Children at the School for Life / Chiang Mai

School for Life

The School for Life provides shelter and education primarily to children who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS or the tsunami of 26 December 2004, and also to children of the poor. The School for Life concept is a unique teaching method, a standard of excellence. It is about empowering children to become successful socio- and eco-entrepreneurs in the future.   

Two pilot schools are now in operation in Thailand. The School for Life / Chiang Mai is 45 minutes from this city in the North. The Beluga School for Life is in the country’s South in Na Nai. About 120 children have found their way into each of these pilot projects and the number will grow to 250 children at each School for Life. The project safeguards their existence, recognizes their right for happiness, provides psychosocial care, provides medical care if necessary, offers them a new home, and aims to provide them with a first-class education.

Learning as a discovery

Teaching focuses on learning through solving real life problems in a practical way; it is different from the formal and theoretical teaching found in state schools. Teaching is not confined to class rooms. Teaching is bundled according to real life situations in centers of excellence grouped around different topics important to life. These centers of excellence are: Ecological Agriculture, Culturally-sensitive Tourism, Health and Nutrition, Body and Spirit, Culture and Development, and International Communication.

In the schools, the children are taught, supervised and supported psychologically by a team of about 40 teachers and adults trained to deal with victims of post-traumatic stress. The supervisors and students all live together in the School for Life villages, in family-like settings. This helps to educate the orphans in a safe and playful way.

This holistic approach to education and life enables the children to successfully acquire skills needed to become young entrepreneurs with social and environmental responsibility. In particular, the children develop their own business ideas in key markets important in their geographical location. They are not treated as victims but empowered as creators of a sustainable society through an education inspired by life-situations and the environment of their community.

Founders

The School for Life was co-founded by Khun Thaneen "Joy" Worrawittayakun and Prof. Dr. Juergen Zimmer in 2003. Prof. Zimmer of the Free University of Berlin created the pedagogical philosophy with a unique teaching method that is helping children to become successful entrepreneurs in the future. They founded the first School for Life in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The second school is located in Na Nai in the South of Thailand. Its founders is Niels Stolberg, CEO of the Bremen-based Beluga Shipping GmbH. He founded the Beluga School for Life in 2005.