Just this week, the world woke to yet another report of violence. On Saturday, a mass shooting occurred at Brown University. Two students were killed. Nine others were injured. As if one were not enough, news followed of a shooting during Hanukkah celebrations in Australia. Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were murdered too. 

The proximity of violence in our lives, and the pervasiveness of pathology has become a grim constant, a reminder of how unmoored we are as a culture and how deeply that drift is felt by our children. They absorb it through lockdown drills and active-shooter training, through the low-grade anxiety that hums beneath their days, through the sense that the adults entrusted with their future cannot agree on even the most basic ethical ground.

We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves. And our children know it.

In response, we reach for solutions that feel tangible: banning cell phones, installing more security guards, tightening rules. These measures promise control, but they do little to address the deeper questions children are asking, often silently, about meaning, belonging, and care in a world that feels increasingly unstable.

That gap between what we offer children and what they need led me to ask a different question. Not how to harden schools against danger, but how to help children become grounded enough to meet the world with empathy rather than fear. What might it look like to organize education not around compliance, but around compassion as a daily practice?

That question led me to the Middle Way School, a small independent preschool through sixth-grade of about 90 students in Saugerties, N.Y., surrounded by woods and streams. I went to see whether a school could place compassion not at the margins of education, but at its center, as a lived-daily practice.

What I found was a school operating against the dominant logic of modern schooling. There was little emphasis on compliance, acceleration, or comparison. Instead, Middle Way prioritizes children’s wellness, inquiry, and intellectual growth through sustained engagement with the natural world. It trusts teachers and children alike. By trust, I mean the essential condition of all human learning, the foundation upon which relationships, risk-taking, and growth depend.

In conversations with teacher-leaders, I heard words rarely foregrounded in educational discourse: awe, curiosity, mindfulness, emotional awareness, interdependence, gratitude, courage, identity, and community. I did not hear talk of test scores or rankings. I heard educators speaking about children becoming at home in the world.

Founded less than a decade ago, Middle Way was among the first Buddhist schools for children in the United States, though it is not tethered to a single lineage. Instead, its approach draws on multiple wisdom traditions, emphasizing non-harm, interdependence, and the cultivation of compassion alongside rigorous intellectual development. The school is chartered by the New York State Board of Regents, recognized as a nonpublic school by New York City’s Department of Education, and is a member of the National Association of Independent Schools. Annual tuition is about $16,000 for kindergarten through sixth grade and roughly $14,500 for preschool. The school offers tuition assistance to broaden access so that financial circumstance does not determine who belongs.

Middle Way is intentional about helping children develop a sense of place, and with it an ethical responsibility toward what they are connected to. Awe sits at the center of the curriculum. Care and kindness, grounded in Buddhist values, are taught deliberately, shaping a culture of reciprocity rather than competition. No new packaged curriculum is required. The instructional logic is simple and profound: curiosity feeds imagination; imagination deepens inquiry; inquiry cultivates appreciation; appreciation gives rise to care.

Learning here is integrated, not siloed. Children interview trees. They forage across seasons. They grow mushrooms and cook acorn pancakes in the fall. From these experiences emerge literacy, numeracy, science, and storytelling, not as separate subjects, but as expressions of a living relationship with the visible and invisible world.

This is not the linear, compartmentalized schooling many of us experienced. It is relational, ecological, and whole.

How is this done? Through routines, rituals, and ceremonies. Through honoring beginnings and endings. Through adults who grow alongside children. And above all, through time. Time to wonder, to explore, to collaborate, to play, and to reflect.

Yes, children still learn essential skills of orality, numeracy, and literacy. But the deeper work is the formation of dispositions: attentiveness, empathy, responsibility, courage, and care. These are not “soft skills.” They are the capacities that allow human beings to live together without harming one another or themselves.

Schools like Middle Way have much to teach the broader education system. Chief among those lessons is the need to reconsider our priorities, especially how we allocate time and to what end. If more time were devoted to learning through awe, curiosity, joy, experimentation, and collaboration, to doing meaningful things together, we might better shape the human beings we hope our children will become.

To school leaders everywhere, I offer this plea: take your foot off the accelerator. We are living in a perilous moment, and it calls for inward attention. Spend less time on dashboards and rankings, and more time cultivating whole human beings, children whose emotional stability determines their openness to learn.

Ask not only how students are scoring, but who they are becoming.

We must also restore our connection to one another, to the natural world, to place, and to ourselves. Schools can and must be sanctuaries, spaces of belonging and care that help buffer children from the harshest currents of the world they are inheriting.

In less than a decade, Middle Way has cultivated an ethic of stewardship for one another, for the land, and for the wider community, under the broad umbrella of compassion. I saw it in the daily rhythms of the school, and in the quiet confidence of children who seemed grounded rather than guarded.

Yes, we can teach and model compassion.

And given the world our children are inheriting, we must.

As Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general, has written: “To truly feel whole, it’s not about acquiring something we don’t have. It’s about remembering who we fundamentally are.”

That remembering may be the most important lesson schools can offer now.

David Penberg is an educator, facilitator, and writer who has worked globally and locally for four decades. He is the former Head of School at the Woodstock Day School and resides in Chichester.