2024 Outstanding Peace Education

David and Naomi Geffen, founders of Loving World, and the creators and authors of Loving Classroom, were inspired by a vision to build a loving world. How? By training teachers globally to cultivate loving classrooms built on 8 virtues: Respect, Compassion, Listening, Kindness, Gratitude, Love, Friendship and Care.

Loving Classroom provides practical tools and experiential learning for students and teachers to get to the heart of the challenges they face, through its unique 4H methodology. Loving Classroom was piloted in Gauteng South Africa, through the leadership of Thulani Makhoba, Loving Classroom South Africa’s Director, and in collaboration with the Gauteng Department of Education. The results were profound: the independent evaluations showed the true effectiveness of Loving Classroom to realize sustainable change in the lives of students, teachers and the school. Incidents of bullying, alcohol and drug abuse, violence, racism and late coming all reduced by more than 80%, while pass rates increased over 13%.

Throughout the Loving Classroom program, students interact while learning and experiencing the 8 virtues, discovering their own strengths and appreciating the strengths of their classmates; they deepen their learning and develop social conscience and responsibility, by collaborating with each other and their teachers to create and implement community enrichment projects. Loving Dialogue is then introduced, where students choose real life issues they face and engage in loving dialogue to explore new ways to work together to solve these problems. They live and relate from their internal empowerment, developed throughout the Loving Classroom program. They become the change.

Loving World has received requests to implement the Loving Classroom program in Spain, France, Ireland, Hong Kong, Poland, Germany, the United States, Mexico, India, China, Jordan, and Egypt, supporting its plans for global scaling.

https://www.lovingclassroom.net/ 

https://www.lovingworld.com 

“On one hand, ‘love’: the infinite cosmic light of connection, on the other hand, ‘engineering’: we can learn practical wisdom that helps us increase the number of people we love and the depth to which we love them.” – David Geffen