La Ceiba Escuela Activa is a social-educational project that stands for the child's freedom while respecting his/her natural development. Our project aims to integrate every social class and origin within Comunidad San Felipe, located in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México.
We offer this place to create conciousness and mindfulness of the environment, care for others and for oneself with respect and love.
Through this emerging school we visualize a long term project in which we are helping to open a path for a wide new generation full of awareness, values and respect. Our mid-term goal is to accompaign these children during their childhood and youth, to provide them with inner mindfulness so that they can keep on their path and revert benefit to their original communities.
CONTEXT AND RATIONALE FOR THE PROJECT
We people have gotten used to an education that understands human being as an empty container that must be filled with knowledge, beliefs and even fears and expectations about what life has to be. Instead of that, in La Ceiba, we prefer to treat people in a way similar way to seeds, who know how to rise, strengthen and become plants. They know how to find sun and take nutrients from the air and the earth. We believe that the new education’s role is to help finding light, water and nutrients for that plant. We trust in children’s ability to understand our world. We trust their wisdom to know what they need for their development, together with an adult that guides from his/her knowledge and teaches them to question what’s being taught. In short, we believe in a conscious and comprehensive education, which can only be achieved through love, respect and freedom.
The global crisis we are facing nowadays is a mirror of the inner crisis that we human beings are going through in this moment of history: crisis of identity, crisis of society, crisis of environment... These crossroads in life blow out in childhood and adolescence, but we still do not know how to channel it. In spite of this, our society is more and more aware of the importance of childhood and adolescence for our future. However, none of this is addressed in the world's agenda. It is our responsibility as adults to accept the challenge of being questioned about our attitudes and favor environments that respect children’s dignity as human beings and their particularities as children and adolescents. Thus, we have created a learning place where children learn how to communicate with each other, to solve conflicts, to make democratic decisions, in summary, to participate. Only in this way can young people have an impact on their reality and contribute to the social change in their daily-adjacent world.
Our goal is to settle a place in which, through a playful-reflexive methodology, we allow for the development and consolidation of more pacific, supportive and democratic societies.
We trust the source of creativity, initiative, dynamism and social renovation that come together with children and adolescence but if they feel that the education they are receiving is distant and and lacking sense, the school becomes a meeting point with friends where they complain mainly about adults, who don't listen to them. That's why it is so necessary to enact a 'radical and creative reform'. In the words of Gerison Lansdown, to shift from a school for children and adolescents to a school for children and adolescents where they have a voice and participate. A school that practices the pedagogy of presence.
ABOUT US
We are five co-founders in the project, teachers covering maternal, preschool and primary school. We are pedagogues in comprehensive education, child psychology, communication,... we all come from very different origins (economic, cultural and family contexts); eclectic roots and histories (three Mexicans, one French and one Spanish). Much as we are responsible for the daily running of the school, our energy comes from a wide range of actors and actresses; the marvelous children and their families that give us their confidence and support, the community of San Felipe Ecatepec where the school is located supports us too. And also friends, acquaintances and unknown people that give us their help, support, advice and knowledge.
