What’s Unique About Terra Nova?

Terra Nova is an intentional, educational community of students, parents, and teachers dedicated to the development of individual human potential. This school facilitates Waking Up — awakening to untapped powers, subtle energies, multiple intelligences, and the talents that lie dormant within each of us.

Terra Nova is a revolutionary prototype of a high school that transforms the consciousness of its students and teachers through a number of means. The agents of change — focused imagination, individual choice, self-discovery, and a commitment to being open and telling the truth — are built into the activities at Terra Nova each and every day.   

Terra Nova functions as a family that shares in the work required to practice a simple lifestyle that is ecologically sound and culturally rich and diverse. We grow and cook our own food, care for our farm animals, construct our own buildings, maintain the school grounds, express our passions and concerns, provide our own entertainment, clean up after ourselves, and learn to live off the grid.

We explore in context and in depth the world’s cultural treasures. We sample the creative and performing arts, literature, history, science, mathematics, philosophy, religion, anthropology, archeology, drama, and psychology. This means, whatever the field of study, we make use of primary sources whenever possible and investigate the work and thinking of geniuses rather than rely on politically correct textbooks that eliminate both passion and controversy.

We promote the values of self-knowledge and self-reliance, cooperation, compassion, giving and forgiving, non-violent interpersonal communication and transpersonal growth.

The Terra Nova Project is dedicated to the adventure of Life — awakening to the possibilities of life, participating fully in life, discovering life’s secrets, and investigating the nature of Nature. To live life fully, we cultivate, explore, honor, and celebrate all four ways humans interface with and understand experience and knowledge:  through Mind, through Emotions, through Sensations, and through Intuitions.

Terra Nova embraces and celebrates Holism — the ancient and recently re-discovered worldview that the universe is alive, connected, conscious, and intelligent. The holographic universe is supported by today’s quantum physics and ecological consciousness as well as by many ancient stories, traditions, philosophies, and faiths. Holism opens many doors, including portals that help us to experience a connection with and compassion for all life. Holistic investigations reveal new possibilities and introduce us to the many realms of beauty that surround us.

We honor subjective learning as the crucial link between our unique, individual experience and the objective reality we share with others. When we examine our subjective experiences, we notice that they are the doorways to discovering significance, meaning, and beauty. Without subjectivity, there is no individual purpose, nor relevance, nor spontaneity, nor creative life. Without the force of feelings and intuitions, without the power of imagination to infuse new life into what has atrophied or died, we are soulless robots in a mechanical universe.

Subjectivity is the medium in which all relationships — with our self, with others, and with Nature — develop. Without subjectivity there is no personal experience, and there is no ground on which to build meaningful rapport with others.

An understanding of the significance of life requires a basic appreciation for and trust in the gifts offered by subjective experiences. It requires as well an active imagination that transforms what is inert or soulless into something that supports a joyous life.   

Communication of feelings, thoughts, ideals, intuitions, hopes, and dreams are part of the currency of human exchange at Terra Nova. As we learn the skills of listening to our inner life and the essence of others, expressing our soul through art, poetry, music, dance, as well as by spoken and written words, and as we respond to outer events and circumstances with grace, dignity, and confidence, we define who we are as powerful, resourceful, and beautiful human beings.

As consciousness is elevated, the power of human choice in shaping our environment and our experience soars. When we discover and re-define our individual life path and purpose, the rate of our personal transformation and evolution accelerates. We attract new and exciting opportunities for ourselves as we make new, conscious choices about how we wish to live our lives and who we choose to be.

We practice experiential learning in an atmosphere of open communications. Our purpose is to integrate objective knowledge with subjective experience so that what is learned incorporates head, heart, and hands. The three hours we devote to individual and group projects each day allows students to learn every step of the process of independent learning. The students select, design, research, implement, and document each project and then present it to an audience of peers, teachers, and friends. By going through this process a number of times, students incrementally learn how to teach as well as how to learn. By experiencing the entire process from many perspectives, they master the process of learning itself. It may take a dozen projects before the procedure become second nature. Students may require considerable help and encouragement, but in the end they will master all the ingredients of becoming an independent learner.

The heart of Holistic Education is becoming aware of the relationships and connections in everything we study. As the science of ecology is illustrated by the thousands of interconnections of living and non-living things within a particular habitat, the ecology of an individual human life is illuminated and made relevant by examining his or her network of connections to things, animals, and people. To become aware of our myriad junctures and kinships with all forms and elements of life is to awaken to our place in the natural order.

To live fully at Terra Nova requires that we develop our unique voice and participate proactively in life so that together we sculpt the nature of our community. If learning is to be integrated with living, we need to shape and become aware of the dynamics of our personal relationships and choose to align our behavior with our ideals.

The Terra Nova High School is ultimately a practical endeavor that requires continual practice, for the TN way is to continually raise the bar — challenging students, parents, and teachers to put into action an elevated awareness of who they are — in order to become more intelligent, more responsive and more responsible, more creative, more compassionate, and more giving. When we are attuned to the possibilities of life, we are both grounded in our essence and inspired to take the road less traveled, our unique path.

Because we value discovery, consciousness, and the power of individual choice, the relationship between teachers and students is based on collaboration, not on authority. Students can only be empowered to find their own answers when they live in an atmosphere of respect, openness, compassion, empathy, and a rigorous commitment to truth.  Individually or in group meetings, teachers listen to and focus on each student’s personal agenda — his or her unique circumstances, needs, priorities, desires, goals, interests, and fears. Unless these individual, subjective elements are respected and honored, the educational process can only proceed on a superficial level. Therefore, we integrate subjective and objective perspectives in order to make the learning experience appropriate, relevant, and potent.

Terra Nova teaches and consciously puts into daily practice the two principles of transformation: unconditional love and forgiveness, so that each student can be free to travel down his or her unique life path. We do not discover our true purpose until we give up seeking attention and approval from others and learn instead to bestow love and forgiveness on others as well as on ourselves.   

The intention behind the design of each course in our curriculum is to illuminate how we can more fully connect with our self, others, our immediate environment, and the larger universe. Therefore our curriculum is a work in progress reflecting our current passions, obsessions, and ideals.

It is crucial that students have time to tune into themselves, to reflect, to consider their thoughts, emotions, and intuitions, to re-order their priorities, to observe the beauty and design of nature, to compose, to sing and to dance, to sculpt and to build. Therefore we have adopted a calendar based on an intensive four-day week. Two of these school days will run from 8am to 8pm, the other two from 8am to 4pm. This allows for many more school hours than the state of New Hampshire requires as well as for 3-day weekends that may prove to be a blessing for students, parents, and teachers.