Bhutan and Journeys School

The exploration on the part of Pema and Tashi of the Journeys place based education was made with the intent of enhancing the entire Bhutanese school system presently based on the Brittish model.
The king of Bhutan, back in 1982, modeled his government on The Gross National Happiness instead of gross national product. I was stunned, in listening to Pema as he spoke to the students, to learn that this is not simply rhetoric. All governmental decisions are made with this intent and, in fact, this is spelled out in the constitution. An example: when a new hdyro-electric plant was to be built, it was decided that, at greater expense, it would be placed in an extremely rural area where there was no power rather than attaching it to an existing system and moving a bit further out into suburbs. This decision was made in order to make more people happy. It has, as a result, made positive changes in many, many lives.