Happiness & Success in High School 

What are your hopes and dreams for your teenager? Not just for high school, but for the whole of his or her life?

Financial security? A good job? A nice home?

Material goals are self-evidently necessary and worthwhile. But surely many intangibles are also worth considering, such as happiness and peace of mind.

We all want our children to acquire an awareness of positive, inspiring values and ideals, as well as a deep understanding of the ultimate meaning of life. No influence outside the home has a greater impact on young people than the countless hours they spend at school.

Nowadays, little attention is paid to developing higher values. But what if your dreams for your child go beyond the material?

It’s difficult in our culture to succeed without intellectual training. But life teaches us that success and happiness depend to a great extent on human skills such as knowing how to get along with others, how to persevere, how to focus our attention, how to cooperate, and how to be a good friend.

At Living Wisdom High School, we feel that teens should benefit from the storehouse of wisdom that humanity has gathered through the ages regarding the skills and understanding they will need to build a fulfilled and happy life. We feel that it’s our duty to give young people these essential life skills, beginning at a young age.

For more than fifty years, we have found that students who learn how to be happy are far more likely to love learning and be successful in their academic studies.

At Living Wisdom High School, the students learn to be balanced, mature, effective, happy, and harmonious. We call our philosophy Education for Life, because it relates the lessons young people learn in school to their lives as a whole. At LWHS, we study not only the great things people have accomplished, but the human qualities that enabled them to achieve greatness.

Before we can be happy and secure, we must know a great deal about the world around us. We need to learn to interact appropriately with the people and circumstances in our lives, because life will seldom mold itself to our expectations.

We must be ready to adjust to realities outside our own. We must learn practical skills, and we must master academic knowledge. Education for

Life helps students prepare for maturity on all levels — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

At Living Wisdom High School, the teachers are constantly focused on guiding the individual student in developing their five universal human “tools of maturity”: body, feelings, will, mind, and soul. With health and high energy, sensitive feeling, dynamic will power, and mental clarity, young people are able to expand their awareness and find a deep sense of meaning and joy.

In our school, we gauge each student’s success not only by test results, but by the quality of their attitudes, effort, and interactions with others.

Young people reveal a far broader array of individual traits than adults do. Instead of forcing them to conform to the rigid mold of a “standardized” curriculum, we feel it makes more sense to discover their unique strengths and help them build on those positive qualities to acquire the knowledge and skills they will need in later years.

Students in our schools develop self-confidence and enthusiasm for learning, because encouraging their strengths releases a positive flow of energy and enthusiasm that carries over into their coursework.

Our class sizes are deliberately kept small so that the teachers can develop a close relationship with the individual student. The teachers are trained to assess each student’s physical, mental, and emotional development, and to guide the individual along the lines of their strengths.

They relate to them much as their parents do, recognizing and helping them meet their ever-changing unique challenges.

We feel it is our responsibility to help make each teen’s school years a joyful experience and lay a strong foundation for success and happiness in school and beyond. In a Living Wisdom classroom, the atmosphere is happy, relaxed, and family-like, although at the same time there is order, appropriate discipline, and a clear sense that the teacher is in charge.

The teachers win the students’ respect by awakening their enthusiasm and energy for the tasks at hand. The students learn that they are expected to behave with consideration and respect for others, and that they can always approach the teacher for individual guidance.

A positive learning environment doesn’t automatically transform young people into angels. In our classrooms we find the same issues, interactions, and challenging transitions as in other schools. What’s different is that the students are given the tools and the opportunity to deal with the challenges in effective, enlightened ways.

At Living Wisdom High School, each student’s natural spirituality is acknowledged and encouraged. Spirituality isn’t defined as a system of narrow dogmas. The focus is on the student’s own experience of universal spiritual truths. We make time for meditation, yoga postures, and other uplifting activities. Teens can experience for themselves what it feels like to be in harmony with their own higher consciousness.

Students discover that expansive feelings, thoughts, and actions increase their own sense of well-being, whereas contractive attitudes and actions take their happiness away. “Right and wrong” become personal experiences of the consequences of specific behaviors, rather than abstract rules.

The students become deeply interested in changing their behavior when they realize that there are effective ways to increase their own happiness and joy.