This is a jointly sponsored project with ProjectHappiness.com. Begun in 2007, the students participated in the development of a curriculum based on the Dalai Lama’s book, Ethics for the New Millennium. In the project, students from Mount Madonna School, the Creative Minds Academy in Nigeria and the Tibetan's Children Village in India engaged in a year-long inquiry into the nature of lasting happiness. The project took the Mount Madonna students to India to interview the Dalai Lama and resulted in a feature length movie, which goes into release in 2009.

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Journey to Africa
 
Eighteen students and five staff members from the “Values in World Thought” program will depart for South Africa on April 4th. The initial exciting cause of our learning journey is that we have been granted the opportunity to meet and speak with one of the great value carriers of our time, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His life dedicated to easing the suffering in the world and his contribution to the emotional healing in post apartheid South Africa have few parallels in history.
 
Also, at the heart of our intention is to connect with and learn from a people and environment in a part of the world very distant from our community. In the spirit of Ubuntu we hope to discover more about ourselves through understanding our relationship to people of our world community whose ideas, philosophy and experience may be quite different from our own. We want to discover how we may be the same and find out how our differences might open us to new possibilities and ways of thinking about our lives.(More...)

The Values interview trip to Washington DC in May of 2008 was on of the most exciting in the history of our program which goes back to 1989. For those who have interest we hope you will take time to visit the blog. Here the students told the story as it unfolded and it give some idea of the excitement and discovery that were a daily part of the experience. We take this unusual journey to the nations capital every other year. By good fortune, hard work and many friends.
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Emmanuel Ande Ivorgba - an extraordinary teacher
 
We discovered the wonderful Emmanuel Ivorgba on the Project Happiness trip to India in 2007. All we really knew of Emmanuel during the months of preparation for our journey was that he was a spirited and gifted teacher in a school in Jos, Nigeria and he was bringing two students to join our trip to India to interview the Dalai Lama. He was an important yet very distant part of our year-long project of creating a student curriculum for the Dalai Lama’s book, “Ethics for the new Millennium.”
 
When we finally met Emmanuel in Delhi in March of 2007 we discovered to our delight... (More...)

July 20th-22nd, 2008
 
For the past four years Mount Madonna School has hosting a gathering of educators who come together for two days in conversation about how to foster learning environments that will support the human spirit and generate the thinking and capacities needed for today’s challenges. This year Peter Block joined our founding team of Angeles Arrien and Vivian Wright to explore the theme of “Remembering and Understanding What we Already Know & Naming the Gifts that we May Have Forgotten.” In the dialogue with 65 participants from across the spectrum of education we examined the question of how to move from teacher as “expert” to teacher as “facilitator and learner” in the educational experience. In addition to the skillful facilitation by Angeles, Peter and Vivian there were two presentations.(More...)

• Mount Madonna School
• Project Happiness
• Creative Minds Academy
• Philani Child Health & Nutrition Project
• MylifE

• Angeles Arrien
• Peter Block
• Fritjof Capra
• Sobonfu Some
• Margaret Wheatley

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Congressman John Lewis

Layli Miller-Muro
Founder of the Tahirih Justice Center

by Emmanuel Ande Ivorgba

The word "Ubuntu" is an ethic or African humanist philosophy that focuses on people's allegiances and relations with one another. With its origins in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa, this traditional African concept is defined in its simplest form as the "art of being human". The word "Ubuntu" itself is Zulu and inspires us to embrace and learn from other people, even as we learn from ourselves. Ubuntu is the humanistic experience of treating all people, irrespective of who they are, or where they come from, as human beings living together in one lager community of beings. Ubuntu is an African view of life and world view.(More...)