Its popularity offers the provocative suggestion that the next generation of leaders requires not necessarily math or literature or history — though Green School teaches those too — but a wider set of tools, ranging from adaptability to teamwork to the sort of problem-solving that flourishes under conditions of constraint, which will prove useful in a world whose resources will only continue to diminish. It is a prep school meant to do more than merely prepare students for college, but also equip them with survival skills for an unknown new world, in which proficiency with alternative fuels and sustainable building practices — and the experience of living in a nontraditional, unpredictable environment — might be more useful benchmarks than SAT scores.
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FOR ALL ITS idealistic trappings, Green School was founded, initially, on a pragmatic concern. “I wanted to stay in Bali,” John Hardy told me, “and I didn’t have anywhere to send the kids.” John, who grew up in Canada, moved to Ubud in 1975. He met Cynthia in Bali in the ’80s, and their two daughters attended Green School. (Hardy’s other two children, from a previous marriage, were too old to attend by the time the school was founded, though his eldest, Elora, has a Bali-based company that specializes in building with bamboo and helped design several structures at the school.) The local Balinese schools were all about learning “by rote,” he said; at the other end, the traditional expat-driven international schools were a “monoculture” of privilege. The Hardys enlisted local friends and acquaintances, along with some international recruits, and in 2008, Green School was born.
It is not hard to see in John and Cynthia Hardy something of the spirit of Rudolf Steiner — the polymathic, charismatic Austrian whose principles informed the school he created in 1919 for the children of the workers in a German cigarette factory called Waldorf-Astoria. (The name lives on in more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide.) While the Hardys abandoned an early idea to actually start a Steiner school — too much dogma, John told me — the influence remains. Not simply in the Green School’s emphasis on “holistic” (i.e., not strictly academic) development and “experiential” learning, but in highlighting the aesthetics of the classroom. (Steiner once called the schoolroom a “veritably barbaric environment.”)
Kate Druhan, a pragmatic, droll Australian and former human resources manager who serves as the school’s board of management chair, told me the school has cherry-picked its curriculum — a dose of Australia here, some International Baccalaureate there, with a dash of Singapore Math for good measure — and stressed what she called “integrated thematics” across subjects; when learning about ancient Egypt, for example, students will explore its history, but they might also use the pyramids to study geometry. But what most distinguishes Green School from other expat-driven international schools found the world over is its strong connection to the local community, and its emphasis on doing. “At most schools,” Medema said, “you learn about making a bridge in a book. At progressive schools, you maybe make it out of matchsticks or carve it out of soap. At Green School, you actually just go and make it.”
That the school’s model is still in flux may be in the very nature of progressive education, which, going back to Steiner and other pioneers, has defined itself against not only reigning pedagogy, but, to a certain extent, against current society. (For example, Steiner wanted his schools to be free from rigid class boundaries.) But it is not always clear what that means; as Druhan told me, she prefers the word “progressive” to “alternative,” because “you can go in all kinds of directions.” With technology, for example, Medema said, “a lot of parents will come here thinking, I don’t want my kid near any wires — I thought Green School was zero tech.” Another group, she continued, wants facilities that are top-notch, “but in the jungle.”
Ambitiously idealistic experiments often collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions, and it is certainly possible to find these at Green School: Here are mostly Western, affluent families, many of them temporarily abandoning their comfortable lives for a metaphysical gap year of voluntary simplicity (or life rebalancing or spiritual reawakening) in an exotic stage-setting, at a school whose annual tuition (roughly $15,000 a year for a sixth-grader), while a bargain compared to New York City private-school standards, is far beyond the reach of the average Balinese. (Hardy’s original vision of having at least 20 percent of the school comprised of Balinese scholarship students was, Druhan noted, easier to scale when the school had 90 students. Today, about 9 percent of the student body are on scholarships.) Still, as much as any parent who’s unsure whether his child is getting the best education (in other words, all parents), I surveyed with envy the kids merrily clambering down jungle paths, the river gurgling in the background and the colorful shrines bedecking the hillsides, thinking grimly of my daughter encased in her sealed-window institutional public school building, shunted to the school gym to watch movies on days with a little bit of bad weather.
Faced with a problem involving the school’s hydropower system, the students were working with master’s students at the University of Cologne in Germany to design and build a new system that will combine solar and hydro power. On sunny days, surplus solar power will pump river water up to a holding tank. On cloudy days, that water will be released downhill, powering a turbine. Green School’s students scuba dive with CoralWatch and spend summers as oil-rig hounding “kayaktivists” and attend U.N. climate conferences; they start fashion companies like Nalu (which dedicates a portion of sales to help children buy school uniforms in India and Indonesia) and lobby the Balinese government to reduce the scourge of plastic bags on the island. “They really do want kids to go off and change the world, as clichéd as that sounds,” Blair told me.
BUT EVEN AMID this backdrop of plucky inventiveness and rational reuse, this armature of sustainable skills, was there not only an impulse toward betterment but a small whiff of dystopia — a prep school prepping for a world that is increasingly out of whack? Is the old paradigm really over?
According to Green School parents I spoke to, it is. A variety of “digital nomads,” early retirees, midcareer rebooters and Steiner evangelists, they spoke of being on a shared mission. Regan Williams, who first enrolled as a boarding student (a rarity here; as Medema told me, “You can go to jail for life in Bali for doing teenage stuff”), inspired the rest of her family to come over from Santa Barbara, Calif. Her father, Rob Williams, wrote me over email, “the families are bonded by the fact you have to be a little nuts to move to the middle of the jungle in Bali. … Everyone is sweaty and has bug bites. … Our kids are challenged, engaged and happy.” Alan Fleischmann, a doctor retired from the Mayo Clinic, told me over beers one night that he and his wife Kara chose Green School for their 6-year-old daughter after an exhaustive global search: “We’re trying to work out how you educate for a life in 20 years’ time — what are the skills she might need, and where do you get them?” This being Bali, other factors entered the decision-making process as well. He and his “witchy” wife, as he lovingly termed her, tuned in to Bali, and received a portent of sorts. “You can argue it’s coincidence, but we had a dramatic indication that Mother Bali wanted us here.” As for his daughter’s education, Fleischmann considers skills like memorization largely useless. “I’ve never studied tropical medicine,” he said, though he is often pressed to consult in Bali. “Fifteen minutes on my phone and I know as much as anyone.” At Green School, he said, he saw examples of “project-based management” — “how do you get through something using critical thinking. All that emphasis is not found in a lot of other places.”
Many families, Medema told me, come on the vacation and end up staying for the education. Michael Diamond, a.k.a. Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, who enrolled his two sons (Davis, 15, and Skyler, 13) this year (he and his ex-wife take turns living in Bali), first visited the school at the insistence of Skyler, whose friend had recently enrolled. Diamond was struck by how different it felt from the “traditional boarding school model — you go here because your grandfather went here and then you’re going to go to Yale and then work at this law firm and charge people $500 an hour to argue about nothing.” The sense I had from many Green School parents, echoing the school’s idea of nurturing and developing the whole student, was not only the hope that the school would help make their children better citizens, but would leave them better placed to navigate a world in which values and norms were changing. That the old prep school model might be lacking is not necessarily a progressive thought; the head of Manhattan’s elite Trinity School recently warned in a letter to parents that his institution was in danger of becoming a “credentialing factory,” helping to produce a “cognitive elite that is self-serving, callous and spiritually barren.”
When I asked Druhan if she could sum up Green School in one moment, she paused. One of her strongest memories was when her young son was doing the “rice thematic”— rice being of central economic and cultural import in Bali. His class had gone out in the fields to learn how to grow rice. He raved about the farmer. “He said, ‘Mum, he’s like a scientist! He has so much knowledge, and he doesn’t have even any instruments.”’ The students went on not only to harvest the rice, but cook an elaborate dinner in an underground fire pit, which they served to the farmers, parents and teachers. “That was everything that’s good about Green School in one moment: The hands-on learning, the respect for school values, the connection to the community.” As a tear brimmed, she changed tack. “Then there are other moments,” she said, with a wry smile. “I sat down with my coffee the other day and there were six parents talking about what the best coffee enema was — exactly how it works and the condition of how it came out. I thought, ‘Well, that’s only at Green School.’ ”
