We send our way rather sadly back from the mountains, via a number of stunning things. The first of these is the Ulun Danu temple, a 'water temple' which regulates the flow of water into the rice fields for all of Bali. The temple is beautiful. Even more beautiful is the concept. The rice fields are split into different groups, each of which have a slightly different calendar. They each plant their rice (the point when it needs the most water) just after their rice planting ceremony, spaced out through the year so that everyone is not planting at the same time thus maximising the supply of water and the chances of contamination or water shortage. Faith placed right at the heart of a community and influencing work as well as play. It's beautiful though as I have noted before, it's neither quaint nor without its dark side.
From there we stop at Jatiluwih, the most famous of the stepped rice fields, which has UNESCO status. It's beautiful. Stepped down the mountain in curved, swirling rows of lush green, punctuated here and there by a small barn in which a solitary golden brown cow munches happily. It's stunning. And, as we walk among the fields, its silent too. We can't hear the jeeps and motorbikes conveying tourists up at the top of the rice fields. We can hear the munching of the cow, birds, crickets and every now and then the rustle of the rice in what little breeze there is.
Our final stop is the Green School. This was such an inspiring visit that I am, perversely, struggling to know what to say about it. We had seen a lecture by the founder on the TEK lecture series, and from that we expected a school which was focused on evo friendly activities. We expected eco toilets, composting schemes, petitions to stop the use of plastic bags, and amazing, intricate architectural structures made from bamboo. We expected classrooms made of bamboo with open sides to allow a natural breeze and no air conditioning. We expected 'green' food in the visitors cafe. All of this we got. And more. There was a clear water stream running through it, and a natural swiming pool created out of that. There was a water fuelled turbine from which, eventually, there would be enough power to sustain the whole school. There was a bamboo bridge across the lake on which one hundred people could sit and have dinner. There were whiteboards made of old car windscreens, a mud pool, and a small bracelet to welcome us, made of the stone from a fruit tree on site. And the bamboo building themselves were beautiful, intricate, stunning pieces of art in themselves, with bright concepts behind them. In one, known as the 'heart of school' where all the children eat together, there is a 'bamboo forest' made of hanging bamboo poles.
But what we weren't expecting, was the ingenuity of the way the pupils are taught. Our guide, the school's director explains to us.
"Children all learn in a different way," he says, "and the current school system is failing so many of them."
I rather agree. All over the world we are teaching our children to pass exams. Or to learn by rote. The good teachers resist this, try to approach it on a more holistic basis, but the system is more and more immovable. When my mother was at school she learned how to dress make. By the time I was in school I made three small things and spent the rest of the time writing about how I would do it, what I would do, how I could have done it better. My sister made even less.
At Green School the teaching is done in 'Thematic Units' (actually a surprisingly boring name for a school that refused to use the name 'administrative centre'. If the children are learning about vikings, they make viking clothes and weapons, calculate how far they travelled, eat Viking food and so on. It's not a new idea, in fact, rather smugly, I , when starting a teacher training course which I finished, though never inflicted myself on any children as a teacher, had a similar idea to blur the subjects and teach maths , hygiene, science etc. through the running of a cafe for the parents project.
"I was a visionary!" I say to M.
Maybe. The trouble was I was a terrible teacher. I couldn't control my class long enough to do anything other than basic. They ran rings, squares, oblongs and triangles round me. And it turns out it takes more than good ideas to be a teacher. It seems you have to be able to implement them.
The Green School does. But it goes much further. The middle school wanted to make a 'fairy house', so the teacher abandoned the schedule and they did it. The lower school built a bridge. They learned the physics of it through trial and error. They wrote about it afterwards. We are given a presentation by a group of middle school pupils of varying ages, about their plan to get the use of plastic bags banned in Bali. They talk with a self assurance I never had as a child and don't remember any of my classmates having either. They talk about 'our founder' by which they mean a couple of other pupils a few years ago. They have a board, on which one of the pupils we are speaking to, sits, where they make decisions about the direction they want to take this in. They have had audiences with people quite high up in government.
I am deeply impressed by the way that the children are. We need, perhaps more than ever, as our world changes, as our technology changes and we struggle to match our lifestyles to it, as our economy changes, a fresh thinking generation, capable of considering inventive solutions outside of the box. And yes that is a cliché. But with increasing government demands on otherwise bright, imaginative teachers, and school administration moving closer and closer to a businesslike model, it is a cliché we are living. Can we develop enough schools, allow enough leeway for creativity in teachers to produce a generation of problem solvers and forge the changes we need?
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