John Stewart is a widely travelled and renowned educator, consultant and author who has featured on The Politically Incorrect Parenting Show, Kerry-Ann show, and the Today show. After finishing up as head of Bali’s famous Green School in 2015, Mr Stewart’s latest project is establishing the first Living School in Lismore’s CBD.

The building we’re renovating for the Living School in Conway St was originally the place my parents bought to raise a family. I'm one of eight kids and we all attended the local schools. My father was a doctor and used to drive around in an old blue Mercedes. He ended up building the surgery next door, a “lovely” Bexhill brick building, which is probably the ugliest building in Lismore.

The building formerly occupied by Dr Stewart's surgery is being renovated to become his son's school. PHOTO: Supplied.

We were eight kids in 10 years, so as we were growing older, he built another block and then another so everyone had their own room. Anyway, they moved out while I was overseas and closed the door and left it a bit like a time capsule.

I'd been teaching all around the world, and came back because they are now at an age where they probably need a little bit of support - my father does especially - and I had this great dream of coming back from the Green School in Bali where I was working and creating a school here.

The certificate of registration from the New South Wales Education Standards Authority for Living School was sent out today in the mail. As soon as I get that, I’ll begin organising community engagement meetings, then there will be teacher engagement meetings, teacher training and enrollment applications ahead of opening next year

I'm registered from kindergarten to year 8 so I've got the option to fulfill that however I'd like to start with a five, six, seven, eight program to begin with, and maybe a kindergarten so I can grow. I'm waiting to see what the interest is.

In a way I always wanted to be a teacher. I remember in Year Three at Lismore Demonstration School, which is now Lismore Public, we had student teachers coming in to teach and my teacher at the time said to my father: “Your son should be a teacher; he's already better than the people we're getting”.

So I don't know if that's true, but I studied teaching at Southern Cross University which was at the time the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education and then the University of New England Northern Rivers.

I went travelling around the world before settling down for a time in England with my now wife. My first job there was at London’s Hill House International School, which Prince Charles attended, after my wife and her mother dressed me up in a blazer and kicked me out of the car in front of the school. “They employ Australians,” they said.

I’ve taken different things from all the schools where I’ve worked.

I think that my English teaching experiences taught me that there are disciplines for confidence. We need to teach and educate with mindfulness and also with the sense of the individual.

The school in London was all about how you can use a building but the school is really the people who are in connected into it, which is one of the key elements of Living School.

When you mention a school such as Cambridge, everyone thinks of it as a very traditional school, but St John’s, Cambridge, was a school which was very much focused on the individual needs of students. The headmaster was very progressive. He took down all the honour boards and he put up the students’ art, which caused a huge furore. But he was that sort of person. Very intelligent. A very driven bloke.

Back in Australia, Central Coast Grammar was really about family connections. How do you connect students together? There were house families and systems where you have vertical connectedness, not just a horizontal.

When I worked at Tudor House in Moss Vale, it was all about responsible risk-taking. Risk is a key feature in learning. So how do you model that into the excursions, the outside world and bringing sustainability? We created organic gardens. The students camped out and fed themselves. So that's all coming into Living School as well.

The Green School in Bali. PHOTO: Supplied.

Working at Green School in Bali had a major impact on me as well, but I had already written a treaties and formulated my ideas as to what my school should be by then. When I went to Green School, I could see bits of it, but not in its uniformity.

I was looking at whether can you create balance instead of just having a wonderful experience. Can you have the discipline of education for science, maths, English as well as connectedness and collaboration? I believe you can.

Living School's all about living philosophy, living architecture, living well, living learning. The challenge is to create a school that actually lives and learns and grows together. That's where I feel progressive education needs to be. I don't want to be alternate. Alternate means a parallel railway track while progressive is saying, let's take the best from all of these things or, what we consider to be best for our community, and let's go forward.

So in Living School there'll be aspects that might be from a Montessori-type approach, there might be an aspect of a Steiner-esque sort of approach - some of the ideals, but without the doctrine - and so it grows. There'll be some from the government schools.

An artist's impression of what the Living School will look like once the renovations are complete. PHOTO: Supplied.

I'm not critical of schools. All I'm critical of is lack of diversity. If we have a monoculture, we don't have the richness and the growth and the vitality of a very diverse biology and ecosystem. Schools should be fostering more variation between schools so the good ideas that might pollinate can be spread.

There are two attributes that we know will create wellness, better relationships, better families and a better future and those two attributes are a love of learning and gratitude. Are we focusing on engendering those two things in our schools today? I don't know.

If we've got disengagement, then I'd say love of learning isn't there. If we've got people continually bombarding and expecting more, we haven't got gratitude. So I want people to come into this arena, this sense of place with a with a sense of wonder and a sense of peace.

A lot of schools and a lot of alternative schools have kind of a locked in view. They see the campus as their domain. They're fearful of strangers. They're fearful of risk. They're fearful of failure and all of those elements are actually vital aspects of learning. So the concept of Living School is first of all, to connect with the community.

Being in the CBD of Lismore means that parents will be able to actually feel connected to the school. They can come and they can have a shared drink and meal with the kids. It means we can move into the community and start to use public spaces that are not necessarily being utilized as much as they used to be.

How do you get students and young people to actually want to be in the public library? You take them there. You establish the routine. So we would look to use the public library and art gallery, we'd look to get involved in the town and to use the facilities of the university and TAFE and make ourselves more about a connected community.

Another of the great concerns that most schools have is about the risk in excursions but what if excursions were really viable parts of learning? Most students, most children, most people, they want to see the connection. If we don't connect lessons with the real world, it's just sitting on a page and it's boring.

So that being the case in the context of Lismore, how do we get kids into community? Excursions. How can we get kids out into farmland? Excursions. There's no reason why you have to be trapped in a campus or that you have to invest all your money inside of a campus. Build a building, and then get out into the real world and connect with it.

John Stewart is fixing up an old train carriage to use as a classroom at the Living School. PHOTO: Supplied.

It's all about wonder. Dr Benjamin Spock's son Michael Spock used to create museums and his whole focus was that people and especially students and especially children need to see the workings of the building.

So then I started thinking, okay, well then how do you create a school that's more wonderful, full of wonder? You have to intentionally do it.

So when you go into this building, there are going to be places where you can see how the electrics are. There will be a ceiling that's missing so you can see how the roof is structured. There will be a window in the so you see you see how lift moves. It's going to be open-plan with breakout spaces. It's going to have an old railway carriage called "the train of thought". We've got the tree of life.

The area for the younger children at the Living School will feature the "Tree of Life". PHOTO: Supplied.

There's a disconnect with nature at present and if it continues we're going to all be lovely living in little boxes but we're going to find the great demise of our natural habitat. How do you change that educationally? So there's a big focus on climate change, pollution and the concerns of the future. So the Living School also needs to have a living architecture.

It's all about creating wonder. It's all about bringing in a sense of wonder and amazement. I want to have a place of engagement where things are wonderful.