Sustainable Green Education
At a glance, what sets Green School apart from perhaps any other educational institution is the uniquely organic infrastructure of its buildings and classrooms-built almost entirely out of locally grown bamboo, traditional Balinese mud walls and floors, and local alangalang thatched grass roofs. To provide for its infrastructural needs, the school has established a community-based bamboo distribution program. The school freely distributes a wide variety of some 50,000 bamboo seedlings to the surrounding community, offering a certain percentage of the bamboo's worth to local owners. Once the bamboo reaches its maturation, the school purchases the remaining value of the crop directly from the local community.
Green School's small carbon footprint has been made possible thanks to its innovation in the field of alternative energy. The twenty-acre campus is bisected by the Ayung River, which not only beautifully complements the school's natural surroundings, but also provides electricity for the entire community. Through the use of hydroelectric power, a state-of-the-art vortex generator naturally harnesses the power of a portion of the river. Residual sawdust collected from the manufacturing of the aforementioned bamboo structures becomes a renewable heat source for cooking and hot water, while methane gas is extracted from cow manure to create biogas used to fuel stoves. Once the methane has been removed, the manure is then made into pathogen free fertilizer, which nourishes on-campus organic fruit and vegetable gardens.
All roads and pathways leading through the school's campus have been built with natural and sustainable materials, which provide for a better built, less expensive, and more aesthetically pleasing alternative to standard petroleum based asphalt. Take, for example, the school's main roads-they are built from volcanic rock, providing ecologically sound and durable surfaces for vehicular traffic. It is also worth mentioning some of the smaller bits of green ingenuity at Green School-solar powered electrical fences to contain the school's livestock; "living fences" that function as both a natural property line as well as food for local wildlife; and recycled car windshields that serve as skylights.
The Steiner-Waldorf education model is the backbone to Green School's academic curriculum. Steiner-Waldorf pedagogy focuses on interdisciplinary learning-an approach in which both educators and students work in tandem to discover a connection between particular disciplines of study and everyday real-life situations. There is a special emphasis on educating the whole child; that is to say, encouraging growth and maturity in all areas of the human self-academically, artistically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. The curriculum of course also aims to inculcate a keen sense of environmental stewardship amongst the learning community.
Green School recently opened in September 2008 and currently enrolls some 100-plus international and Indonesian students from kindergarten to grade eight. To find out more, visit the school's website at http://www.greenschool.org.
