Why we’re here
“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”
— Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Founding Idea
Nearly every school in the world — public or private, progressive or traditional — is organized around the same premise: that education exists to maximize the opportunities of an individual child. The curriculum, the activities, the metrics of success — all are oriented toward launching a particular person into the world.
The Field School of Hvar was founded on a different premise.
We believe that a child who understands herself only as an individual, optimizing her own potential, is missing the most important truth about what it means to be alive: that she exists in relationships. Her identity takes shape through the people who love and challenge her, the landscape that feeds and shelters her, and the long inheritance of cultures that gave her language, craft, and meaning. None of these can be replicated in an artificial environment. They can only be encountered in the real world, through real work, in a real community.
This is why we are here — not to build a better classroom, but to build a better village.
Values
Stewardship
A meaningful life is grounded in reciprocity. We belong in the ebb and flow, the give and take, between self and community, nature and man. Landscapes that nourish us, we serve in turn. Stewardship is environmentalism — it is also humanist. We gain strength from civilization, and renew our culture by practicing artisanship and celebrating our heritage.
Enlightenment
The human intellect is our eye to existence. Without it, we move through the world but do not truly see it — cannot read its history, reckon with its complexity, or participate fully in its unfolding. At Field, we take seriously our duty to develop children intellectually. We teach real mathematics, real literacy, real science. Not because these skills are professionally useful — although they are — but because a mind that has been trained is capable of a richer, more wakeful life.
Dignity
Living beings - human and otherwise - are not instruments. They exist for their own reasons, and their value is not raised or reduced by their value to us. As an educational institution, our first priority is to support children’s development into discerning, ethical young people. As a community, we approach each other and all living thing with an attitude of compassion and respect.
Living Our Values
Children are capable of real contribution — not someday, but now. At Field, every subject is taught in the context of a project that serves our community, making the purpose of learning concrete and immediate. When we compete for excellence, we do not keep score with grades or trophies. We ask instead: what did you make? Who did you help? What do you understand now that you didn't before? The answers unfold not in classrooms or sports halls, but on the farm, at sea, in conversation with neighbors and friends.
What is honored in a country is cultivated there.
— Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
Serving Families
The Field School is a portal to family life as it should be. Our community nourishes parents, so that they can be the bedrock of love and truth for their children. Our school is a caring place, echoing home values, while challenging children to develop lasting skills and a stable sense of belonging.
Serving Island Hvar
The School aims to invigorate regenerative industries on the island. Our students learn to read and serve the environment through heritage-rich trades and contemporary sciences. As an institution and as a group, we work to meaningfully advance sustainable food, energy, and culture on Hvar.
Education for Today’s World
The point of education is not to prepare a child to leave, but to teach her to belong.
When generic knowledge and transferable skill become cheap and abundant, what remains scarce is the idiosyncrasy of embodiment: a person who knows where she comes from, what she owes, and what she is capable of contributing to a specific place and people.
For two centuries, the great project of education has been standardization: bringing all people up to a common level, freeing them from the accidents of birth and geography. It is a noble ideal. But the future lies elsewhere: in an education that makes humans as specific and irreplaceable as the communities from which they arise.
Field is building a pedagogical framework that empowers a village in Nepal, a housing project in Bucharest, or a suburb of Atlanta to draw on its own specific heritage, resources, and challenges to challenge and inspire its children — to draw strength from the specific patch of soil in which each of us has been planted.
Mission
Living Our Misssion
The Field School of Hvar was founded to build a regenerative ecosystem on the island of Hvar — a new, or perhaps very old, kind of community that continually enriches the landscape and culture on which it relies. We hold ourselves accountable to verifiable outcomes: carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and waste reduction. We also sit with less tangible impacts. Are we driving gentrification? Do our programs serve all island residents? Who gets to define "the good life" we are celebrating here?
To move from principle to practice, we have identified four projects where we can make trackable progress towards our commitments. By practicing Regenerative Agriculture, we are gradually rebuilding the ecosystem for organic local food production. In our Zero Kilometer Schoolwear project, we are reducing our waste as a community and mainstreaming re-use through artisanal skills. In our Wooden Boatmaking project, we are reviving an alternative to carbon-intensive nautical tourism. And through our Field Store, we are ensuring that Hvar's culinary and ethnobotanical traditions remain vibrant.
Our Approach to Education
The magic of childhood - its boundless curiosity and special sweetness - are what The Field School nurtures and celebrates. Caring educators, natural beauty, and rich Mediterranean culture are the foundation of our offering and approach.
Educational programs at The Field School of Hvar present math, language, science, history, and other academic disciplines as critical tools for appreciating joyful and exciting real world experiences.
Our goal is to inspire wonder, which is the beginning of an intellectual life, by activating the multiple benefits that children draw from time spent in nature, collaborative play, and creative pursuits. There are no worksheets, no textbooks, and no screens.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
— “Nostos” by Louise Glück