Multiworld India

The Multiworld Network is an association of people from Asia, Africa and South America, who share a common objective to "restore the diversity of learning that existed from times immemorial." The Multiworld web site is very nice to look at and contains some excellent resources, especially for rural education.


In particular, the site hosts The Natural Farming Institute, a virtual center for the promotion of farming, based on natural principles in Asia and Africa.

They have uploaded a full curriculum that uses farming as a basis for education. When we started Lhomon Education, Rinpoche's very first request was that each school cultivate a vegetable garden, for their health and for their education. So I am very interested in what NFI is proposing, which is "to look closely into every aspect of natural farming, particularly knowledge of the soils and plants," as a means to education. They will maintain an on-line library of materials for organic farmers, directories of websites, and training courses for farmers presently using chemicals who wish to convert to organic methods.

Here is an excerpt explaining the curriculum available for download on their site:

An educational programme for the children of farming communities in India-FEB 2012:
A major focus of the Institute is the children of organic farmers whose future on the land is generally sabotaged by the existing educational system which has been designed exclusively for persons from non-rural, non-agricultural backgrounds.
"Our Land our Life" is the curriculum framework for an educational programme for children with specific emphasis on farming and farm related activities. It’s design provides a hands on approach to learning both academic and farm related topics.

The document was prepared by the Organic Farming Association of India, Taleemnet and the Natural Farming Institute with other collaborators to serve the needs of the rural and the farming communities of India. Although the emphasis is on the above, others too, specially home schooling children and alternative schools will find the document useful. 

The programme is the outcome of a yearlong research based on inputs from pioneer educators, organic farmers and academicians from across the country.

With so many wonderful initiatives and resources available, we must think creatively about ways to link and share information. We are planning to use the new Lhomon Education Web site as a resource hub, and to that end we are imagining tools and design strategies for making information easy to access and easy to share. Ideas are welcome!

A Bounty

Another magical tale from Bhutan.

One day I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a library of literature for teachers to learn about sustainable development and mindfulness? I went online and made a wish list of books. Within about one week, sponsors from around the world had donated all the books on my list. The mailing address we used was my very kind Bhutanese friend's apartment in Queens, New York. But it all happened so fast, I didn't really have a plan how to get them to Paro.

Another week passed and I was at the Dzong in Thimphu, meeting the Secretary General of the GNH Commission, Dasho Karma Tshiteem, who had just returned from the big UN Conference on GNH in New York. I shared information about the Lhomon Education Curriculum Development Workshop, and he discussed poverty alleviation. It was thrilling to be in the Dzong, by the way. There's nothing trashy about Trashichodzong, with its men marching and the gloved soldiers in glass boxes. I was in my best suit but was told to take off my scarf before entering the hallowed fortress. 

Just as I was leaving, Dasho remarked, "I think we have your books." He made a quick call and then told me that I would find the box at Am Yangchen's house, of all places. Am Yangchen! She's an old friend who I met when she played a small part in Travellers and Magicians (the village woman who detains Tshewang Dendup, forcing him to have tea with her as he tries in vain to catch the bus). I owed her a visit anyway so I walked to her house and we had a lovely catch up.

And there they were, my books. Almost 30 of them, neatly packed in a box and delivered, just 2 weeks after they entered my consciousness as a possibility.

Bhutanese resourcefulness at its best!

Many thanks to all who made this bounty possible, all the book donors, and all the couriers - I cannot imagine how they got from my friend's place Queens to JFK, through customs, off the plane, from Paro to Thimphu, then into my friend's house. And also thanks to all the writers. We are still interested in building our library so if you have any suggestions, please let me know. Our library now includes these books and more:

Affluenza – De Graaf

Big Ideas – The Center for Ecoliteracy

The Botany Of Desire – Michael Pollan

Buddhism Textbook by Dominique Side

Building Emotional Intelligence in Children - Linda Lantieri

Charlotte's Web – E.B. White

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – Jared Diamond

Cooking For Geeks - Potter

Ecological Literacy – Stone and Barlow

Educating for Wisdom and Compassion - John P Miller

Education and The Significance of Life - Krishnamurti

Food Inc - 2 Copies

Food Rules - Michael Pollan

The Great Disruption – Paul Gilding

A Guide To Green Housekeeping - Strutt

Hungry Planet - What The World Eats - Menzel

The Holistic Curriculum - John P. Miller

Kalakshetra Reflections

Literature Based Maths Grades 4-5

Look to the Mountain – Gregory Cauete

Mind Up Curriculum - Pre K-2, Grade 3-5, Grade 6-8 - The Hawn Foundation

Mindful Movements – Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A guide - Shoeberlein

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel

No Impact Man – DVD

Omnivore's Dilemma – Young Adult Edition – Michael Pollon

A Pebble in your Pocket – Thich Nhat Hanh

Present Moment Wonderful Moment – Thich Nhat Hanh

A Proposal for GNH Value Education in Schools – Karma Ura

Quality Education in Bhutan – Jagar Dorji

Seeds Of Deception

Seeds Of Deception - 3 DVD set

Teaching English as a Foreign Language For Dummies

Think on These Things – Krishnamurti

What Einstein Told His Cook - Wolke

What's The Economy For Anyway? – De Graaf

Where There Is No Doctor - 3 Copies

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies - Daniel Siegel

Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens - Diana Winston

How to Get an Intern in Bhutan

Anwen at the market with her big lemon

It is possible to impose a western way of doing things in Bhutan, making people stick to schedules, getting "straight" answers, doing things "logically". But I find when I relax a bit and let the Bhutanese way take over, sometimes a little magic happens. There is an undercurrent of unspoken, indefinable activity that flows through the culture. Sometimes I worry it might dry up if too much external influence is exerted.

Two Sundays ago, I went to the Sunday vegetable market in Paro to stock up on the basics (mostly inorganic produce imported from India, sadly) and meet up with my good friends Yann and Sally. We've made a little habit of meeting at the market then fixing lunch at my house and hanging out on the verandah every Sunday afternoon. This fulfills a major aspect of GNH – being social with friends, enjoying the outdoors, taking time to cook healthy meals.

I promise this story is getting somewhere...

Yann and Sally have a bright eyed daughter named Anwen who, being closer to the ground and also more attentive than us adults, found a pen drive amongst the chilies at the market. She showed it to Yann who showed it to me and back at my place we plugged it in to see if we could track down the owner. Judging from the files, I quickly knew that it had to be someone involved in integrated curriculum development and soon found a name: Mr. Karchung. So I called my friend who is a lecturer at Paro College of Education and asked him if he knows someone named Mr. Karchung. Of course he did. This is a small country. Mr. Karchung called me and I invited him over for tea. Turns out he lives just down the road.

Also turns out he is developing curricula for remote schools who require alternatives because of their highly differentiated needs. It's common for small remote schools to have only one teacher for a school of 40 students at all different levels. So we talked about Mrs. Das's active learning strategies and differentiated instruction and after handing over his pen drive, I invited him to the July workshop. I think he'll be a perfect addition to our group.

So because of the memory chip lying in the chilis and the sharp eyes of Anwen and all the little causes and conditions, we had this fortunate meeting.

But it gets better. The next day Mr. Karchung called again. He said that his daughter Sherub Chokyi, who just graduated from Samtse College, would like to meet with me. I'd mentioned that I'd been seeking a Bhutanese counterpart and Mr. Karchung said she was interested in possibly helping us out. So today they both came back over and we had a good meeting. I found Sherub Chokyi to be smart and eager and genuinely interested in the subject at hand. So I loaded her up with movies (Schooling the World and Dhamma Brothers), books (the MindUP manual) and some sticky notes and asked her to start familiarizing herself. She'll start on April 20. I finally have my intern! I hope to learn much from her. Thanks Anwen!

Introducing Sally Booth, PhD

We are very pleased to have Dr. Sally Booth joining us for the Curriculum Design Workshop in July. Sally attended the Educating for GNH conference in Thimphu in December of 2009 and we invited her to a roundtable discussion in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art's education wing last summer. It was a pivotal meeting for us and Sally was instrumental in helping us change our course to become more teacher-centric in our curriculum design. Since then she has been guiding us through important decisions and developments so it is wonderful that she is volunteering her time to come all the way to Bhutan for the two week workshop. Sally is also joining our advisory committee. 

Sally is currently working as the Director of Curriculum, Research, and Professional Development at Think Global School, a one-of-a-kind high school devoted to learning through international travel and cross-cultural perspectives.  She is working with Think Global School to create and implement a travel-based curriculum as a unique foundation for student learning and experience as preparation for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme.  It's a fascinating idea and we look forward to sharing concepts with our participants. For more information about Sally's history as an educator, please visit our new web site.

New Web Sites Launched

Lhomon Society and Lhomon Education finally have fully functioning web sites. The LME site will eventually become a storehouse of education materials including all the curricular units generated at the July Curriculum Development Workshop, videos, web links, articles, lesson plans, and much more. We welcome your feedback. Please visit the sites at the links below.

Lhomon Society

Lhomon Education

David Brooks of The New York Times writes about The New American Acadamy in his column today. The founder of this unique school in Brooklyn, Shimon Waronker, says, "The American education model was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers." Waronaker wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today. Bring on the Project Based Learning! Some days it really feels like there is a groundswell of progressive education alternatives and I feel optimistic.

Read more here

Introducing Pawan Gupta

One wonderful outcome of my attending the Samvaad conference last month is that I had an opportunity to invite Pawan Gutpa of the Society for Integrated Development of the Himalayas (SIDH) to join us in Paro for the Curriculum Development Workshop to lead the teachers in developing relevant history lessons with a focus on cultural awareness and pride of place. I am very happy to report that he accepted our invitation. Pawan-ji has written and lectured extensively on the subject of education and his name was brought to my attention around the time of the 2010 Educating for GNH conference here in Bhutan. It was through his words that I first came to know him two years ago. Our paths have crossed several times since at various conferences and I have always found his views very much in harmony with what we are trying to accomplish with the LME curricula.


He's already generously sent forty copies of his excellent book Understanding History: A Guidebook for Teachers for us to distribute and use during the workshop in July. This handbook for teachers helps connect history to our own lives by illustrating in simple terms how change is a part of nature and how through a process of change we have come from the past to the present state. Pawan has published many other books which are available here.


Here is one quote from Pawan-ji:

In many ways, contemporary education has trapped us all in a set of assumptions, which has led to frustration and unhappiness. In the world-view that is now dominant, there are only narrow definitions for 'development,' 'progress,' 'education, 'science' and 'modern'...We feel it is important to challenge these assumptions and definitions. Notions about who is 'civilised', who is 'backward' or what is 'scientific' need to be viewed afresh. It is only then that we can have a drishti, a true perspective, of our society and its knowledge systems.


Our education system is a legacy of the colonial rule, and its overall framework has remained the same even 60 years after independence. This system impels the students to unthinkingly and unquestioningly accept the dominant world-view. It makes the youth dependent on the "other" for information, ideas, knowledge, understanding and decisions…NGOs have a critical role to play in challenging dominant mindsets. There are many people, thinkers and activists who are trying to bring about fundamental changes in the education system.

As we begin to structure the workshop, it's clear that Pawan will have an important role to play. Each of the pilot groups will be developing integrated units using the LME themes as a backbone then creatively filling out the lessons using their existing curricula and local environments as reference, and our resource materials and people for support. In the end they will have in hand a unique, highly-personalized curriculum that promotes true GNH thinking. Pawan can meet with each group independently and assess where history and traditional wisdom can be reflected and highlighted throughout.

We see it as a great alliance to be partnering with Pawan and SIDH. Our team of good people is expanding and for that we rejoice. Help sponsor the workshop with a tax-deductible contribution through The Bhutan Foundation or by participating in our book drive on Amazon.

The Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH) is based in Kempty, outside of Mussoorie in the Central Himalayas. SIDH is committed to providing meaningful, relevant, and holistic education to local children and youth. SIDH’s primary mission is to use education as a tool for social change and to encourage a more meaningful exploration and dialogue, not only in the social and political spheres but also within individual mindsets. Currently SIDH operates 11 schools from the pre-primary level through high school and serves nearly 500 children in 40 villages of the Aglar Valley in Jaunpur. SIDH has expanded to include youth courses, teacher training, educational research, advocacy, and publication units, thus reaching out to all those concerned with quality in education.

Our Story & How You Can Support Us

Our Partner, The Bhutan Foundation, is now accepting contributions on behalf of Lho Mon Society and its two projects, Lho Mon Education and the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative. If you would like to support the LME Curriculum Design Workshop (July 1-14, 2012), please follow this link, and be sure to specify in the notes that it is for LME. The Bhutan Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization registered in the US, therefore all US contributions will be fully tax-deductible. 

We still need to raise another $10K in order to host the event, which will be serving all 6 of our partner organizations.

So, how did we get here? In December 2009, the Honourable Prime Minister of Bhutan, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, launched an initiative to bring the principles, values, and practices of Gross National Happiness into the country’s educational system. Educational experts from 16 countries held a week-long workshop with top Bhutanese educators to discuss how principles of holistic, sustainability, and contemplative education as well as indigenous knowledge and ancient wisdom traditions could be integrated into regular curricula.

Shortly thereafter, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche offered his monastery, Chokyi Gyatso Institute, as an experimental “laboratory” for developing GNH-based educational curricula as part of his newly-formed Samdrup Jonkghar Initiative (SJI). While supporting innovation in education reform, Rinpoche also wanted to help his monastery keep in step with a fast changing society. CGI is poised to become the first monastery in Bhutan to introduce a full secular curriculum in math, language, science and other key subjects, that will be taught in tandem with its existing curriculum of classical philosophy and ritual.

Designing this curriculum has taken more than a year and in the process Lho Mon Education branched off of SJI's activities so that it could address education needs outside of the Samdrup Jongkhar region. The curriculum design will get its final push in July at our CDW workshop in Paro. We decided to share the wealth of our resource people and invite other organizations to participate in this process. Now, based on LME's initial framework, five respected Bhudantese educational institutions have joined in setting up their own pilot projects. We hope that the new GNH-based curriculum being implemented at CGI and the other five environments will be relevant and useful to schools throughout Bhutan.

Through the Lho Mon Education Initiative, new strides are being taken in transcending conventional secular-sacred boundaries, integrating spiritual values into daily life, and demonstrating the relevance of Bhutan’s ancient wisdom traditions to the modern world. In these ways, the new curricula developed through Lho Mon Education have important implications for education throughout Bhutan, and can make a significant contribution in integrating secular and spiritual endeavours.

While Lho Mon remains a grassroots civil society initiative, it now has the support of Bhutan’s Prime Minister, the Secretary of the GNH Commission, the Minister and Secretary of Agriculture, the Samdrup Jongkhar governor, the Samdrup Jongkhar District Education and Agriculture Officers and Agriculture Extension Officers, the Ministry of Education, and local village leaders. 

The visionary behind LME is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a Bhutanese meditation master from a great line of masters and yogis, a teacher of Buddhist philosophy, and one of the most progressive lamas teaching today. He has taught at institutions around the world including Yale University and Oxford University and oversees numerous religious and secular nonprofit organizations. 

Our Wish List

Lho Mon Education is compiling a wish list of books, films, and classroom supplies on Amazon that will be used during out July Curriculum Development Workshop. Anyone who likes to make wishes come true can scan the list and make a contribution towards the purchase of any item. We are also very open to suggestions of materials that have not made it on the list. For example, we are looking for books on practical green living. For the BAoWE pilot, we will be training domestic helpers on green cleaning (in addition to addressing issues of dignity of labor, urban rural migration, mindfulness, self respect, human rights, etc). Since domestic helpers are the ones who do most of the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and childcare, their sensitivity to environmental issues will impact the entire household. So what's the best resource book we can provide for them? We'll add it to our wish list and hope that one of our generous friends sponsors it.