A family coliving village
Sociable, gorgeous, and interesting, our little village on the Adriatic Sea offers a new kind of community, reviving the Mediterranean lifestyle at its bucolic best. Kids play freely throughout parks, piazzas, and beaches. Parents have time and space to connect. Local artists, academics, and friendly neighbors join olive orchards, church bells, and even the occasional goat to embrace and enrich us. We are here together to have fun and live life with curiosity. Joy and reverence give us energy to take on the impossible.
Community Life
CULTURE
Family life as it should be
Conventional patterns of school and work prevent us from spending time with our favorite people. At The Field School of Hvar, we choose to pass most of our days with family and friends. We all “work” in the same building: parents in the coworking lounge; kids in the learning center. We frequently run into each other on walks to town or the beach. Accommodations combine privacy and proximity, transforming strangers into friends, and friends into an extended support network for life’s big and little challenges. It’s not an intentional community. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a village.
Much of our culture emerges from the hobbies, skills, and traditions that our families want to share. In our first fall session, families hosted a pasta-making workshop, an afternoon crochet, and a trick-or-treat evening with DIY lanterns. For each other, parents hosted meditation, yoga, a men’s group, sound baths, wine tastings, and acupuncture. One set of parents dedicated significant time to building a wooden kayak together, creating a carefully thought-out series of opportunities for learners of all ages to contribute.
The Field School is a platform for its people, adding in a bit of facilitation to spark connection and keep things interesting. In school, children bond by learning Croatian songs and phrases together. Big and little kids pair up for reading time and free play. Every Friday ends with a short assembly, and every session ends with a big reveal of student projects.
For adults - which emphatically includes aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends - The Field School breaks the ice with a farm-to-table welcome dinner at the outset of each session, followed by weekly free or inexpensive get-togethers: a hike, an apertivo, a simple workshop. We help organize outings to local events and can troubleshoot confusing or stressful moments on the island.
As The Field School of Hvar grows, we will have additional opportunities for parents to partner or volunteer. For example, we will be building a community garden - the first step towards a more permanent, regenerative campus. Parents are warmly invited to step into these roles and get to know Hvar better - or to pass and focus on other goals.
ATHLETICS, ARTS, & MORE
Outdoor recreation is a major focus at The Field School of Hvar, somewhat taking the place of traditional athletics. We choose this approach because the island is so abundant in opportunities to climb, sail, paddle, and hike, and these sports naturally support our broader mission of inspiring a deep sense of love for the natural world.
Our youngest students spend most of the day outdoors. Preschoolers can paddle in our mini-kayak, practice camping in tents, and embark on full-day walks. Children ages 7 and older spend an afternoon each week learning boating or mountaineering. Pre-teens and teens aim to take an entire week at the end of each session for a hike, sail, or paddle, staying in campsites. With a good book and nature journal in tow, students use these outdoor capstones as an important moment to consolidate learning and relationships.
In daily learning, The Field School of Hvar incorporates quite a bit of physical movement, craft, and arts, as well as other activities that translate into traditional extracurriculars, such as service work, debate, and creative writing. With that said, many children will want to participate in dedicate programs for sport, arts, and other activities.
There are three main options for extracurriculars on Hvar: clubs led by parent volunteers, by faculty, or by local providers. To participate in local extracurriculars, such as rowing, dance, mountaineering school, judo, theater, football, and folk dancing, children may need to speak conversational Croatian. The Field School will provide roughly an hour of Croatian language practice per day. Participation in local clubs will greatly help children acquire the language.
Parents and faculty may also choose to host clubs or workshops. The Field School is very ready to support these initiatives, so long as an effort is made to also invite Croatian children to participate.
LIFE ON HVAR
Hvar is a truly special place. The air is clearer here. The sea bluer. There is a special feeling that comes with spending time on the island, adding your story to millennia of human history, much of it still hidden in plain sight.
It’s also quite livable. Croatia is a member of the European Union and uses the euro as currency. It is a fully democratic country - one of the safest in the world. Private healthcare remains fairly inexpensive. Almost all people under the age of forty speak English fluently. Prices have increased dramatically in recent years, but it remains quite affordable compared to North American and northern Europe.
The island of Hvar is home to 10,000 year-round residents including many artists, academics, and outdoor enthusiasts drawn by its natural beauty and gentle climate. It is by no means a “dying” town like some beautiful but inaccessible villages elsewhere in Southern Europe. Children and strollers are ubiquitous. The island boasts the most UNESCO Heritages of any island in Europe, numerous well-curated museums, and archaeological sites. It offers modern grocery stores, charming libraries, daily ferries and catamarans to the city of Split, an emergency room and helicopter, and all the other essential services. There is endless outdoor recreation, including extensive hiking trails. Restaurants generally close in the winter, but cafes remind vibrant all year round.
2026-27 PROGRAM
The 2026-27 academic year will The Field School’s first! Following the classical model, we will be immersed in the prehistoric and ancient world for our first year, as well as biology, classification, and anatomy. Hvar is a superb place to study these topics, with ten thousand years of human history and a beautifully diverse landscape.
In the humanities, we will use The Story of the World, a popular and activity-rich history spine with an extensive reading list that brings together myth, biography, art, and science. In addition, we will be localizing this global history with visits to relevant historical sites on Hvar, such as neolithic caves, Illyrian fortresses, the Greek colony of Pharos, and Roman mosaics that endure to this day. This region was very much a part of the Greco-Roman ancient world and is full of fascinating episodes and characters.
In science, we will use Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding to study biology, classification, and anatomy. Once again, Hvar is a vivid laboratory for hands-on observation and experiments. While this is a fully contemporary, stand-alone science curriculum, we will explore the pre-historic and ancient technologies of science as opportunities arise.
Notably, our winter term (January through March) will be in another location in the Mediterranean that amplifies our study of the ancient world. Most likely, this will be in Turkey, which has large, well-preserved ruins, as well as safety, convenience, and affordability.
In 2027-28, our learning focus will be on the Middle Ages and we will likely visit a location on the Silk Road (winter) and in the British Isles (summer). In 2028-29, we will center on the Renaissance and Reformation, with visits to Japan (winter) and again the UK (summer). In 2029-30, we will complete this four year cycle, studying our modern world. Families are welcome to join at any point in this cycle.
We will continue to share more details about this program - specific curricula and units as they align with terms - as we develop it with parents, learners, and faculty.
Shared Work & Artisanship
Gardening and preparing food. Learning how things work and how to fix them. Making useful, beautiful objects from natural materials. With the right mentorship, practical life is an unmatched classroom for honing the intellect and cultivating the art of living well.
Through our Shared Work Program, all students, parents, and faculty participate in the communal responsibility of care necessary to sustain the school and to keep us warm, nourished, clean, and safe.
Food is the beginning. Both immediate and dazzlingly complex, food ties us to layers of natural and human systems. In four year cycles, students progress from regenerative gardening, to harvest and preservation, to meal preparation, and finally to food as a product that is bought and sold.
Every object is an invitation. Textiles, furniture, dishes, soap, buildings, and transportation. Every artifact around us is an implicit expression of our collective values and culture. Our students reinvent conventional solutions from the ground up through crafts such as wild ceramics, natural dye, candlemaking, and carpentry - all packed with academic content.
The shared work of care. What does it mean to take care of a place? For The Field School of Hvar, care is not a chore to be outsourced to others or foisted upon those who have no choice. It is a common invocation that unites us to meet our most primal needs. Shared work and artisanship is a block of every regular school day. Parents contribute to shared work for a few hours each week.
Service Learning
Regenerative climate action is the thematic throughline for education and impact at The Field School of Hvar.
Profound ecological change has arrived and will shape our children’s lives in ways we cannot predict. Everything students do at Field— every lesson, every debate, every sketch, hike, or song — is meant to help them discover their agency in this era so that they can confront an uncertain future with reasoned hope and resilience.
Our emphasis is in the optimism of regenerative design - solutions to climate change which sequester carbon, enhance biodiversity, and advance human thriving. Regeneration aims to reverse the damages of history for a better, and not merely inhabitable, world.
Service is both a dedicated activity within this vision and a thread in many other aspects of the curriculum: a language class that includes weekly conversation at the nursing home; citizen science to save a neighbor’s orchard from disease; policy research to accelerate green energy adoption.
Parents are valued partners in modelling charity and stewardship.
Capstone Older teens inspire our entire community by embarking upon projects which define their secondary school career and prepare them to enter adulthood. Capstones usually begin with a purpose-testing series of apprenticeships, then progress to student-led research, social entrepreneurship, or policy work. With mentorship and resources, youth are capable of great things. We expect no less.
