Translucent educators have a profound intuition, based on direct experience, of their own deeper nature. They have discovered their luminous core to be an infinite source of creativity and light. When you know yourself to be full, it is natural to see that same fullness around you, to see young children as whole, intuitively knowing what is right and good. The educator who is more awake simply provides the context to evoke this innate brilliance.

Translucent education begins from this premise. Rather than viewing a child as unprepared and unresourceful, needing to be filled with knowledge to be able to survive, translucents recognize that children are born with a natural curiosity, interest, and creativity. Neither force nor discipline is needed to wake up this innate brilliance; it simply has to be seen, respected, and harnessed.

A translucent educational model encourages children to question, to create, to become learners rather than knowers. Rather than preparing children to participate in the existing economic and social system, translucent educational environments help children to question the status quo, and so prepare them to change it. It creates awakened co-creators instead of somnambulant consumers. Jean Houston observed:

Education that is hands-on, experience rich, that calls forth the whole mind and body of each child, and develops human, mental, spiritual, psychological capacities: these are the tools I believe can allow us to cope with the transition we’re in. Schools can lead the way, providing a model for education continuous throughout life. Schools at all levels can teach us, and allow us to find our hidden potential that will enable us to explore the morass of our present time.

At the core of a translucent educational environment lies a reverential respect for each child as sacred and unique, and for each child’s gifts as distinctly her own, not to be reduced to the conformity of standardized testing. This approach respects the essential divinity of each child as the source of wisdom as much as the recipient of knowledge. It respects the mystery each child embodies, as a living representation of something far deeper and more alive than any syllabus could ever solidify.

For Lantieri, translucence means bringing spirit into education. She makes the vital distinction between religion and spirit: “Religion can be an expression of one’s spiritual nature, but many people nurture the spiritual dimension of their lives without adhering to a specific religion. Spiritual experience cannot be taught. But it can be uncovered, evoked, found and recovered."

The blurring of this distinction between religion and spirit has been the greatest impediment to bringing more translucence to education. Of all those I interviewed for this book, more had a background in education than in any other field. Educators are, on the whole, a more translucent community than, say, people in the military or in business. The challenges of bringing translucence into education are not due to a lack of translucent parents or teachers but to an entrenched bureaucracy with fixed notions of what education can and cannot include.

We can find vibrant examples of translucent schools springing up, like shoots of grass through the concrete, all over the United States and in Europe. Many, like the ones in which Lantieri’s work has had such an impact, are to be found right in the heart of the mainstream system, and often in less privileged areas. Two other movements, both of which have gained ground in recent decades, have provided a particularly fertile soil for translucent schools to flourish: one is the Waldorf system of education created by Rudolf Steiner, and the other is the charter school movement. Both have attracted translucent parents and teachers like bees to honey, and we have even begun to see these two models overlap.