Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Astin.
Paul, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
In college, some impassioned professors convinced me that we humans were facing immense challenges and that I would be at my best working to address injustices in our world. I was sold! In the late 1980s, I founded a small non-profit that undertook health education projects in northern Mexico. I eventually became an inner-city, bilingual, 1st-grade teacher in the early 1990s. After six years, and with two young daughters at home, I took a job teaching 6th graders in my own community of Topanga. Working with older students was an eye-opener. It quickly became clear to me that schools were failing to address this most important period in a young person’s life –adolescence. Instead of mentoring youth, we were sending them off to impersonal middle schools where they desperately struggled to find themselves without any consistent adult support. In 2008, frustrated by this, I finished a doctorate in Education focusing on middle schools. My dissertation, which won a considerable award at UCLA, argued that young people must move through adolescence with two vital supports. First, they required rigorous mentoring from caring adults other than their parents. Second, they needed a robust set challenges created through immersion in nature.
With an MA in anthropology, I already knew that humans evolved their culture in response to the ecological niche of their home range and ecosystem. Indeed, for 99% of human history, people were guided across the threshold to adulthood by the dual forces of wild nature and compassionate elders. Manzanita School was launched in Fall 2014 to revive this old paradigm within the context of modern schooling. We are presently in our 6th year and have served over 170 students during this time. We are fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and have graduated two small classes of seniors who are thriving in college. We have also hosted over two dozen public speakers through our Manzanita Institute. These free lectures have been filmed and are archived on our website to support this growing alternative vision for education and community. Manzanita School & Institute has a dedicated and highly trained team of educators and naturalists, who work with students on a thriving farm within our 21-acre campus in Santa Monica Mountains. Our students are awake, engaged, authentic, and dedicated. They have hope for a better world and see themselves as agents of positive change. This is an amazing project and a vital new model for educating youth into the 21st century.
Has it been a smooth road?
Our challenges have been twofold. One concerns the machinations of local government, the other involves the prevailing biases in the culture. As a small school in a residential neighborhood, we operated through a Conditional Use Permit (CUP). Our current permit is set to expire in 2022. Because of the numerous studies to complete and consultants to hire, it is a multi-year process to renew this permit. We are two years in, with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested. The Santa Monica Mountains is designated a “significant ecological area” by Los Angeles County, so the process of getting a new CUP is very complex and costly. Unfortunately, the myriad government agencies involved do not generally coordinate their efforts, which makes for a lot of confusion and frustration. Also, there appears to be a belief amongst many bureaucrats that ‘slowing’ or ‘stopping’ development is a good thing, without differentiating between an environmental school versus a strip mall. Another challenge concerns the prevailing beliefs within the culture that educating a young person simply means strong academics.
The reasoning goes something like this: my child must have a ‘rigorous’ and competitive academic education to get into a ‘good’ college. From there, they will be offered the best possible job. With that job, they can be happy. Anything short of this, and they will surely be sad. Despite an epidemic amongst high school and college students in depression, suicidal ideation, prescription drug abuse, and anxiety, we continue to push a narrow definition of education. Young people need strong core academics, but they need so much more. They need to know themselves, to have collaborative skills for working in a group. Students need to be awake and creative and engaged. They need conflict resolution skills and healthy ways to deal with stress. They need a relevant curriculum. Manzanita offers all of these things. Yet the culture is still operating under an old paradigm with narrow definitions of what makes for an educated person. Although Manzanita has faced these dual challenges of misguided county governance and old cultural biases about learning, we continue to flourish and forward this important new paradigm for learning.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Manzanita School & Institute – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
Manzanita School and Institute is a non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation. We offer a tuition-based education for students in grades 4 through 12. We will be opening a K-3 in the fall of 2021. We have a generous financial aid program, and our student population is socio-economically diverse. There are many international families at our school. We offer an educational model that values rigorous academics in Language Arts and Math and an interdisciplinary Humanities-Science Core. We divide our instruction between traditional classroom academics, and time spent outdoors in the undeveloped chaparral and on our farm. Our students engage in a host of practices outdoors that build a sense of belonging to the ‘more-than-human world’ (nature), and that facilitate an embodied sense of being part of an ecosystem. We also have a permaculture program which fosters a deep commitment in our students to be stewards of the earth, and which reawakens that latent human capacity to tend to the plants, animals, and local environment from a place of mutual symbiosis. While there are many schools in Los Angeles that offer college-preparatory academics like Manzanita, and many homeschools and wilderness schools in California offering programs to connect young people to nature, we believe we are the only full-time, year-round day school in the country which is offering both of these things simultaneously. This is the new paradigm for growing healthy, engaged, connected, and committed young people.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Our city of Los Angeles has the largest continuous ‘wildlands’ located in an urban area in the world; the Santa Monica National Recreation Area. At the same time, Los Angeles has a richness and diversity of culture which boasts amazing cuisine from around the world, specialty museums, and numerous gardens and landmarks. It’s an amazing city with incredible resources to enhance the education of students. On the downside, the public transportation system is still fledgling, unable to compete with the dominance of the automobile As such, traveling about during peak rush hour, can be near to impossible. Also, the recent climate-induced drought has created a wildfire threat that is visceral and quite frightening. This has been especially true for our young school, which is situated in a remote area of the Santa Monica Mountains. For the past two years, we have had to close our doors for up to 10 days because of mandated evacuations. Still, we wouldn’t trade our location for anything! We love where we are.
Pricing:
- Full Tuition is $32,000
- 63% of families receive financial aid
- The average financial aid award is $22,000
Contact Info:
- Address: Manzanita School & Institute
1717 Old Topanga Canyon Blvd.
Topanga, CA 90290 - Website: www.manzanitaschool.org
- Phone: (310) 455-9700
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/manzanitaedu/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ManzanitaSchool
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ManzanitaEdu
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/manzanita-school-topanga
- Other: https://www.manzanitaschool.org/speaker-archive
Image Credit:
Miriam Geer, Paul Astin, Hilary Boynton
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