Green School Tulum – Sustainable Learning For The Future

In the Fall of 2021, an exciting new development is not only bringing new housing to Tulum but also the first sustainable school in Mexico. The Green School Tulum is an outstanding future-focused education institute that will be bringing together nature, culture, comfort and of course, sustainability.

This impressive new school will be located beside the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum, in the heart of the lush jungle, as part of the Selvazamá holistic residential project. Not only will the children enrolled here be able to immerse themselves in the rich cultural heritage of this area, but they will also be just minutes away from the soft sands of beautiful Caribbean beaches.

How did it start?

After being inexplicably touched by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, John and Cynthia Hardy were inspired to found The Green School. They felt compelled to create something that would change the way we moulded our youth, making today’s children into trustworthy future leaders. By September 2008, they had opened the doors to their first school in Bali. Since then, The Green School has accepted over 400 students from all over the world and has opened up two more schools in New Zealand and South Africa.

With their roaring success, John and Cynthia wanted to bring this progressive and sustainable way of learning to Mexico and found the perfect home for their school in the jungles of Tulum.

A new way to educate

The Green School Tulum was “designed to communicate with children”. The idea of this forward-thinking way of learning is to cater to the way children actually learn and develop, instead of how we think they should learn. There are no standardised tests or marked assignments at The Green School. Instead, the teachers (who are usually specialists in their field), provide thorough and in-depth reports based on each child’s experience, in a hope to pinpoint why a child is struggling in a certain subject, not simply show that they are.

The founders of this unique learning establishment aim to create a school “without walls or boundaries… to show children that nothing is impossible”. Cynthia and John have expressed that “Green School isn’t just a school, it’s a global movement to raise changemakers – because our world needs us now.”. To carry out this goal, they actively nurture what they call skills of the future, such as creativity, lateral thinking, rather than just focusing on pure academics and written work.

This progressive new way of learning, teaching your children necessary life skills and not just knowledge, has proven extremely popular and effective within the expat communities in Bali and New Zealand. At The Green School Tulum, they intend to take this education even further, adding both active Spanish and Mayan lessons to their curriculum, along with their Maths, Science, Humanities, English, entrepreneurial studies, environmental studies, arts, health and wellbeing classes.

Built around sustainability

Apart from future-forward learning, the founders of The Green School wish to highlight the importance of today’s environmental battles and sustainable living. Because of this, they build all of their schools out of low-impact materials such as bamboo and locally sourced woods. They also use local permaculture principles in both their operation and design, helping the school blend seamlessly with its surrounding landscape. The main idea is to to create a haven of sustainability within the community, this is why they chose the holistic residential project Selvazamá for the home of their school. Their off-the-grid approach to power, using solar panels and natural water, will be carried out through the residential properties, allowing the community to sell excess power back to the local power companies. At The Agency RM, we have a wide range of developments, homes for sale and condos for sale in the areas surrounding The Green School Tulum. So if you’re looking to enrol your child into this innovative education establishment, don't hesitate to get in touch.