NZ: Where Children Are Free to Roam

Pupils at Deep Green Bush school spend the majority of their day outdoors, exploring the countryside, learning to fish, hunt and trap possums

Deep among the streams and Kauri trees of rural south Auckland, New Zealand’s newest and most alternative school is in session. The weather is fine so a bout of fishing is in order, followed by lunch cooked on an open fire. Homework and classes? Indefinitely dismissed.

“We are called a school but we look nothing like any school out there,” says Joey Moncarz, co-founder and head teacher at Deep Green Bush School, which is in term two of its inaugural year.

“We don’t do things like telling kids it is time to write or learn maths. When they are interested in doing it, they do it.”

Moncarz is an ex-mainstream teacher. After five, frustrating years in mainstream schools in New Zealand he quit to found Deep Green Bush school, which has a roll of eight, and no classroom walls, time-out chairs or tests.

Concerned that mainstream schools were not preparing children for the global problems of the future – such as climate change –Moncarz envisioned a radically different kind of education, rooted in the primal skills of hunting, gathering and survival.

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Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk