Lho Mon Education

The Future We Are Creating

Monasteries once provided the only education in Bhutan and continue to provide excellent classical Buddhist philosophical study programs. But the lack of practical secular education has created a division between the monks and the society they are there to serve. Great potential exists for the monastic community to help the Bhutanese through common contemporary issues such as alcoholism, materialism, changes in family structures, depression and fear. But they must understand the world around them in order to help those who are caught in negative patterns. It is also understood that not all monastics will remain within the system; once they leave, they have few options to make a livelihood.

How We Are Creating It

By providing monks with knowledge and skills that compliment their traditional studies, that they can have a positive influence as models and leaders of the community. To that end, a new secular curriculum for monks will be implemented at Chokyi Gyatso Institute (CGI) in Dewathang, East Bhutan, beginning in 2013 under the auspices of the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative (SJI). We will be teaching them with the latest in progressive education techniques, project-based, inquiry-based, integrated, and designed to foster a sense of interdependance, responsibility, dignity of labor and pride of home.

After a six-month English intensive course that begins January 2012, one Bhutanese teacher and one western counterpart will be hired to teach a 24-part progressive curriculum over the next four years under the supervision of LME. A designated classroom at the monastery will be equipped with resource materials and computers for the monks to use throughout their studies.

Chokyi Gyatso Institute has already started serving as an example to the community by becoming the first "zero waste" monastery, banning plastics and using traditional methods of gardening.

Secular education at CGI is just one of four pilots that Lho Mon is incubating. We need to equip CGI's classroom so that we can get the greatest benefit out of the experiment. After this pilot, we will share the CGI curriculum with monasteries seeking secular education around the globe.

Our Story & Why You Should Support Us

In December 2009, the Honourable Prime Minister of Bhutan, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, launched an initiative to bring the principles, values, and practices of Gross National Happiness into the country’s educational system. Educational experts from 16 countries held a week-long workshop with top Bhutanese educators to discuss how principles of holistic, sustainability, and contemplative education as well as indigenous knowledge and ancient wisdom traditions could be integrated into regular curricula.

Shortly thereafter, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche offered his monastery, Chokyi Gyatso Institute, as an experimental “laboratory” for developing GNH-based educational curricula as part of his newly-formed Samdrup Jonkghar Initiative (SJI), a project of the Lho Mon Society. While supporting innovation in education reform, Rinpoche also wanted to help his monastery keep in step with a fast changing society. With his guidance, and your help, CGI will become the first monastery in Bhutan to introduce a full secular curriculum in math, language, science and other key subjects, that will be taught in tandem with its existing curriculum of classical philosophy and ritual.

Based on this experiment, we hope that the new GNH-based curriculum being implemented at CGI will be relevant and useful to schools both in Samdrup Jongkhar and throughout Bhutan.

Through the Lho Mon Education Initiative and SJI, new strides are being taken in transcending conventional secular-sacred boundaries, integrating spiritual values into daily life, and demonstrating the relevance of Bhutan’s ancient wisdom traditions to the modern world. In these ways, the new curriculum being developed through Lho Mon Education has important implications for education throughout Bhutan, and can make a significant contribution in integrating secular and spiritual endeavours.

While Lho Mon remains a grassroots civil society initiative, it now has the support of Bhutan’s Prime Minister, the Secretary of the GNH Commission, the Minister and Secretary of Agriculture, the Samdrup Jongkhar governor, the Samdrup Jongkhar District Agriculture Officer and Agriculture Extension Officers, the Ministry of Education, and local village leaders. Bhutan Nuns Foundation is our partner in the teacher training and curriculum development project and many other monasteries and lamas have expressed keen interest in sharing the outcome.

The visionary behind LME is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a Bhutanese meditation master from a great line of masters and yogis, a teacher of Buddhist philosophy, and one of the most progressive lamas teaching today. He has taught at institutions around the world including Yale University and Oxford University and oversees numerous religious and secular nonprofit organizations. Noa Jones serves has served as education coordinator since March, 2010 at the request of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.