Back to Questions Parents Ask.
What about the spiritual aspects of Living Wisdom School? Is the instruction truly nonsectarian?
Helen: Parents generally accept that we are nonsectarian, but what they often wonder is how we do it. How do we infuse the school culture with spirituality, without being sectarian?
Barbara: It’s such a highly personal, volatile and emotional issue, that it’s often something parents are reluctant to ask about in any detail.
What we do in the earliest grades is help the children live with a bit more awareness of universal spiritual principles. How do you develop enthusiasm? How do you develop concentration? Where does happiness come from? Does happiness change over time? How does it change? What stays the same? All of these questions are fundamental to spirituality, because they’re questions that human beings have always asked, regardless of their religious affiliation or culture. And what we do is simply create a climate where the questioning is open.
We open space for growth. And this is how we’re tremendously different from a “religious school.” As wonderful a choice as that might be for many people, there’s a dogma that will definitely be shared. But we don’t have a dogma, and that can be difficult for parents to understand.
When I began teaching here, I had the naïve idea that an open approach to spirituality would be easier for people to embrace. And I couldn’t have been more wrong! Because our world is accustomed to announcing its affiliations: “Yes, I go to that synagogue. Yes, I’m a Greek Orthodox. Yes, I’m Presbyterian, Catholic, Rastafarian” — because it helps me define my life, which would otherwise be too uncertain.
Here in the school, we live with an openness, and a refusal to embrace dogma, so they have the opportunity to consider the largest questions, and to live in a spirit of experiment and discovery.
The first School Rule is “Enjoy yourself!” Well, that’s much deeper than it may sound, because it opens a host of important questions. How do I enjoy myself? How do I enjoy myself alone? How do I enjoy myself in a group? And then, of course, the far-reaching question, “Can I enjoy myself if I’m inflicting any kind of suffering on someone else?”
So all of the school rules have far-reaching spiritual dimensions built in. And we live with them simply, moment by moment, with a love of the question, and a willingness to live in a spirit of not deciding in advance, so we don’t need to have decisions made for us — “I’ve got to live by these rules, I’ve got to tighten up, everything’s fine.” Many adults live that way, but if you question them, their dogma quickly falls apart, and maybe they resort to shouting.
Helen: We’re sharing principles and direct experience, rather than rules, and suspending the kind of judgments that come with dogma. It doesn’t leave room for the punitive to come in, which is so much a part of a dogmatic structure — you did it or you didn’t, and if you did or didn’t, you’ll go to hell.
Here at Living Wisdom, it’s “Oh, look at my direction. Look at how far I’ve come, and look at the successes I’ve had along the way. And I can do even better, so let’s keep going.” It’s a deeply spiritual attitude that most parents would want for their child, because they would want the child to “choose happiness.”
If an adult tries to “practice kindness” and “choose happiness,” they discover that it isn’t easy. But those rules are the basis for our school: “Practice Kindness,” and “Choose Happiness.”
