The Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing

A Vision for Transformative Education

A New Kind of School for Children Rooted in Mindfulness and Compassion

Since 2008, Thầy has emphasized the importance of supporting teachers in their personal practice of mindfulness so they can transmit it to their students and colleagues. As a result, monastics, in partnership with lay practitioner-educators, have held numerous retreats for educators worldwide and initiated a secular movement known as the Applied Ethics Initiative, which later evolved into Wake Up Schools.

For many years, teachers, parents, and practitioners attending our general retreats for families as well as those for educators have expressed the aspiration to bring the Plum Village way of practice into their children’s and students’ daily lives—both at school and at home. While some have found aspects of this approach in alternative educational models such as Waldorf and Montessori schools, many feel that a school rooted in Thầy’s teachings and the Plum Village tradition—where mindfulness, applied ethics, compassion, and community are at the heart of learning—would offer something profoundly new and deeply relevant in response to the challenges facing today’s society and the field of education.

Thus, the idea of the Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing had begun to take shape. This initiative is a natural continuation of the Wake Up Schools movement, which has been growing since Thầy's proposal in 2008 and now has training programs for teachers in the US, France, Spain, and Italy.

The school will offer a holistic approach to education that nurtures simultaneously the ethical development of the child and inner transformation through the practice of mindfulness, as described in the Happy Teachers Change the World book and the WakeUp Schools mission statement.

The school will be located next to Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, CA.

The Applied Ethics program, carefully developed by Thầy, will serve as the guiding framework for students, teachers, parents, and the entire school community. Here, education will go beyond just accumulating knowledge — it will be rooted in mindfulness, love, understanding, joy, peace, and collective awakening.

As Thầy has shown us, an authentic learning environment is also a home—one where students feel deeply loved and cared for, where the classroom is a family, and where genuine kinship flourishes.

Our aspiration is to create a community environment where learning, teaching, and practice extend beyond the classroom into daily life. Teaching at the school will be done in the spirit of service, embodiment of the practice, and community living rather than as a career path or a 9-to-5 job.