Chicken Coops
Growing a school that helps children keep the joy and inspiration
of early childhood alive
an interview with Nitai Deranja
Nitai Deranja is the Director of Living Wisdom
Schools, dedicated to giving children personal skills to be successful
not only in academics, but in life.
There are now Living Wisdom Schools in Nevada
City and Palo
Alto, California, Portland,
Oregon, a preschool in Seattle,
and summer
camps in Nevada City.
When I came to Ananda, I was in my mid-twenties,
and I had an interest in education. The people at Ananda had come
to know me, because I had been visiting for a couple of years,
and so when I finally decided to move there, they were aware that
I had a teaching background. I arrived on Friday, and on Saturday
I was asked if I would like to start the school, and Monday morning
we had our first class.
I said, “Where’s the school going to
be?" And they said, "Well, there's that chicken coop
that nobody's using over there." And you would think that
someone who'd been to college would ask some more questions about
that. But I just said, "Oh, so that's where were going to
start?"
As a devotee, you can't claim much for yourself,
because you realize that it's all Divine Mother working through
you. But I guess I can claim to be willing to be a pioneer. And
a pioneer lives something like this: you look around and see what
you're working with, and it can seem a little discouraging at
times, but then God takes care of you.
I love reading the stories about Dr. Lewis, Yogananda’s
first disciple in American during Yogananda's first years in America,
in Boston. Yogananda would share all these plans for the work,
and Dr. Lewis would look around and think that it didn’t
look like much. But on the other hand, Dr. Lewis was having many
blessings of inner experiences and visions to tide him over the
hard years.
So here I am, I've got six kids, who now are all
in their late thirties and early forties, but at the time were
four to eight years old. And I really had no clue about what we
were supposed to be doing. I had read Autobiography of a Yogi,
and I knew that Yogananda had a school in Ranchi, India. But he
doesn’t give a lot of detail in that book about what happened
at the school day to day. So I was trying my best, and I thought,
well, I’ll start by sharing the Ramayana with them.
So here are these tiny kids, listening to this long
story, and the vocabulary would get a little challenging at times.
It must have been during the first couple weeks of school, we
were reading along one day, and we came to a passage where it
says, "Hanuman flew through the sky like a meteor."
And I stopped, because I thought here's a big word, "meteor."
I said, “Who knows what ‘meteor’
means?” And one little boy said, "Well, I know what
a meteor is. It's somebody that eats hamburgers!”
So we had our own version of the Ramayana. But that
just set me up. Because I was thinking, yeah, these little kids
are so cute. And then, two days later, we got to a point in the
story where Rama and Sita are walking through the forest and they
see a monk meditating in ecstasy, samadhi. And I thought, here's
another big word. So I asked them, “Who knows what the word
‘samadhi’ means?"
And a little girl, Nicole, who was four years old
at the time, raised her hand and said, "I know! Samadhi is
when you’re sitting very still and people come up to you
and they stand around and they say ’Nicole! Nicole!’
And there’s nobody there to answer.”
It was the gift from God that I needed to realize
that "Wow! The potential here is amazing!”
Things evolved, and over the next 10 or 12 years
we developed a very good elementary school. But then we tried
to start a high school and we realized that we didn't have enough
background. Swami Kriyananda hadn't written his book, Education
for Life, which basically explains what our schools are about.
[Click the link to read the complete book online.] And so we got
to a point where it was basically a disaster, and I ended up taking
an extended sabbatical.
But I always had in the back of my mind the idea
that “We aren’t done yet.” Because, while a
good elementary school is nice, these kids have incredible potential,
and the purpose of Education for Life is basically to build a
bridge across a chasm. Most little kids have a shining light in
them–they are just vibrant with joy. But then they reach
the teenage years and they hit a deep chasm, and some of them
hit it earlier than others. I don't know of anyone who hasn’t
gone through at least some of that experience of stumbling into
a deep trough at that age. And I realized that it doesn't have
to happen.
When the right training is there, that original
inner light and enthusiasm of early childhood can continue to
blossom and grow during the teenage years. So I felt that we needed
to create a high school. And about eight years ago I got to start
working on that, this time with much more background, and a whole
lot more understanding of what we needed to do. And, now, eight
years later, I can say that we have a really good high school.
And what you can do with young people at that age is just amazing.
This year, we started a new course. I guess you
could call at Civics, for lack of a better word. But as we got
into it, I realized that it was actually a study of the progression
of nonviolence in this era, as a way of resisting evil. We studied
Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez,
and many others, and the students were very excited about this.
They began by studying the history of war–what happens when
people deal with evil in the usual way, by getting out there and
trying to clobber each other. (Photo: Nitai as a young teacher,
early 1970s.)
In the high school, we do a service adventure every year, and this
year the service adventure for the older boys was a trip to India.
We spent six weeks traveling around India, and a special part of
the blessing of the trip was that we got to meet the Dalai Lama.
At the start, when we first arrived in India, we had a wonderful
satsang with Swami Kriyananda. None of these boys had had much contact
with him, and they were extremely impressed because he was so relaxed,
informal and inviting, cheerful and insightful.
There were about 20 of us sitting in the room with
Swami, in this nice, relaxing situation. And about three weeks
later, we were in the ashram of the Dalai Lama at Dharmsala, in
basically the same situation, except that we had to go through
airport-type security to get into the room because of the political
situation. But we went into the Dalai Lama's living room, and
it was very similar–the same number of people, same kind
of furniture. And then, of course, the Dalai Lama was there, and
it was just like watching a twin soul with Swami Kriyananda. You
come up, and he's very humble, very joyful. He greeted each of
us individually, like we were important, and sat us down, and
we got to ask questions.
One of the questions that the boys asked was, "What
do you suggest for spiritually inclined teenagers? What should
they do?" He thought about it, and he said, "Travel."
And it's a very profound answer, as you know if you've ever tried
to work with teenagers. And of course, it was what we were doing,
so that was nice.
Afterward, I asked the boys to write about their
experiences, and I would like to read what two of the them wrote.
"I never gave much thought to China invading
Tibet until I went to India. It was always just something that
was happening to another part of the world. It didn't have anything
to do with me. Then we had an audience with the Dalai Lama that
changed my beliefs.
Later that evening, we were eating dinner and met
a monk there. He was collecting signatures for a petition to allow
the Dalai Lama to speak to the United Nations. We found out that
the monk had published a book, and we bought it. I spent the next
afternoon reading his compelling account of how he was arrested
and tortured by the Chinese. He was able to work through his anger
and show compassion for them, even though they had done horrid,
unimaginable things to him. Still, there are others who have a
hard time not hating the Chinese for what they have done. I know
I would have a hard time forgiving them. But like the Tibetans,
it is our job to be forgiving and accept people for who they are."
And the second boy wrote:
"The Dalai Lama is incredibly joyful and funny.
One of the questions our group asked him was, "What was the
hardest part of ruling Tibet when you were only 15 years old?”
He said it was probably when he had to talk to General Mao Tse
Tung to try to stop him from invading Tibet. As we all know, it
didn't work. He said that General Mao was very intimidating. There
were all these different steps you had to take to honor him, and
if the Dalai Lama made a mistake, everybody would snicker at him.
He said it was really artificial, and it was only to give Mao
an air of importance.
The Dalai Lama struck me as an amazing character.
Over one million of his people were slaughtered by the Chinese,
and he doesn't hate them. Just looking at him, I came to the conclusion
that he was incapable of hate."
When you can do that kind of thing with teenagers,
and have them thinking and sharing and experiencing life on that
level, you've got a whole higher dimension in education. And that's
the opportunity that we’ve been given with these teachings.
Not only for education, but for all aspects of life. It's completely,
utterly transforming, beyond imagination of expectancy. Not only
in bliss, but in what it can accomplish on this plane. And to
do it, all we have to do is say “yes” to whatever
opportunity is before us, and tomorrow say yes to the next one.
And then miracles start to happen.
Afterword
Since 1997, my focus has been on developing our high
school, which is the long term answer to meeting the needs of
our teenagers. As the project has grown, we've been able to attract
other children from the surrounding area, and also boarding students
from as far away as Germany and Taiwan. Outside students bring
diverse backgrounds to the school and to the community, and have
been an essential part of helping our children to appreciate what
they have.
Gradually, as our program has developed, the community
has been able to experience the wonderful. but all too rare, blessing
of inspired, motivated teenagers. Through the children's music,
serviceful spirit, and sheer exuberance they have added tremendously
to Ananda's mission of providing an example of cooperative spiritual
living for people of all ages.
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