The River School is a community of learning including students from Pre-Kindy to Year 6, teachers, administrators and parents.  It is located four kilometres from Maleny on beautiful acreage of rainforest and creek.

The River School is part of a global Neohumanist Education movement which teaches love and respect for all humanity as well as all living and non-living beings. Through meditation and yoga children learn to experience peace and connectedness; through play-based and excellent academic education they learn how to use their gifts to make a difference; and through the arts they learn how to express their creativity with joy.

The school models sustainability by reducing, reusing and recycling in all areas of school life: from the vegetarian tuck shop, organic gardening, composting and mulching, rainwater collection and solar panels, to personal and social sustainability through enhancing inner peace, teaching moral values and training in relationship-building, leadership and service-oriented programmes.

The River School strives to build a strong cooperative community within and around the school and is part of a network of Neohumanist schools throughout the world.

What is Neohumanism?

Helping children to realise their spiritual potential is an integral part of the mission of a Neohumanist school. Children are encouraged to develop their ‘internal life’ and to recognise their ‘interconnectedness of being’ with the natural world and planet Earth.

A Neohumanist education seeks to cultivate in children their already innate capacity for love and compassion. In the words of Shrii Prabat Ranjan Sarkar who first propounded the philosophy and who founded a global network of Neohumanist schools:

When the love of the human heart extends its embrace to the entire living and non-living worlds, this is Neohumanism.

The goal of a Neohumanist education is to expand gradually a student’s sense of community: from self, to family, locality, country, humanity, life on earth and ultimately the entire universe. A Neohumanist education is also an ‘education for the whole child’, that is, for the physical, mental and spiritual child. It is about doing (activity in the world), knowing (learning) and being (entering one’s inner world). A successful education leads to a deep desire for further learning which then continues throughout life.

The River School strives to build a strong cooperative community within and around the school and is part of a network of Neohumanist schools throughout the world.