The Taihu School: A New Model of Education That Brings Culture and Values Back Into Schools

The Taihu School, located in Wujiang, China is a new type of international school that emphasizes both Chinese and Western cultural values in its curriculum. Founded by Sami Kuo in 2008 starting with just nineteen children, its growing student body of elementary students will soon number nearly four hundred children.

The Taihu School has earned a reputation throughout China as a "miracle school" because of the positive behavioral changes that are typically seen in its students due to its teaching methods. This magical result of behavioral transformation has been achieved due to a special curriculum that incorporates the multi-dimensional cultivation teachings of Nan Huai-Chin, who worked to develop and spread an integrated life philosophy of virtuous humanistic principles. The boarding school has many unique features that separate it from traditional schools, such as a teaching emphasis on virtue and goodness, life skills mastery and responsibility, recitation of the Chinese Classics, martial arts, daily outdoor activities, traditional Chinese medicine and agricultural education, concentration practice, a senior-junior classmates system, and various other topics that are not emphasized within a typical Chinese or international school curriculum. The list of unique features that characterize this special school goes on and on.

The goal of the school has always been to teach the best from both Eastern and Western civilizations in a grand unification, provide the children with the academic and life skills necessary for life so that they can make their own contributive way in the world through self-reliance, provide them with a strong foundation of self-cultivation and self-adjustment principles they can use throughout their lives, and to especially emphasize Chinese cultural thinking as the foundational values system in the curriculum. These virtuous seeds are then watered and fostered with the best from Western culture. Since its very inception, the school has undertaken the goal of developing an entirely new educational model for China that emphasizes the cultivation of virtue and goodness in individuals along with academic mastery, and tries to do so by integrating the best of Chinese and Western influences including the teachings of great sages from many traditions.