How to Design a School

Every school is designed around an answer to one question: what is this school for? Usually the answer is never said out loud. But it shows in the timetable, in what gets tested, and in what students are praised for.

For many schools today the answer is exams, then admissions, then jobs. Those matter, and many teachers do far more than prepare for them. But a school designed only for them can produce people who know a great deal about the world and very little about how to live in it. We have built an education system that can tell a child how far the moon is, but not help them understand the person sitting next to them.

Madhyasth Darshan is blunter. It warns of an education that spreads three manias (उन्मादत्रय): economics that teaches profit above all, social thought that teaches consumption, and a psychology that treats craving as human nature. It is worth asking whether that is part of why the most educated societies are often the ones that consume the most.

This may sound as if it comes at the cost of academics. It doesn’t have to. The books pair every subject with understanding rather than replacing it, and the schools we describe put academic rigour alongside understanding and living. Whether the balance works is something only years of students’ lives can show.

What education is for

The darshan defines education (शिक्षा) as the process by which a refined, humane way of seeing arises. In Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), Shri A. Nagraj states its purpose in four words: resolution, prosperity, fearlessness and coexistence. Education exists so that people can live these, together.

The Paribhasha Sanhita then describes what an education policy should make available to everyone. There are things to understand: how everything exists together, what life is, what humane conduct is, and what the human goal is, with a clear direction for reaching it. And there are six qualities to grow into: trust in oneself, respect for excellence, a balance between talent and personality, sociality in behaviour, and self-reliance in production. These are often counted as six, with talent and personality as two. Understanding here, the book adds, means not only knowing but accepting it in one’s own life.

That last quality is easy to skip, and it matters most for the planet. An education that teaches people to understand themselves and also to produce what they need is very different from one that prepares them mainly to earn and spend.

From understanding to participation

The same book names the kind of person a school should help a child become: someone with understanding, honesty, responsibility and participation (समझदारी, ईमानदारी, जिम्मेदारी, भागीदारी). In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan gives the four an order. Honesty follows from understanding. Responsibility follows from honesty. Participation follows from responsibility.

The order matters for how a school is run. Asking children to be responsible before they understand produces obedience, not responsibility. Asking them to participate before they are honest produces performance. Each step rests on the one below it.

Four partners in learning

Manav Vyavahar Darshan makes a point that most school reforms miss. Responsibility for learning, it says, lies with four things together: the teacher, the parents, what is taught, and how it is taught. The four are complementary. Learning succeeds only when all four pull in the same direction. And when they do, the book says, the way opens to gratitude and to coexistence.

A brilliant teacher can’t make up for a home that teaches the opposite. A good curriculum can’t survive a system that tests only memory. Most schools work on one of the four at a time. The book’s point is that they can only be designed together.

Every subject, studied whole

The book doesn’t ask schools to drop any subject. It asks that each be studied together with its human side. It lists eight pairings:

Read the list against the three manias, and the pattern is clear. Economics taught alongside the good use and protection of nature’s wealth can’t become an economics of profit alone. Psychology taught alongside how character is formed can’t settle for craving as human nature. Every pairing keeps a subject connected to the question of how to live.

“What a school is for decides everything else about it.”

Two schools trying it

One school that has taken these ideas as its design brief is Global Guardians School in Visnagar, Gujarat. It describes itself as rooted in Consciousness Development Value Education, and the competencies it lists for every student follow the darshan’s six closely: trust, respect, talent, personality, behaviour and occupation. We use it below as an example of what each design choice can look like.

A second school, Abhibhavak Vidyalaya in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, is an alternative value-education school whose curriculum is based on Madhyasth Darshan. It began on 4 July 2011 with eight teachers and twelve students, and it shows the sixth design choice especially clearly. Everything we say about both schools comes from what they publish about themselves.

1. Put relationships at the centre

If a happy life is lived in relationships, a school can’t treat them as a side topic for one period a week. They have to shape how the school itself works: how teachers speak to students, how disagreements are settled, how older and younger children treat each other.

The teacher and student are themselves one of the seven relationships Madhyasth Darshan describes. The teacher hopes the student will understand; the student hopes the teacher will teach in the direction of the student’s own curiosity; and when understanding is complete, the teacher celebrates. We set this out in What Does Each Relationship Ask of Us?

Global Guardians School says relationships are at the centre of everything it does. Its youngest stage, for nursery to kindergarten, is built around the theme of family. Since a child’s education begins at home, it is designed as a bridge between home and school, with trust and security in relationships listed as the first thing children develop.

2. Teach understanding alongside academics

Literacy, numbers and science are not in competition with understanding. A child who understands themselves and the people around them learns everything else better, because less of their attention is taken up by fear and confusion. The eight pairings above are one way to build this into every subject rather than adding it as one more.

Global Guardians School’s stated aim is excellence in three things together: in consciousness, in academics and in living. Its primary years pair foundational literacy, numeracy and science with understanding relationships in family and society. Its middle years add self-reflection, critical thinking and what it calls purpose-oriented analysis, alongside advanced work across subjects.

3. Teach production, not only consumption

Many schools prepare students mainly to earn, and leave them to work out the rest. Few teach them to grow, make or repair anything, or to work out what is enough. So students can leave knowing far more about consuming than about meeting their own needs.

The village school in Vyavaharatmak Janvad builds production into the school itself: each teacher has a workshop for village crafts beside the school, with land and cattle to look after. Children grow up next to production, not apart from it.

Global Guardians School names this directly. Its Life Essential Skills aim at “self-reliance in occupation to fulfil our needs while maintaining nature’s balance”. In the middle years students learn hand-based skills in what it calls Harmonious Living Labs, and in the senior years they practise an occupation and plan their lives with purpose. The thinking behind this is close to How to Decide What to Produce and How to Calculate Enough for a Family, taught early.

4. Let students take responsibility, and become teachers

Understanding grows fastest when you have to pass it on. A school can give older students real responsibility for younger ones, and can grow its own teachers from among the people who have lived its approach. The darshan goes further: in its village model, any adult who has understood can teach.

At Global Guardians School, students in the middle years take on responsibilities within the school by supporting younger students. And after Grade 12, it offers a two-year teacher development programme, so that students who have understood the approach can learn to teach it to children of all ages.

5. Measure success by how students live

What a school measures, it gets. If only marks are counted, marks are what improve. A school designed for a happy life has to look at how its students live: with their families, with each other, with nature. The four steps above, understanding, honesty, responsibility and participation, give a school something concrete to look for.

Global Guardians School states its measure of success plainly: equipping each child to become a wise, honest, responsible human who takes part harmoniously in family, society and the wider system. It also asks students to reflect on their own progress and evaluate how they live in the light of their purpose. That is the same test we use on this site: does understanding show in how a person lives?

6. Let families build the school together

A school is usually something a family chooses and pays for, and then hands its children over to. But if parents are one of the four partners in learning, the people who care most about the child can be part of building the school itself.

Vyavaharatmak Janvad describes how a whole village could do this. Every village keeps primary education. Because every adult in a village of understanding families can teach, primary teaching needs no separate salary. Alternatively, the village together provides each teacher with a home, a workshop for village crafts, five acres of land and five cows, and the school works as a guardians’ school (अभिभावक विद्याशाला). Then, for every ten villages, about a thousand families, there is a further school, built from each family’s contribution, with transport that the group of villages keeps running. Its teachers also lead the village’s celebrations, such as a child’s naming or first letters. Education runs in steps, the book says, from the first letters all the way to understanding coexistence and life.

Abhibhavak Vidyalaya, whose name is the same idea, is built this way on a smaller scale. Abhibhavak, guardian, is described as one who wants resolution in every part of a child’s life, along with nourishment and protection. Vidyalaya is described as the collective expression of parents and teachers. Its own tagline is “where parents are teachers themselves”.

The families pooled their own resources for the building, transport, furniture and toys, with support from other families in Raipur and across the country, so the school runs without government aid. Its teachers take no salary, and there is no tuition fee: parents contribute to the cost of facilities, because providing for their children is seen as their responsibility. One parent, quoted on the school’s website, says it took time to understand the school’s thinking, but that the families now find it a much better environment than a conventional school.

Not every school can be built like this. But it shows that a school can be a shared project of families, not only a service they buy.

Stages that follow a child’s growth

One more detail is worth noticing. Global Guardians School groups its years into five houses of learning, each named for what it hopes students will come to know:

The names say what the school is for before any timetable does.

If you can’t start a new school

Most parents and teachers work inside schools they didn’t design. Some of these choices can still start small.

• Give relationships one regular, unhurried conversation a week, about real situations in the class.
• Pick one subject you teach and add its pairing: one lesson a term on how economics, science or history connects to how we live.
• Use a family’s yearly needs as a maths project. Working out enough is arithmetic with meaning.
• Start a garden, a repair corner or a cooking day, where students produce something and see where the waste goes.
• Pair older students with younger ones, with real responsibility.
• Bring the four partners together once a term: a teacher, parents, and a look at what is being taught and how.
• Ask, at the end of a term, not only what students learned but what changed in how they live.
• Invite parents in to teach what they know, from cooking to accounts to caring for the old.

And the planet?

Schools decide what the next generation thinks success is. A generation taught that success means earning and owning more will keep taking more from the earth, whatever else it is taught about climate. A generation that learns early to understand itself, to know what is enough, and to produce what it needs while keeping nature’s balance will treat the planet differently without being told to.

That may make the design of schools one of the most lasting sustainability choices any society makes. It is part of the argument we set out in One question, not two.

And our happiness?

Many adults carry, from school, a lasting sense of being measured and found short. A school built on understanding, relationships and participation leaves something different behind: people who trust themselves, respect excellence in others, and know how to live well with the people around them. Those are much of what a happy life is made of. We look at how happiness can last in How to Make Happiness Last.

A protocol to try

If you are a parent or a teacher, change one question for a week. Instead of “what did you learn today?” or “how did the test go?”, ask: what did you understand today?

Listen to what comes back. It will tell you a good deal about what your school is really for.

Limitations

• We describe both schools from their own published descriptions, not from a study of their results. Two schools, however carefully designed, are not yet proof.
• Parents’ worries about exams, admissions and jobs are real. A school that asks families to weigh other things carries a real risk for them.
• Small schools can do things that large public systems find much harder. We have not shown how these choices would work at the scale of a state or a country.
• The village school model in Vyavaharatmak Janvad is a proposal. We know of no village that runs its schools exactly this way, and unpaid teaching only works where families can truly support their teachers.
• The eight pairings of subjects come from the book, but our short descriptions of each are approximations.
• Our account of what Madhyasth Darshan says about education is still brief, and leaves a great deal out.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, शिक्षा (education), शिक्षा नीति (education policy) and शिक्षा संस्कार, p. 219
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, उन्मादत्रय शिक्षा (education in the three manias), p. 48
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, मानवीय शिक्षा (humane education), p. 151
4. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Vyavahar Darshan (मानव व्यवहार दर्शन), p. 145 (the purpose of education), p. 150 (teacher, parents, what is taught and how, as four complementary parts; gratitude; the goal of education policy), p. 151 (the eight pairings of subjects)
5. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 106 (primary education in every village; any understanding adult can teach; the teacher’s home, workshop, land and cows; education from first letters to understanding), p. 110 (a school for every ten villages; understanding, then honesty, then responsibility, then participation)
6. Global Guardians School, Visnagar, Gujarat: home page
7. Global Guardians School: Our Shalas
8. Abhibhavak Vidyalaya, Raipur, Chhattisgarh: website (About us) and Facebook page