A few years ago, Dumbo Feather interviewed the founder of the Green School in Bali, John Hardy—a man with a huge vision and the means to make it a reality. His dream was to create a world our children would want to live in, by nurturing the young, ethical leaders of tomorrow in a revolutionary re-imagining of education. He created, alongside many passionate believers in a better future, the Green School, a place where kids can run around barefoot in the magnificent foothills of Bali and learn about being citizens of the planet—responsible, connected, enlightened and free.

My husband and I decided we had to go and see for ourselves what all the hype was about. After a one-and-a-half-hour drive we finally found it—the only signage, a tiny engraved bamboo stick with G2 on it stuck in the ground. I began to worry, were we heading into a nether world of idealists like in the movie The Beach? Was I about to have my utopian fantasies realised, only to find there was nothing real underneath the surface, just a lot of dreams without foundation?

I’m not a cynic by any stretch, so I took a deep breath and ducked inside the thatched entrance. There before me stretched a bamboo campus of such awe-inspiring beauty and palpable energy, I was instantly excited and totally curious to know everything I could about the curriculum and the community.

We took one of the open tours with Ben Macrory, the enthusiastic and slightly overwhelmed tour guide. Everybody there is a little overwhelmed. It seems the vision was so timely and was so quickly realised that they are, by their own admission, still trying to keep up and put in place the necessary content to fill the exquisite spaces. They are pioneers in what is by far one of the most fascinating education experiments happening on the planet.

Children here are free to explore a campus that is, even for us as adults, a wonderland. The classrooms have no walls; the fresh air coming across from the river wafts through the whole place; the furniture is all bamboo, and the kids have to sign a contract to ‘love the pigs and take care of them’. There are ducks, chickens, cows; an endangered bird breeding programme on campus; and a vegetable garden outside every classroom that the children get to design, tend and harvest every season. There is even a huge permanent mud pit for local martial arts classes and a Healing Circle for meditation.

At the heart of the school is a bamboo cathedral to sustainability, a nautilus-shaped hub that defies any earnest attempts to explain it (including this one). Here the kids learn to respect the earth, tread lightly, think of the world around them, and be themselves. As Sir Ken Robinson says, why do we persist with 19th century models of education for our children when they are citizens of the 21st century? For the challenges that will face them they need the right skills and equipment. The Green School, with all the challenges it is facing in determining its present and its future, may very well be one of the most inspired centres of learning in the world.

Would we move here with our two kids and send them to Green School? You betcha. By the end of the day, weary and pretty stunned, I couldn’t think of many reasons not to spend a year in Bali as part of this incredible group of people from around the world. So often I hear, ‘But that’s the way it’s done,’ ‘That’s reality,’ ‘You’ve got to be practical’—the Green School is real and practical, it’s just a whole new version of reality.

I just wished I were still a kid and could go to the Green School.

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