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In a world where education often feels like a competition, the Ambleside Method offers a refreshing perspective: a school should be a sanctuary of belonging, joy, and disciplined harmony, where students learn not for rewards, but for the sheer delight of discovery and shared growth.

“A proper setting for the beauty of a child’s life is what a school is required to be.”¹

Marion Berry begins with the ideal, establishing a proper school setting consisting of:

• A place of belonging — Young children recognize sociability as the first gift they have to give. With smiling faces towards friends, they offer companionship to one another. They see themselves as belonging to an “us”.
• The joy of combined effort — Children naturally break off into teams to play tag in the playground’s woods or to gain knowledge of math, history, poetry and literature, delighting with classmates and teacher.

A vivid image comes forth when I think about “us” Observing in an Ambleside classroom, a narration; heads down, pencils move rapidly, so as not to miss a thought.  Silence is interrupted, a student calls out, “How do you spell furrowed?” A student responds, “lower case f, double r.” After some time, another student leaves his seat at the request of a classmate to spell, uproariously and writes the word on the classroom board.

Most adults and children experience relationships in schools, sports, clubs, and sometimes family life as fundamentally rivalrous. Most of the time striving is incentivized by systems of rewards and punishments and cajoling by parents and teachers. It is a common fallacy that “the best way to get something done is to provide a reward to people when they act the way we want them to.”²

One might ask, what stimulates students to respond with the humility and helpfulness described above?  “The indispensable link between the two ideas, companionship and cooperation, is discipline.”³ Discipline implies right ordering, which is necessarily imparted by loving instruction. Under joyful discipline, students respond to the work before them, not as something to get through or for the sake of reward, or to avoid punishment, but as a combined effort of belonging and working in harmony; our way of being at Ambleside.

In Ambleside Schools students are instructed in high standards of reasonable behavior and conscientious work. Maintenance of such standards is not achieved by a scheme of rewards and punishments. Rather, they are breathed in from the pervading atmosphere of strenuous happiness, of expectations through the varied relationships of teacher and students, a collaborative sense of duty with one another, and individual effort in an approach to all work, be it reading, mathematics, or school chores.

A grateful school parent told Marion Berry, “You really do give the children something to live by.” What are your children living by in this coming school year? Will it be a proper setting for the beauty of your child’s life?

Maryellen St. Cyr

Founder, Director of Curriculum

Ambleside Schools International

¹ Marion Berry, I Buy A School, (London: Avon Books,1996), Prologue.

² Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards, (New York: Houghton Mifflin,1993), 3.

³ Marion Berry, I Buy A School, (London: Avon Books,1996), Prologue.