be analyzed.
And there are sports fields, it’s just that the goalposts are made from bamboo. It makes the ideal building material here: it is quickly renewable and very resilient.
The Green School has gotten a lot of press. It has been covered by world media from the South China Morning Post to this month’s issue of Ode Magazine; here, Thomas Friedman describes his visit to the school. By all accounts, this is an exciting experiment in education.
But the school also faces a unique set of challenges. It’s not just trying to design a new kind of curriculum, and become a showcase of architectural wonders: it aims to bridge the world that the expat children know with the Balinese culture they have moved into. The idea is to weave the school in with the fabric of the local communities, and create global citizens in the process. Currently, the school has a student body of 80% expat and 20% Indonesian. How can the Green School keep from being a social and economic bubble in the heart of Bali? One encouraging move is that all students have both an Indonesian and an expat teacher in the classroom; they also all take classes in the Bahasa Indonesian language. It will be fascinating to see how the relationship between the school and the surrounding community develops.
Indonesia is a so-called “developing” country. This terminology is problematic, because it implies a set of standard definitions about what development or progress are. But it also opens up a lot of potential: where better to work on sustainable development than in a place that isn’t entirely “developed” (i.e., shackled into fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure?) It would have been very difficult to get a project of this scale off the ground in North America: financially, because of labor and material costs, and perhaps even legally, in terms of building and zoning codes. As we begin to see that the ways in which North American society’s development are less than ideal, perhaps we can look to innovative models in the less-developed world to reform and revise some of our own institutions.
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