Educational Objectives

The educational objectives that define our school depend upon the culture of our school community. Our culture involves students, teachers, parents, and friends working cooperatively together to support both optimal learning and personal growth. The educational objects reflect the nature of Terra Nova’s subculture.

These eight objectives relate to developing consciousness of the self and the world at large. They may also be viewed as a set of powerful tools that stimulate personal transformation, expand intelligence, and promote responsible living. They not only lead to exceptional academic performance, but also to wisdom about how to lead a healthy life.

That is our intent.

1. To practice experiential learning in an atmosphere of open communications. To integrate objective knowledge and subjective experience into all that we do, so that what is learned is not just information and intellectual models. For us, unless knowledge is integrated and deepened by experience, it remains isolated and foreign to the personality. At Terra Nova, both the experiences we promote and the content of our teaching address the heart as well as the mind. In our view there is no true experiential education unless students can talk freely about everything they experience, unless they can discuss everything, including issues with their school and their teachers. We provide weekly open-ended meetings, giving students the opportunity to talk about all their concerns; there is no taboo subject matter at Terra Nova.

2. To teach students how to become independent learners through project-based learning.

Our students agree to take responsibility for their own education. And since much of our education is through project-based learning, they regularly practice the process of being independent learners from beginning to end each time they do an individual project. They select, design, research, implement, and document every project and then present it to an audience of their peers, teachers, and friends.

3. To stimulate personal growth and personal transformation in a wide variety of ways. All humans are born with great possibilities. Yet most forfeit their potential before they are out of their teens. This is only possible by raising awareness and requiring students to accept responsibility for all their behavior. With the adoption of over fifty standards of behavior dealing with Responsibility, Creativity/Expression, Emotional Maturity/Integrity, Holism/Life Principles/Empathy, and Self-Knowledge, our students are encouraged to accept responsibility, to grow, to give, to honor life, to be honest and open and forgiving, to express and to listen, to understand themselves and others, and to know how to ground and discipline themselves. It is our intention to work together as a community to raise our consciousness and transform our petty obsessions so that we may embrace the world with expanded minds and hearts.

4. To train our students to see relationships and connections in everything they study. If learning is to be integrated with living, it must show students how to connect the dots and make connections. Our teaching is focused on showing how all life is related, how ideas are related to other ideas, how one discipline (for example, math) is related to science, to art, to architecture, to animal and plant forms and growth patterns, to technology, to music, to symbolic understanding, etc. The intention is to make us aware of our relationship to our psyche, to other people, and to all of nature. We are concerned with the big picture of how all life is interconnected. This is the heart of Holistic Education.

5. To train students to become conscious of the dynamics of their personal relationships. As long as our relationships are dominated by unconscious, reactive behavior, we remain victims of circumstance and have little control over the direction of our lives. But as we come to investigate and understand the dynamics of our present and past relationships, we appreciate that we can choose not to impulsively react and free ourselves from relationships controlled by unconscious forces. Conscious relationships can withstand change. They are likely to be healthy because they are negotiable; they accord with our priorities, our principles, and the values we have chosen. 

6. To teach students a wide range of Practical and Essential Life Skills. These include, but are not limited to: how to form healthy, non-toxic relationships based on trust and honesty, how to communicate non-violently, how to handle success and failure, how to discover and honor inner truth, how to honor one’s word, how to integrate personality and shadow, how to use one’s individual voice effectively and courageously, how to recognize when you need to forgive, how to articulate, and how to be inclusive and honor life.

These skills also incorporate how to grow nutritious food, how to construct a building, how to raise animals, how to take care of the earth and its creatures, how to make use of solar and wind power and convert it to electricity, how to integrate mathematical knowledge with simple living, how to creatively draw, paint, sculpt, how to tell stories, write poetry, essays, short stories, and one’s autobiography, how find or create wisdom in films, how to play an instrument, how to create individual learning projects, a web site, and electronic portfolios, how to navigate, cook meals, survive outdoors, eat for health, be a leader, and start a business. Students that complete four years at Terra Nova will do it all.

7. To awaken the natural, innate intelligence that lies dormant in all individuals. The goal of holistic education is not to shape people, but to help them connect with their individual, idiosyncratic genius. Intelligence is not information; it does not come from teachers or books or authorities and is not measured by tests: it does not arise only from cultivating the mind or from the acquisition of knowledge. True intelligence is the gift to comprehend the ways of life. Intelligence is the talent to individually separate the essential from the traditional. Intelligence is direct knowing — the capacity to distinguish the real from the illusory, the aptitude to discriminate what is life giving from what is toxic, what is universally true from what is just cultural. Full intelligence implies dropping any personal agenda and discovering beauty and perfection in the reality of what is. It implies being fully present in the moment and engaging with life.

In holistic education we make use of all the sources of information because we recognize intelligence in all of them. That is, we recognize and integrate messages that come through our body, our mind, our emotions, and our intuitions. We honor sensations, thoughts, feelings, and intuitions by focusing on all of them and becoming conscious of the role that all of them play in human intelligence.  

8. To teach students to become astute observers of inner and outer realities. Learning to witness one’s experiences and one’s self dispassionately allows us to know ourselves in a way that is impossible when we are fully identified with everything we think, feel, and do. To be an impartial observer of self is a meditation technique that helps us break our blind identification with the ego and discover who we are when we are not self-absorbed with our own personality. This simple dissociation from all-consuming ego accelerates the development of consciousness. Being in touch with higher states of consciousness helps us discover our life path.

When one learns to observe nature without preconceptions or prejudices, one takes on the role of the ideal scientist. One simply notes what one sees and describes it in detail in a journal. We all know that observation and description are two of the essential facets of the scientific method for they prepare the ground for making a rational hypothesis that can be tested by a scientific experiment. We want our students to become excellent, impartial observers and record keepers, for by mastering both arts they are in a position to think clearly about what they observed. It is no wonder that Johann Pestolozzi, one of the fathers of Holistic Education, did not tell his students what was true, but required them to meticulously observe and record what they witnessed and then come up with their own answers for why things happened as they did. This process cultivated their own powers of seeing, making judgments and reasoning. He was satisfied that his methods produced students who could indeed think originally. All creative scientists essentially do the same thing.

9. To allow students to demonstrate their knowledge in a wide variety of ways.

Having a flexible system of accountability recognizes that each student learns in different ways. We have separate protocols for grading academic, art, communication, technical, self-knowledge, and business courses. And we allow students to customize.

10. To require students to demonstrate significant levels of responsibility, creativity, maturity, compassion, and self-knowledge.

With the adoption of over fifty standards of behavior dealing with the categories of Responsibility, Creativity/Expression, Emotional Maturity/Integrity, Holism/Life Principles/Empathy, and Self-Knowledge, our students are encouraged to accept responsibility, to grow, to give, to honor life, to be honest and open and forgiving, to express and to listen, to understand themselves and others, and to know how to ground and discipline themselves.