Meaning at
an Early Age
A conversation with Living Wisdom School
director Helen Purcell and teacher Barbara Rabin.
Q: Living Wisdom School deliberately nurtures a sense of life's joyous possibilities. How do you counteract the belief, widespread nowadays, that life holds no meaning apart from the pleasures and diversions of the material world?
Barbara: Certainly, in early childhood education, the
bond between teacher and child is the place where everything begins. The relationship that you develop with a child can grow gradually and respectfully. All else comes from that—from an understanding of the individual child, a sense of caring for his or her interests, and an ability to bring that awareness sensitively into the classroom. (Photo: Barbara Rabin, Early Childhood Education coordinator, second and third grade teacher)
You can read manuals for teachers, but how are you going to bring a sense of joy to the classroom? You have to learn to listen and watch.
Helen: It's also about authenticity. In educational
circles now, “relationship” is a buzzword. There are those who would say that education is relationship. They believe the most important thing in the classroom is the conversations that occur, verbally or nonverbally. But, for us, it's definitely all that, but the relationship between child and teacher comes from an authentic commitment to living life on a conscious level, according to certain principles. (Photo: Helen Purcell, School Director, Language Arts teacher, grades 6-8)
You have teachers who are "heart people," and they teach from the heart. And that can be very effective. That's what Barbara was saying, and it really does come down to that. If the children sense that your heart is closed or judgmental, they'll shut you out. Learning comes from openness, and the freedom and ability to take risks, and you can only truly do that when you feel safe.
Our philosophy and spiritual teachings are so central to the experience in our classrooms that it's impossible to talk about one without the other. I can give you two examples, both of which occurred in the last two days. A little Indian boy in our school had cousins visiting from India . One came to our first-grade class, and the other visited my class. After school, they told their parents that they wanted to come back. The boy's mother said, "We offered to take them anywhere they wanted in the Bay Area, and we told them they could do anything they liked, but they said they just had to come back to your school." So they spent their vacation in school with us, because they couldn't believe the feeling of it.
They said, "The teachers are kind, and the children are friendly." But, really, it's something deeper--it's a culture in the school that's become embedded with us, a deep commitment to living life consciously. I want to say that it's about inner joy—and, yes, that's true--but it's also only a part of it. When children are healthy and fed, they have tremendous energy, and tremendous natural awakeness and presence.
That's something we can learn from children, how to go through our experiences, feeling them deeply and moving into the next new moment. That's a spiritual teaching, and it's an important factor in the culture in our school. If you nurture that “present” awareness in children, tremendous learning can occur.
The teacher becomes someone who not only imparts a fixed curriculum, but notices how the child is being aware in the moment, and who acts as a guide. The teacher is at the center of the energy in the room. This is especially important with young children. When you notice what's going on with them, then with a little guidance you can often help them feel very, very happy, and so they can go happily from activity to activity.
Yesterday, a little girl visited the school because she wants to enter next year. Her mother said, "I'll have to come in and stay with her. She's so shy, she can't possibly come in by herself." I said, "That's actually not a good idea. She needs to come and be with us, and we'll give her an experience of the school." The mother wasn't convinced, but I said, "You can come in for a few minutes, but then you'll really need to leave."
The little girl was 11. She was literally hiding behind her mother, the way a kindergartner might on the first day of school. But after five minutes she’d forgotten that her mother was there. It wasn't my doing, it was the little people who understand about opening their hearts, and they had just drawn her in. That afternoon, when she got in the car, her mother asked her, "How did it go?" and she said, "Mom, I want to start tomorrow!" It was a big transformation, but that's the transforming power of a culture that celebrates all the positives and makes people feel safe.
Q: You're creating an atmosphere?
Helen: It's not just an atmosphere. It’s a culture. And it expresses in so many ways. The kids internalize and duplicate it, and so it grows. Wouldn't you say, Barbara?
Barbara: I would. They do begin to learn, as we all can, that we are happier when we look for the positives. We're happier when we practice kindness. We're happier when we try to choose happiness in the midst of circumstances that may seem trying. And we can only discover this ability through experience. We begin talking about those ideas with very young children, and then they begin to act on them and see for themselves, and make their own decisions as to where it's coming from.
As teachers, we work very hard to live the principles that we choose to share with the children. That's the authenticity that Helen was talking about. We do the best we can, and we support one another in our mutual spiritual growth. Then with the children, every experience, every lesson, and every morning circle time expresses that aspiration.
We begin the day with circle time to awaken and harmonize our energy. We sing spiritual songs such as "Move O Ye Mountains!" which is our theme song. Or, "All the World Is My Friend." And we sing a great many chants: "You Fill My Heart With Music," "I Awake In Thy Light," and so on. Grace descends, and the room is very, very happy.
Several years ago, when we moved into the large classroom, we had an amazing experience. The parents came on the first day. We were all in that big room, and we started chanting. I thought, "The parents will stay for one or two songs, and then off they'll go." So we were singing, and I looked up and thought, "It's about time for the parents to leave." I was thinking about the next activities to do with the children, but no one was leaving, and about twenty minutes later we were still singing.
Thick-headed me, I finally got it, and I thought, "It's the energy--this is God's little school. It has always been, and everyone is feeling the miracle of this moment, right now, and no one wants to leave." We sang a little more, and then finally they left. But it was a very palpable experience of the Divine supporting our small endeavor. In a sense, the entire school is uniquely graced. For ten years now, I have felt that I've somehow entered a river and that I'm paddling along as fast as I can.
Q: That would seem to imply that you couldn’t put together a miraculous experience for kids with the power of your own mind.
Barbara: Exactly, of course not, and yet we must use all the tools we have.
Q: Are you creating experiences for the children in which they can express themselves, so that you can then teach them based on an awareness of who they are as individual people?
Barbara: That's part of it. I don't want to mislead anyone--we teach all the skills that any elementary school would teach. The children learn to read, write, spell, think critically, and exercise discrimination. They have physical education, music, science, and mathematical thinking. We're very much an elementary school in those ways. But what sets us apart is, I think, the consciousness with which we do it. Some things certainly are suggested by the child, but not the entire process. It's not that kind of school. It's not Summerhill--and, might I add, that's because Dr. Neill is not present.
Q: He could make it work?
Barbara: You bet he could. He did. Individuals can create things that others are unable to duplicate.
Q: Back to creating a culture of meaning, purpose, and hope for the child--what does that require?
Helen: There's a certain amount of direct classroom instruction that occurs, but when you have an intimate setting like this, there's a tremendous amount of individualization.
Q: Based on noticing each child's needs?
Helen: Oh, absolutely. It would be impossible not to. Gary [junior high teacher Gary McSweeney] and I often share a laugh because we went to Catholic schools where there were fifty children per classroom, ten in a row, all lined up with the nun in front.
Barbara: "One hand on the ruler and the other on the Bible."
Helen: That wasn't true in my school. But certainly, there was no individualization. It just wasn't possible. But in our school, it would be almost impossible not to individualize the curriculum, since we're so accessible to the children, and they to us.
I taught in a public high school. The students were freshmen, and when I finished talking, they said, "That can't possibly be true, because you haven't said one negative thing about anybody!" I said, "No, of course, it's true." [Laughs.] So, you see, it's your point of origin.
Barbara: I'm nodding because I completely agree.
Q: In her book, The Argument Culture, Barbara Tannen describes how everything in our culture is now put in the context of argument. For every pro there must be a con, and if you don't bring out the negatives and dwell on them in loving detail, people are programmed to think that you're hiding something.
Barbara: Explaining to the children how to come from a positive point of origin is a challenge, and it can be even more challenging to explain it to the parents. When you don't share a common body of beliefs, saying something positive may arouse skepticism. So we're always looking for better ways to communicate with the families.
Helen: They see it as "looking at life through rose-colored glasses." This morning, in our circle time with the children, we sang the chant, "Oh life is sweet, and death a dream, when Thy song flows through me." And one of the girls said, "That's not true. Death isn't a dream. Death is real." So we stopped and talked about it. We talked about the life of the spirit and how, when you are aware of spirit, the physical reality is seen to be subordinate, and so that's why the chant says that death is only a dream.
I told them the story of Saint Francis, when he was dying and singing because he felt so joyful. Brother Elias felt that you should be sad and very grave when you die, and so he scolded Francis. [Laughs.] And Francis said, "Oh, no! Everything's so beautiful!" even though he was blind and couldn't actually see. And the children understood that.
One little boy said, "Do you mean that when I go to my mother's funeral, I have to be joyful?" I said, "Absolutely not!" We talked about the human element, and how that, too, is real. But it's very intricate, and children will demand that degree of thoroughness when you teach them. In our classrooms, we have the opportunity to do this, because we make a point of pursuing those conversations. But when it comes to people who aren't with us all day–parents, or people who just ask what we're about--it's difficult to translate it into their terms, unless they can bring their own similar experience to it.
Barbara: One little boy's mother was pregnant. The baby died at childbirth, and the family aren't part of our spiritual path, but they're very pleased with the school, and so they felt that we were a spiritual link for them at a time when they needed to do something in memory of the baby, and to grieve for what had occurred. So our school had a commemorative service with them, and the church was filled.
Helen: Two hundred people came.
Barbara: These were people from computer companies, musicians, housewives. It was a mixed crowd, and it was an amazing experience. The reason I remembered it is that the children do demand that we be honest. They're not afraid of questions, and they aren't afraid of answers--contrary to what adults often feel, that we mustn't tell them the truth because it's too harsh. On the contrary, the truth is the only thing that will eventually help us heal, so why not start at the beginning?
At the memorial ceremony, we talked about what had happened, and we sang, and the visitors loved it. Helen: I gave a talk at the service. We were in a position of having to present our beliefs before a group of people who didn't share our understanding of the most profound truths. I talked about it from our point of view, and later people came up to me and said, "Thank you so much for being open."
Basically, we were honest about what had happened, and how difficult it is to understand on a human level, and how important it is to have faith that there is purpose in the divine plan, and joy. It was freeing for them, that you could hold these two perspectives in your understanding. With the children, we do that all the time because we have to. I honestly think that it’s at least part of the reason why they get such a powerful sense of life's deep meaning from their school experience.
We aren't afraid; and we deal with subtleties and complexities in a simple way, but in as truthful a way as we're able. When that little boy asked if he should be happy at his mother's funeral, I told him about my mother, who's 85, and my aunt, who's 88, and my uncle, who's 90. We were gathered around the big table, and my sister Kathleen can’t talk about my mother dying, because it hurts her too much. So my mother was sitting at the end of the big banquet table–I'm telling this to the kids–and Kathleen is going, "Oh my God, they're going to talk about death again!" And my mother looks down the table at Kathleen, and she says, "Now, Kathleen, I'm gonna use the big word. I am going to DIE one of these days!" And everybody just laughed, the whole table, and it was so joyful. I'm telling this to the kids, and they're looking at me, and they have this look on their faces of utter acceptance and delight. I said to them, "And what my mother was saying is that, yes, she's going to die and we're going to be very sorry, but she's going to be so happy, because she's going to be in a much better place, with a much better body." And they understood that.
It's the most amazing experience to work with children in such an authentic way and not have to worry about overstepping hidden boundaries. When you teach in public school, you're always worried, because you have to finesse your way around these deep truths.
Q: Reading about the high school kids who shoot up their schools, one suspects that their rose-colored glasses were either never in place, or that they were ripped away. They hadn't been taught to work with their dreams and deal with human realities at the same time.
Helen: A classroom is as complex as the most complex relationship, multiplied by however many kids there are. Because you aren't simply delivering a curriculum--you're delivering it to a certain person. And so there has to be a rapport that's developed very carefully. And when you add in the many individual learning styles, learning disabilities, and differences in temperament and intelligence, you can see that it's deeply multi-layered. The science of teaching is about knowing what to do with the various components of knowledge, but the art of teaching is doing it in an elaborate, creatively choreographed way. If someone with no experience as a teacher were to walk into Barbara's classroom, they wouldn't understand what they were seeing.
Barbara: They would feel, probably, that it was just so relaxed, and that everybody was happy, and that whatever I said to the children, they did it immediately. Helen: Not understanding that for every transaction they saw, there were a million transactions that led up to it, that were the result of conscious decisions, so that Barbara could now ask the child to please sit down, and they would do it. Barbara: It's very much like having a close friend that you can say three words to, and they'll fill in the rest of the sentence. Many, many experiences lie behind what goes on in the classroom, experiences that enable you to know at a glance what's happening with each child. That's the joy of knowing someone well, over time, and it's the same with the children, only they're shorter.
Helen: I walked into the classroom yesterday morning, and a little girl was sitting with tears streaming down her face. She tends to cry a lot, so you don't want to take it too seriously, but she was really upset because she’d gotten braces and they were hurting. Also, somebody had put yogurt in her lunch, and she hates yogurt, so she was mourning that she didn't have a good lunch. She was really crying, and I took one look at her, and I knew that you acknowledge, but you don't get involved.
So I acknowledged, and then I said, "You know, it's Gary 's birthday." She loves birthdays, and I said, "You have something for him, but it's not completed, right? Why don't you work on that?" The tears stopped instantly, and for the rest of the day she was okay. Do you know what went into that? The many, many times that I had to figure out that she tends to do such-and-such, that so-and-so works with her, and so on. It's very, very complex, and I happened to hit the nail on the head that day. Some days you don't hit it.
Q: You're dealing with the children as people?
Helen: Oh, yes. They're just as much people as we are, only they don't tend to hide things as well as adults. It's laid out there for you to deal with.
Q: Does it help prevent people from becoming "high-school shooters" to be acknowledged as people?
Helen: I think it comes back to our school rules. If they could experience a school that teaches children how to be kind, and if they could learn that their enjoyment depends on others’ enjoyment, then those kids, to a person, would never have been able to say "Somebody picked on me and nobody helped me." That's the culture. It isn't as if the children in our school are saints. They're normal kids, and they do get into it with one another. But because the culture is well defined and we're very clear about it, things are addressed as they happen. If a child says something sarcastic to another child, we don't think of it as a small thing. We consider it an opportunity for both children to learn: the one child to learn to be more kind, the other perhaps to learn to assert himself more.
Q: The little things count.
Helen: Oh, big-time.
Q: Are those the things that actually begin to nurture a child from inside, so that he or she doesn't feel isolated or lonely?
Helen: Absolutely. The sense of family that extends from the kernel of the classroom, concentrically out into the entire school–this is something that plays out in the playground, and also between child and teacher. Barbara has often said, and she's so right, that our children feel very comfortable with us.
They approach us, not as peers, because there's a tremendous respect there, but they aren't uneasy. They aren't put off by authority or by roles, because they have a good sense of themselves. When the children feel good about themselves, and they feel that the teachers are accessible, then you have a situation where almost anything can be worked out. If there's an axis that's closed off–and this is what those bullies did–the other kids feel alienated, marginalized, and in their case, they felt that only way they could get back into the center of the energy was to blast their way in. It's a tragedy, and the responsibility is all over the place.
Q: ABCNEWS.com on April 1, 2001 reported a nationwide survey of more than 15,000 teenagers nationwide conducted by the California-based Institute of Ethics. Of those teenagers, 21% of the high-school boys and 15 percent of the middle-school boys had taken a weapon to school at least once in the past year. Sixty percent of the high school and 31 percent of the middle-school boys said they could get a gun if they wanted one. And 16 percent of the high schoolers admitted to having been drunk at school. It's amazing, the number of kids who have violence in their background, and it seems to indicate that the kids who blasted off are only the tip of the iceberg. There's a huge consciousness around violence in this country.
Helen: There's also a culture of exclusivity that exists in the public sector. In middle schools and high schools, belonging to an in-group is assumed to be very important, and no one is fighting against it.. It's a generosity of heart that allows almost anything to bloom. It's absent in any kind of structure that is hierarchical and compartmentalized. In education, you find it in administration and among teachers.
I've heard the high school faculty lounge described as the "snake pit." Someone told me that they're legislating state and federal grants and funds to combat the bullies in the schoolyard. He said that in Colorado, the governor, acting through the state department of education, has outlawed the game of tag.
Q: Hurrah for hyper-rationalism!
Helen: It's a matter of the heart. Our belief is that every child is perfect, and that our job as teachers is to draw out the perfection of that soul. It doesn't have to be measured by human standards. We look for the beauty of these children, even the most difficult ones, even the ones where the the mask has already fallen. Because we're with them all the time, we can often see the glimmers behind the mask. You know it's there, and it's a question of bringing it out.
Q: It sounds as if Living Wisdom School has a unified understanding of what the children should get out of school. If there's a keynote of the school, what would you say it is?
Barbara: Choosing happiness and practicing kindness. Think about what it means to choose happiness.
Q: It can be very difficult.
Helen: My first impulse was to say "Joy." But joy comes when you choose happiness and practice kindness. Barbara expresses it often and well to the children, "It isn't that things are going to go well in your life all of the time. You have to choose to come at life from a point of inner joy." That's the essence of our teachings.
Barbara: And to accept what is.
Helen: Yes. Again, it's the human and the inner reality, operating together. They aren't separate. If the inner reality is in place, it affects the outer reality. A child can be feeling overwhelmed by a bad mood or a tragedy in their life, and they'll be lifted by the others who are managing at that moment to be very centered in the inner attitudes of practicing kindness and choosing happiness.
A final example. At the level that I teach, we've had a cascade of kids who've gotten braces, complete with a whole range of side effects, from braces that cut the gum, to headaches, to being unable to think and just not wanting to be here. They want to be good, but they don't feel well, and do you know what the class does? The class prays for everybody who has braces. In the morning, we do healing prayers for them, and you can honestly see the impact of it on those kids. Even if it doesn't take the pain away, they have that sense of friendship and support from their classmates, and it transforms their experience.
Q: They can feel Krishna walking beside them?
Helen: Yes, that's true. It's just one little thing, but when you multiply it by all the other things that happen, it begins to add up. A child can't figure out how to double-space on the computer, and someone walks over and says, "Well, I know how." They don't even have to ask the teacher, because they know it's okay, and so they actively help each other.
Q: Positive behavior is encouraged and accepted?
Helen: It's accepted, and we give them the freedom to act it out. When everybody's trying to operate from that point of origin--"I want to choose happiness, I want to be kind."–nobody has to be in control in a rigid way that stifles individual differences.
Barbara: They love to pray. They pray for everyone–their animals, their friends, their brothers. It's wonderful.
Helen: And they feel powerful when they pray for others.
Barbara: We treat it seriously, with respect.
Helen: The other day, in the middle of the afternoon, one little boy said, "Helen, can we say a prayer for my sister Heather? She's coming in on the plane." So we all stopped at that moment in the middle of the lesson, and we said a prayer, because it's okay.
Barbara: We don't want them to think that you can only do something as important as praying at a particular time of the day. You can do it at any moment, and you can always pray when no one knows you're praying. These things, done over and over, reveal to them their possibilities. I wonder, sometimes, if one of these children will be twenty years old and something will happen in their lives, and they'll remember the prayers and affirmations they're doing now: "I am brave I am strong! Perfume of success thoughts blows in me!" It's very powerful.
