“How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find our selves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

– From Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”

As a parent you will make many decisions for your child’s future and one of the most important of these is the choice of education. If, as a parent you are not happy with conventional schooling where education, means only the quantity of information passed rather than the quality, then we should meet!

Krishnamurti has said that, “The child is the result of both the past and the present and is therefore already conditioned. If we transmit our background to the child, we perpetuate both his and our own conditioning. There is radical transformation only when we understand our own conditioning and are free of it.”

At BMS we are constantly analysing our ‘own conditioning’. The teachers, themselves are in a constant process of learning at their individual levels and nobody in the school is of the view that they are ‘experts or specialists’ in the art of imparting knowledge or what learning implies. Such an implication would bring us very close to “conventional education… (that) makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity.” Teachers are expected to remain open-minded and in a democratic dialogue with their surroundings.

There is a lot of ‘de-schooling’ that takes place at The Blue Mountains School and attention to the individual is given great importance and despite the emphasis on co-operation rather than competition; the fact that the educator and the student are part of a journey that takes them towards self-awareness and inquiry; not being dependent on dogmatic approaches; where grievances/views are aired in open meetings giving the pupils a strong sense of justice as well as an ability to listen to, and understand, the other person's point of view…the children do not suffer when they go on to conventional educational institutions or in the world. Learning is not a task.

Our methods of sharing experiences and teaching are direct, the pace that of the child, the atmosphere informal and intimate and, the child’s bugbears – homework and examinations – absent but not ignored.

All members of the community live and share responsibilities in the areas of basic community-needs (food, shelter, health, occupation). Each member of the staff is completely responsible for the school. We have a minimal support staff, and most of us are involved in the daily running of the school and campus.

The general environment is informal and encourages a close adult-child relationship. The non-competitive and cooperative environment, free of the uses of reward and punishment systems, encourages a natural and wholesome growth. The orientation is towards individual responsibility within the group rather than leadership. All decisions are based on consensus and dialogue.

We are a group of individuals from diverse backgrounds, the core team (as some of us are called), really concerned with what J.B. Priestly said, “Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.”

As we look around, the ‘billions’ are already there and the only way we can stop the rest of the nightmare, is to bring about a meaningful social change – a revolution in the minds and attitudes of human beings…through the right kind of education. This process of Enquiry and Revolution continues to be our greatest challenge and purpose of living!

There comes a time when
You stand at the crossroads.
Thinking whether to turn left,
Or right.

Will you choose the path that’s difficult?
Or the easy one?
Will it bring you glory and fortune?
Or pain and shame?

You only have a moment to decide.
And a lifetime to feel proud.
Or repent.

You turn left.
When everybody is turning right.
You dare
Just like some of us do.
We dare to commit…because we dare to be free!