Philosophy of the Terra Nova Project

Project Terra Nova is an alternative, educational program dedicated to creating the conditions for optimal learning, sustainable living, and personal growth and transformation. It is a community endeavor — rather than a hierarchical system — in which all participants agree to work cooperatively. 

The intention of Terra Nova is to have teachers, students, and parents work in concert in order that the students become competent, independent, passionate learners. We all want these people to develop large, flexible minds capable of holding grand ideas, mysteries, contradictions and paradoxes, ideals, visions and dreams. We see them with expansive hearts in touch with all the emotions experienced by human beings, but also full of empathy, sympathy, and compassion for all of life.  

The role of our teachers is to provide each student with the tools for creating academic success while exposing them to the exemplary arts of world cultures, the breakthrough ideas of geniuses and pioneers, and the scientific disciplines and activities that contribute to an understanding of life. Teachers also lead students through processes that put them in touch with their inner genius and their capacity for direct self-knowing. Furthermore, they help each student identify and develop his or her unique talents and track the signposts that indicate his or her unique path.

At Terra Nova teachers are called upon act as facilitators who help students to organize and present their projects. They work and play cooperatively with students, instead of acting as an authority that tells them what to do. As students mature, teachers urge students to make more decisions and adopt additional responsibilities. Teachers often participate in creative assignments and share their creations with students.

The role of students is to do the work necessary for transformation. Only the young adults can precipitate and realize their own power and potential through applying an open, enthusiastic, can-do attitude; only the students can face their fears and decide to deeply explore the unknown. A student’s choices concerning personal attitude and degree of commitment will ultimately determine the quality of his or her growth and extent of his or her learning. Our program asks students to become proactive, to take the lead in determining many of the ingredients of their education.

In addition students are invited to participate fully in community activities and encouraged to develop and express their individual viewpoint concerning everything that goes on at school.

The role of the parents is to preserve the integrity of the home. Our four-day school week allows three-day weekends so that families have the time required for family-based activities. As the child’s responsibilities increase at home and he or she becomes less dependent and more of an equal, he or she requires more freedom and latitude. So part of the parent’s role, an admittedly difficult one, is to gradually let go of parental responsibility and control so a dynamic in relationship is possible.

Obviously a parent can also be an invaluable resource for a child in high school, especially if parents agree to help only at the child’s request in the form the child desires. That way, the responsibility of getting homework done is clearly the child’s.

Parents can help The Terra Nova Project as a whole by providing services to the school in exchange for tuition reduction. That help might take the form of teaching classes [see Terra Nova curriculum], helping to provide technical know-how (solar and wind power, computer skills, building structures), helping with group projects (farming, gardening, raising animals), wilderness trips, or putting on plays.   

Six Essential Factors for the Success of Terra Nova’s Mission

1. Skilled teachers who are personally committed to becoming ever more compassionate human beings and who are dedicated to helping each student discover and follow her or his unique voice and unique path through life.

2. Students that seek to know more about themselves, who like to work on their own projects, and who want to assume responsibility for their own education.

3. Parents and friends of the school willing to be used as resources for learning.

4. An agreement entered into by teachers, students, and friends to:

• Create a safe environment in which all individuals are prized, respected, and honored.
• Take responsibility for our individual thoughts, feelings, intentions, and behaviors. We learn not to blame others for our own “stuff” when it arises.
• Adhere to the principles and language of non-violent communication as defined and taught by the Center for Non-Violent Communications. Using these parameters everyone’s basic needs can be met and together we can thrive.
  
  Briefly one adopts a specific consciousness governed by four intentions:
  • To learn to see the goodness and beauty in yourself and others
  • To learn to observe self and others without judgment and criticism
  • To become aware of and communicate feelings and identify the underlying human needs that give rise to them
  • To request specific actions from schoolmates and teachers that will enrich your life.

5. A commitment by teachers, students, and friends to explore an education based on self-knowledge.  

Terra Nova understands that self-knowledge is the foundation of advanced learning. For in laying claim to our own treasure, we learn to rely on our own authority, and trust less and less in the authority of others over our lives. The desire “to conform to belong” needs to be challenged and our natural brotherhood and sisterhood with each other and with all life forms explored. If we are to become responsible stewards of our environment, we all need to expand our self-centered existence and grow up. For the good of our self and our world, we need to be willing to change.

Direct knowing demands that we experience personal truths, and bring consciousness to our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. It involves learning to trust one’s intuitions and traveling down our unique path.

Although this pathway reveals our common connection to all things, animals, and people, it requires that we separate ourselves from group thought, tribal conditioning, and unconscious belief systems. The path to meaningful knowledge then also becomes a path to mature, expanded, personal freedom.

6. A commitment entered into by students, teachers, and friends to study Life while at the same time participating fully in Life as part of a community of equals.

Together we seek knowledge that connects us with our environment, each other, and ourselves. Learning that is motivated by love and compassion binds heart, mind, body sensations, and spirit together. This knowing illuminates, creates, and heals through natural, empathetic processes. It joins, rather than separates; it relates the knower to the known through the medium of an open heart. Heart knowing transcends ego and reflects the beauty and wonder of oneself and of all life.

Knowledge that connects heart with mind, sensations, emotions and spirit recognizes our limits and our potentials, our capacity to subvert as well as our capacity to relate. Integrated beings are capable of observing things as they are without dividing them into light and shadow, good and bad. Heart knowing is paradoxical. It dispassionately observes and describes what it sees; yet it empathizes with that which it reflects upon.

Learning relates to living when we agree to fully participate in life, rather than resisting much of it. Our hope is that if and when students adopt The Terra Nova Project as their educational community, they will cease trying to live according to the expectations of others, and put their full energy into a community that supports an individual’s authority to determine his or her own life.   

The Terra Nova Project integrates subjective experience with objective knowledge. All schools combine rational, scientific knowing in many fields of established knowledge with artistic modes of expression. What is unique to classes offered by The Terra Nova Project is that they make subjective experiences part of the educational journey. One’s experiences in life are an integral part of what a student focuses on, clarifies, and explores here.