“It’s amazing what happens when you trust a 16-year-old to figure something out on their own. To be involved in real research, to work in a community and take care of each other,” says Chris Maxey, Founder and Head of The Island School, a nearly self-sustaining, entirely unconventional school on the remote Bahamian Island of South Eleuthera. In a world where childhood independence has been systematically curtailed (see WILTW January 18, 2024) and many young adults seem caught in a state of suspended adolescence, Maxley’s statement feels profound, even radical. 

Boyish and energetic, with a weather-worn tan that speaks to his love of the islands, Maxey is a philosopher of the contrarian sort—and a pied piper at heart. He left his teaching position at The Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, in 1998 to start what he calls a “place-based educational experience.” A clutch of spare, white-washed buildings at the ocean’s edge, the school gathers roughly 150 students aged preschool through high school with Ph.d researchers and scientists from around the globe every year. 

Various strains of classical and ancient wisdom are guiding lights on campus. The school’s mission draws partly from the Stoics, a Hellenistic school of philosophy focused on courage, wisdom, and, as Maxey puts it, embracing the idea that the “hard journey is where you grow.” Its project-based curriculum is entirely democratic, with an emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. And, central to the program is the concept of the hero’s journey—a transformational, coming-of-age experience that enables students in the high school Semester and Summer Term programs to realize their own ambitions, unencumbered by the expectations of parents, college pressures, and social media.

We have known Maxey for years. His ideas stretch back to ancient Greece. And yet, what inspires us about The Island School is how well-adapted it is for the future. Freshly-minted MBAs from top schools are struggling to land jobs. The U.S. unemployment rate for recent college graduates stands at 5.8%—unusually high and the latest sign yet that AI is eating white-collar jobs. 

Meanwhile, school boards around the country are grappling with ChatGPT and its threat to automating education itself. 

In an era of mass automation, what does it mean to have purpose? In a world where college doesn’t deliver the same labor-force advantages it did fifteen years ago, what does it mean to be educated? What are the skills of the future? 

It’s increasingly clear that the education of the future will prioritize skills that technology cannot replace: the skills that make us human. Churning away the formative, childhood years on a hamster wheel in pursuit of SAT scores and jobs that won’t exist is the fastest way to irrelevance. And yet so many classrooms are stuck in a dying paradigm. What’s so compelling about a place like The Island School is the learning process itself is very much guided by what makes us human: exploration, curiosity, lived-experience, human connection. 

We quote Dr. Edith Widder, senior scientist at Ocean Research & Conservation Association, who collaborates with the students at The Island School: 

I never equated school with learning. It’s always bothered me that we’re not training kids to deal with the problems we’re leaving them. That’s what The island school is doing. It’s one of the few places I’ve found that is doing it. The kids here, because they’re getting involved in real research projects, they start to realize, wow, you guys don’t really know the answer to this question, and I could be the one to find the answer. That’s a wake up call.

Alumna Liah Burbridge recalls her experience: 

In a typical classroom back home, you’re just reading out of a book and answering questions and doing busywork. I actually understand things now. It’s just a lot more fun to learn. You don’t even realize you’re learning. In marine ecology, you go out and do these dives and you notice that you can actually tell what the species are. It’s incredible.

Asher Dawson, another alumni, remembers the stakes: 

The work here matters. If you don’t do your research homework, then you’re kind of messing up not only your group, but you could mess up the greater scientific community, which is cool because you have a huge responsibility and you always feel incredibly accomplished.

Maxey puts it this way:

In traditional school settings, most of the student responsibility is to consume. At The Island School, the focus is on producing. We want you to be out of your comfort zone, physically, emotionally, intellectually. At the end of the Semester, a new young-adult self emerges ready to lead and make a difference. 

In practice, this means that, in the high school Semester and Summer Term programs (the equivalent of a semester abroad for international high schoolers), applied math is less about books than it is about “putting a stick” in a cistern to monitor how much rainfall has been collected, or recording wind and solar data to analyze and inform the campus’s energy footprint. A humanities class means engaging with the history and concerns of local fishermen through outreach programs, or collaborating with local Bahamian students at the program’s Deep Creek Middle School. 

Every morning begins in a circle around the flagpole—a moment to gather and reflect—followed by some sort of physical activity. Physical-challenges are a requirement for high school students. Teens train all semester for a 13 mile run or a long-distance swim. In some cases, kids have arrived not knowing how to swim and 100 days later are swimming 4 miles in the ocean. All of the Semester students participate in an eight-day solo kayaking trip.

Over the course of the semester, students initiate and lead their own research projects in collaboration with scientists at the campus’s Cape Eleuthera Institute. This year’s projects include the installation of new PV solar-panels to push the campus closer to its goal of being 90% reliant on renewables (it’s currently at 40%) and studying the impact of local ecotourism on sharks. 

A third group is researching the long-term population densities of conchs—an animal that is central to the Bahamian culture, ecology, and economy—with the aim of proposing stricter regulations for a marine-protected area. 

The stakes feel high indeed.

And the experience is phone-free. High-schoolers in the Semester program hand over their passport and phone on arrival. They get them back 100 days later. Summer-term students are phone-free for six weeks.

In the meantime, students are adapting to a very different life: living with twelve other people in a simple dormitory, amid mosquitoes, snoring roommates, and a communal culture of self-reliance where students are growing their own food, cooking their own meals, and washing their own dishes. Food security is another top priority: nearly 70% of campus food comes from local farmers. Students maintain a robust aquaponics system and are launching an agroforestry project to decrease the need for imported food.

For all of these reasons, the entire semester is designed to be a rite-of-passage—a journey that culminates in graduation and a sense of self-actualization and purpose. When you consider the mental-health crisis so many young people are facing today, and especially the crisis of boys and men (another area of Maxey’s focus), so much of it boils down to a loss of purpose. Through ancient and classical principles, from the Stoics to the hero’s journey, The Island School helps kids reclaim it.

We end on two ideas from Maxey: 

In our culture, we don’t celebrate young people as people who can do things—real things—for a long time. So there’s this lost wisdom, this disconnect between generations. When you come here and stand in one of our circles, you won’t be able to tell the difference between some of the faculty and the students. It’s the twenty-somethings, or the ones that have just been through this hero’s journey, who are guiding the next group. 

Finally, the harder the better:

I have this masochistic view that when we go on a kayak trip and the weather’s perfect, it’s just great, it’s good. But when the stormy weather comes in, that’s when that team really comes together. That’s what they remember for the rest of their life.