dr. paul’s blog

Please join Dr. Paul in his new Blog called “Founder’s Corner.” In this column, you will find short videos and other resources that support our shared and collective vision as a school and community, uniquely positioned in a rapidly-changing world. Dr. Paul welcomes your questions and comments. 

october 16, 2026

Communication in Nature: How the Wild Earth is in Constant Dialogue with Itself

Are you amazed by the diversity of intelligence in nature? Humans do not have a monopoly on smarts. Maybe you know about mycelia, the fungal networks within soil that negotiate nutrients between trees in exchange for glucose. How do they communicate with trees? Perhaps you've also heard about ants, how the millions of individuals in a leaf cutter colony broadcast their unique jobs to one another, all day, through coded molecular pheromones. A constant roll call of colony duties. If a passing anteater devours 5,000 foragers in a morning meal, the colony will, by afternoon, collectively replace them all via pheromonal communication. When acacia trees are overgrazed by gazelles they release a pheromone to tell other trees, "Make that enzyme to disrupt gazelle digestion!" and within weeks a portion of the grazing population is killed off by the trees through a chemically-induced starvation. Trees regulate the antelope population! Everywhere in the world, nature is communicating intelligently and quietly. We humans have a gift to decipher these stories and more. Cultivating silent receptivity opens the door. Let us step barefoot into the fields and forests with ears and hearts open, receptive, and listening.

october 9, 2026

Manzanita's Forest Kindergarten: From Theory to Practice

How Manzanita School is reimagining the earliest years of education, and why research suggests that children thrive when nature becomes their classroom.

Imagine a kindergarten classroom without walls. Instead of desks, there are oak trees, trails, sandstone boulders, a seasonal creek. Instead of spending mornings completing worksheets, children are building shelters, encountering insects and reptiles, balancing on logs, inventing games, and making discoveries. Welcome to Forest Kindergarten at Manzanita School, where our 21-acre campus in the mountains of Topanga becomes a living classroom.

To some parents, this approach may seem unconventional. After all, shouldn't kindergarten be about preparing children for academic success? Won't children fall behind if they spend so much time outdoors, playing? These are understandable questions. But a growing body of research in child development, psychology, neuroscience, and education suggests something remarkable: the experiences children naturally seek through play may be precisely the experiences they need to become capable, confident, resilient, and successful learners.

Play is how young children learn. What modern research increasingly reveals is just how important self-directed play is to healthy development. Psychologist Peter Gray has argued that freely chosen play helps children develop independence, creativity, problem-solving abilities, and emotional self-control. 

When children invent their own games, negotiate rules, solve disagreements, and pursue their curiosity, they are doing much more than entertaining themselves. They are developing capacities that will serve them throughout their lives. At Manzanita, we don't regard play as a break from learning. Play is one of childhood's most powerful forms of learning. 

Imagine a five-year-old kneeling beside a seasonal stream in Manzanita School's Magical Forest. She's constructing a dam with stones, sticks, and mud. Water keeps escaping. Another kinder friend offers a suggestion. A third child stumbles over with a large rock. They try again, this time working together. There’s a brief argument about where to put the bigger rock. Then an disagreement about who’s project it is, “but this is my dam!” Within a few minutes, they’re back to working together, with animated voices of excitement.  

Nearby, another student is balancing on a tree stump in the community circle, stepping to an adjacent stump, carefully judging his step. A different child has discovered a small frog in the spring grass, and is calling to her friends. At first glance, this might look like a group of children simply enjoying themselves outdoors. But it’s much more than that. The children building the dam are experimenting with gravity, water flow, and the properties of materials. They're estimating quantities, testing hypotheses, negotiating disagreements, and even learning to manage frustration. The child on the log is developing coordination, confidence, and judgment. The child with the frog is experiencing a kind of wonder that can become the foundation of scientific curiosity, as well as a lifelong love for the more-than-human world. These children aren't taking a break from learning. They’re fully engaged in it. These seemingly ordinary moments may be extraordinarily important.

Researchers Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter and Leif Kennair have proposed that adventurous, age-appropriate risky play helps children learn to manage fear. By voluntarily encountering manageable challenges, children practice assessing danger, exercising judgment, and responding constructively to uncertainty. Psychologist Darcia Narvaez's research likewise emphasizes the importance of free play and nurturing developmental environments for children's emotional and social growth.

In an age when anxiety and emotional distress among young people are serious concerns, opportunities to develop confidence and self-regulation deserve particular attention.

At Manzanita, children are encouraged to climb, explore, experiment, and take reasonable risks under the guidance of experienced educators. Our goal is not to eliminate every challenge, but to help children develop the judgment and resilience to meet challenges themselves.

Why take learning into the forest rather than simply providing more playtime indoors? One answer comes from a fascinating field of research known as affordance theory. An affordance is an opportunity for action that an environment offers a person. A fallen branch might become a measuring stick, a building material, or an imaginary sword. A stream invites questions about water, gravity, and the natural world. A hillside invites climbing, balance, and physical experimentation. Unlike a conventional playground, where equipment often suggests specific activities, a natural landscape offers an almost limitless variety of possibilities.

Research on forest kindergartens shows that these environments encourage movement, imaginative play, exploration, and discovery. Australian researchers Coral Campbell and Christopher Speldewinde found that children in bush kindergartens engaged in meaningful science learning through play, with teachers helping extend their understanding. The forest isn't simply a beautiful setting for education. It is an extraordinarily rich environment for learning.

What about academic readiness? For many parents, this is the most important question. The encouraging news is that research does not support the assumption that more desk-based instruction at younger ages necessarily produces better academic outcomes.

A 2019 study led by Tori Cordiano compared children attending nature-based and traditional kinder programs. Researchers found that both groups were equally prepared for future grade-level learning, including in academic and social-emotional skills. Other research provides additional reasons to question the rush toward formal academics. Education researcher Rebecca Marcon found that children who attended child-initiated preschool programs demonstrated more favorable academic outcomes in later elementary school than children from academically directed programs. These studies challenge the belief that children must spend their earliest school years at desks to succeed academically. At Manzanita, we believe that curiosity, persistence, imagination, self-confidence, and a genuine love of learning are essential foundations for future academic success.

There is another reason we believe so deeply in Forest Kindergarten. When children spend their days observing birds, discovering insects, caring for plants, watching seasonal changes, and developing relationships with the landscape, something important can happen: nature becomes more than scenery. It becomes a community to which they belong. Research on children's encounters with small animals suggests that these experiences can cultivate curiosity, empathy, and emerging values of care. Forest Kindergarten is not a retreat from serious education. It is a different understanding of what serious education should look like in early childhood.

We want our students to become strong thinkers, capable learners, confident problem-solvers, caring friends, and responsible members of the living world. And we believe one of the best places for that journey to begin is outdoors—with muddy feet, bright eyes, open hearts, and an entire magical forest waiting to be discovered every day!

october 2, 2026

Why We Should Tell the Story of the Great Turning

We humans have a well-established negativity bias: threatening and disturbing information tends to command attention disproportionately. Modern news and social-media systems can magnify this because attention is economically valuable. The result can be an important distortion: what is most visible can begin to feel like what is most representative. War, political breakdown, ecological destruction, cruelty, and catastrophe, are real and deserve attention, but they are not the entirety of what humanity is doing.

The Great Turning is the emerging shift from a civilization organized around domination, hierarchy, and extraction, toward one grounded in equality, mutual responsibility, and respect for the living Earth. To understand how quickly the Great Turning is happening, we first need to understand what it is turning away from.

About 5,000 years ago, as large agricultural societies and early civilizations developed, a new way of organizing human society emerged. David Korten calls this the Empire model. Riane Eisler describes a similar pattern as the domination system.

For thousands of years, societies were largely organized around hierarchy and domination. Kings and Emperors ruled over their subjects. Men ruled over women. Powerful nations conquered less-resourced and less-military ones. Slavery turned human beings into property. Warfare became an accepted way to gain land, wealth, and power. And nature was increasingly treated as something humans could own, exploit, and control. This way of organizing society became so common that, for most of recorded history, it was simply considered normal.

That is what makes the Great Turning so remarkable. Compared with this 5,000-year history, the movement toward more equal and democratic societies is incredibly young. Many of the changes we now take for granted have happened only within the last 250 years. And the pace of change has been extraordinary. In just a few generations, ideas that had existed for thousands of years have been challenged, overturned, or radically transformed.

We can see this Great Turning in seven enormous changes:

1. The Abolition of Slavery

For thousands of years, slavery was accepted in societies around the world. Human beings could legally be bought, sold, and owned by other human beings. Then, over a surprisingly short period of history, abolition movements, slave rebellions, political campaigns, and international agreements made slavery illegal across most of the world. Something that had existed for millennia went from being considered normal to being internationally condemned.

2. The End of Colonial Empires

For most of history, powerful nations conquered weaker peoples and claimed their land as their own. During the 20th century, the vast European colonial empires rapidly broke apart. Independence movements across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, established a radically different principle: people have the right to govern themselves. Conquest was no longer widely accepted as sufficient justification for ruling another people.

3. The Expansion of Democracy and Voting Rights

For most of recorded history, ordinary people had little or no political power. Even early democracies usually allowed only a small portion of the population to vote. That has changed dramatically. Voting rights expanded beyond wealthy men to working people, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Women’s suffrage is especially striking. In little more than a century, the idea that women should vote went from being considered radical in many societies to becoming a basic expectation of modern democracy. And to go further, 

4. The Transformation of Women’s and Family Rights

For centuries, women in many societies had far fewer legal rights than men. In some legal systems, a married woman’s independent legal identity was severely restricted. That has changed dramatically. Women gained rights to own property, earn and control money, seek divorce, participate in public life, and receive legal protection from domestic and sexual violence. Marriage and family life increasingly came to be understood not as relationships of domination, but as relationships between people with equal human rights.

5. The Rise of Civil, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ Rights

Another enormous change has been the growing recognition that human differences should not determine who has rights. Civil rights movements challenged racial segregation and discrimination. Indigenous peoples around the world have fought for sovereignty, cultural survival, land rights, and self-determination. LGBTQ+ peoples have gained legal recognition and protections that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few generations ago. The deeper change is cultural: societies are increasingly recognizing human diversity rather than demanding that everyone fit into a rigid hierarchy.

6. The Rise of Workers’ Rights and the Social Safety Net

The Industrial Revolution created enormous wealth, but it also produced terrible working conditions. Workers -including children- often worked extremely long hours in dangerous factories for very little pay. Over the last 150 years, labor movements and political reforms created workplace safety laws, restrictions on child labor, shorter working hours, public education, social security, public health systems, and other forms of social protection. The underlying idea was revolutionary: an economy should serve human well-being, not simply the accumulation of wealth.

7. The Emergence of the Rights of Nature

And now the Great Turning may be reaching another boundary. For thousands of years, nature has largely been treated, in law, as human property -a collection of resources that people are entitled to own and use. That idea is beginning to change. In a growing number of places, rivers, forests, ecosystems, and other parts of the natural world are being recognized as having legal rights of their own, of having personhood, and a right to exist, flourish, and regenerate.

So, we are witnessing a shift away from a civilization organized primarily around domination, hierarchy, and extraction toward one increasingly organized around human dignity, equality, participation, mutual responsibility, and respect for the living Earth. And when we place these changes against 5,000 years of recorded history, what is most remarkable is not simply that they are happening. It is how quickly they are happening.

And I want to say that none of this means that history is moving smoothly or inevitably toward a better world. The same centuries that brought abolition, democracy, human rights, and environmental consciousness, has also brought colonial violence, industrialized warfare, genocide, nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, and new concentrations of economic and technological power. It is therefore possible to tell more than one story about the direction of human civilization. The Great Turning does not deny these contradictions nor guarantee where history will lead. It suggests something more modest, but still extraordinary: that alongside our continuing capacity for domination, a historically young and increasingly powerful countercurrent has emerged, one that keeps widening the circle of beings considered worthy of dignity, rights, and moral concern. 

This is why telling the story of the Great Turning matters. The stories we tell about ourselves do more than describe the world; they help shape what we believe is possible within it. If we see history primarily as an endless repetition of domination, violence, and greed, resignation can seem reasonable. But if we recognize that slavery has been delegitimized, empires dismantled, democracy expanded, women and marginalized peoples granted rights once considered unimaginable, and even nature itself increasingly recognized as worthy of personhood and protection, a different story becomes visible. Naming these changes as part of a larger Great Turning reminds us that profound transformations have already happened, and are continuing to happen. Telling the story of the Great Turning is itself part of the Great Turning, because what we believe is possible, helps determine what we are willing to create.

We live within an information culture that gives extraordinary attention to catastrophe, conflict, cruelty, and collapse. These things are real. We should never look away from them. But they are not the whole story. If our attention is continually drawn towards what is breaking, while the quieter transformation of human values remains largely invisible, we may mistake what captures our attention for the direction of history itself. That is why stories of the Great Turning are worth amplifying, not as comforting alternatives to reality, but as another part of reality that deserves to be seen. Hope grounded in evidence is not naïveté. It can be a source of human agency. If despair tells us that nothing can change, the history of the Great Turning reminds us that things already have, and that the next chapter remains ours to write.

At Manzanita School we’re proud to be able to talk about the Great Turning, and to introduce to our young students through many many layers of activity, curriculum, and daily engagement. Thank you parents. 

SEPTEMBER 25, 2026

There is No School Like This

When we imagine most schools these days, we expect classrooms where reading, writing, and 'rithmetic take place. There will be science study and some history lesson. We also think of PE, art enrichment, maybe a maker lab, and an occasional field trip, lunch and recess. These schools are filled with mostly compliant children buzzing through classes, waiting for summer breaks. “We'll put the kiddos through a solid 12 or 13 years of this and then off to college.” 

Our world has not been made better because of this model, but in spite of it. There are a host of developmental missteps in this model, and the school reform movement has come and gone, come back again and faded out again, joined to generations of scholars aging out in waves. It's wrong for 1,000 reasons, and the world suffers under our indifference to the fictions of this model. 

At Manzanita we care about supporting a child's literacy. We want articulate writers and lucid thinkers. And we build math competency and problem-solving skills. But when it comes to science and humanities, these are woven into a rich broth of embodied brilliance, destined to awaken sincere sentiments of symbiotic human commitment to earth engagement and an ethic of stewardship that will enhance the world in which we live for generations to come. 

A nature-immersed Forest Kindergarten becomes an Expeditionary Learning program by 3rd grade, with sleep overs in wild places, camping through mountain passes into middle school, and services trips in high school. Each week, the academic program is complemented by a full day of Nature Connection practices that ensure a love of place, and an appreciation of a Living Earth. Another day is dedicated to Stewardship in which our students, in cross-grade-level mentoring teams, tend to the creeks, fields, and hills of our campus, clearing, cleaning, beautifying, and gifting their hands and hearts to create beauty and health for the land. This intimate symbiosis between interdisciplinary academics and embodied engagement with the earth, awakens the future human, who builds a life of service to healing all that makes us human. 

Our days at Manzanita are bookended in circles, in which connection, community and common stories of gratitude grow our breadth of belonging. “We will love one another and love the earth,” while establishing life-long competencies, and intimacy with our origins, a voice that visualizes stories of what is truly possible for all of us. 

Children thrive here. They graduate with integrity and compassion, with hearts intact, minds clear, convictions intact, poised to bring goodness to their lives and their work. 

Expeditions to wild places together, immersive nature-connection experiences each week, systems of stewardship sending students towards mutual symbiosis as their value set, circles of gratitude and story to bind hearts in common communities of care, each class a temple of integrity. Academic content that reinforces feelings of purposeful engagement with place, land, wind, and wilds. They are nourished not just from these designs and destinations, these dedications and deliberate dances with the numinous earth, but also from food fashioned with love, harvested wholesomely, and crafted with care. A nutrient dense lunch to mediate a rich and nuanced world of learning. 

This is Manzanita. There is no school like this! 

September 18, 2026

“Mentoring Relationships” and “Intrinsic Gift” -Two of Manzanita’s Guiding Principles

Despite every parent’s best intentions, we cannot mentor our own children. This doesn’t mean we can’t teach them, guide them, or advise them. We can. We just can’t ‘mentor’ them. Mentor is a very special role in one’s life. The mentor sees our genius, acknowledges it, welcomes it, and helps us to bring it into the world. 

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with this, but a parent must first love a child unconditionally, right? Because of this biological dynamic, this unqualified connection, the child will seek to have their gift seen by someone other than mom and dad. If a parent tries to bless the gift, the child will rebel and shut down. “Of course you see me! You love me!” The blessing, for it to activate the gift, must come from someone who is rather less invested. That kind of blessing proves that the genius is real. An auntie, an uncle, a grandparent, a neighbor, a teacher. They can all mentor your child, but you dear parents, cannot. There is so much you can give to your child. This includes giving them an environment full of potential mentors. The more loving, caring, engaged, and compassionate adults who work with your child, the more opportunities there will be for mentoring moments. It’s often as simple as, “Hey, I saw the way you listened to your peers in that circle. You are a compassionate listener.” or “I notice you are consistently engaged when we are writing. You have a gift for focus.” or “Wow, you make lines with such intention when we are using oil pastels. That confidence can produce real art!” These noticings by compassionate mentors open up the qualities of the intrinsic gift in young people, especially as they move towards adolescence. 

At Manzanita, two of our Guiding Principles are “Intrinsic Gift,” and “Mentoring Relationships.” We believe every human being comes into the world with a unique genius. Once activated through mentoring, it will serve the world as a gift to community and the world. This is an old story. A part of the story is that the gift is seeded by ancestors at the moment of birth. It is the role of mentors to awaken the gift and help a young person to cultivate the competencies that will help the gift to flourish. And a part of the idea is that this gift is needed by the world in the time a person is living. 

May we all bless the gifts of the young people around us, and let’s remember that we are responsible for one another’s children, to serve as mentors, witnesses, and the ones who will see and bless the gift. In its most simple form, mentoring is authentic noticing. Look for those gifts, and bless them. Do this with your nephews, nieces, neighbors, and the friends of your children. This is one beautiful way we can continue to heal our communities in these times. Thank you dear parents. 

September 12, 2026

Dr. Paul Visits Farmer’s Market with School of Lunch

This past Wednesday morning (September 9th, 2026), I was grateful to join our Kitchen Manager, Pam Nears as she shopped at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market located near Ocean and Arizona avenues, just a block from the beach. I tagged along, carried some boxes, helped load the truck, and admired her tremendous rapport and connection with so many local farmers. On our visit to the market, we also ran into Chuck Barth, one of the co-founders of our food program. He was shopping specifically for proteins (meat and chicken) for the school, his area of expertise. Our tremendous “School of Lunch” (SOL) program was founded by Hilary Boynton and Chuck, and provides the most nutritious meals imaginable. There may not be a healthier school lunch program anywhere in the country. Every day, our Manzanita students are served these super flavorful, nutrient dense, locally sourced, and largely organic meals, made with great care and creativity. The food in MNZ’s meal program is extremely fresh, and is included under the tuition umbrella for all families. Both snack and lunch, as well as sandwich bars for Hawk Day students, are carefully crafted by loving hands. And our kitchen staff is comprised of a beautiful group of hard-working and super compassionate people. The students love the SOL team, and we do too! If you’d like to express your gratitude for the food, send an email to Dr. Paul, and I’ll pass it along to the SOL Team! 

September 9, 2026

Stories Between the Worlds

Greetings, Manzanita community, and welcome to the new school year! It's thrilling to walk the campus and to see the students smiling, connected, even in the heat. I'm excited to be adding regular videos and blogs to our website, as we learn together about ideas that inform our school vision. Manzanita brings something unique to the world of education and to the students that join us and families that are part of our extended community. Today I'm going to talk about something that frames the big picture of why we do what we do at Manzanita. 

We talk a lot about story and the importance of telling what we've called “the new story.” And by new story, we mean what is it that we're narrating for ourselves about ourselves in this time, and why. Why are we choosing to talk about our time in the way that we do? And I say “we,” not me, not the school, just all of us. We're storytellers as a species. Here’s a great quote by Lisa Cron, who wrote Wired for Story, “story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution, more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on. Story told us what to hang on to.” 

So what I wanted to share today is that one of the ways the present has been described, the present moment is that it's in transition. We're leaving behind the story of progress, the one that said with just the right technology, the right discoveries in medicine, we're going to be freed from the toil of work, we're going to be healed of all disease, everyone's going to be fed. And that story was built largely during the Scientific Revolution and in the following discoveries of the Industrial Revolution. And it has led to what we now call climate change, species extinction, global warming, and other challenges, including the famines and disruptions in cultures that are a result of climate change in certain parts of the world. So we know that the story, that original version, the story of progress, is inadequate. And we also have a story that we are a species of great capacity, and potential, and possibility.

So somewhere, lingering for many of us, is this vision of the future. Charles Eisenstein called it “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” One way that's helpful for me is to see us as positioned between a story that's becoming somewhat extinct, which is the story that progress is going to solve everything, and the story that's not yet here, which is that humans are kind, compassionate, problem solving, creative, and innovative. And so we're in the place of trying to tell a version of a story that might bridge our way. I was recently at a retreat with a great mythologist, Michael Meade, and he said, the world we grew up in is gone, and the world we are seeking is not yet here. We are all in the liminal.

The liminal is the space that the initiate is in during the rite of passage. They're no longer a child, and they're not yet adult. They're in the liminal, ritual, transition space. And it's the space I think we're in. So it calls on us to bring something new, to align ourselves with creativity and emergence, to have faith and hope, and to hold on to love, care, and compassion. And with that, parents, I welcome you back to the new school year.