Those who conceived Lumiar was convinced, as from the start, that a school does not need to look like a factory or worse, a prison: a serious place, even a sad and gloomy place, where regimented children in uniform practice, against their will, the difficult and even painful duty to learn.

And the creators of this idea were convinced that, although children are born rather ignorant, knowing almost nothing, they are born knowing how to learn... and, in fact, children are beings who seem to have been programmed to learn. At a very early age and without being taught to do so, they learn to recognize their mother’s face and voice as well as those of their father, siblings and others close to them. They greet family members and acquaintances in general with a smile – and, feel unease in the presence of strangers…Soon they learn, again without been taught, how to recognize sounds and to realize that some sounds have meanings and then they begin to tour the wonderful and fascinating world of language. Next, they learn how to sit down, then to stand on their feet, then gain enough confidence to walk. They learn how to walk and talk nearly at the same time – quite imperfectly at first, but then these are all quickly mastered. In a short time they are running, jumping, climbing furniture and stairs – and talking almost like a grown up. Then they learn how to dance and often times in a natural and graceful way. At the same time, they learn how to sing the words of nursery rhymes and then to hum along the melody and to follow the rhythm of a tune. And they learn all this with no difficulties and with a great pleasure – not because they have been forced or taught to, and clearly not painstakingly. Those who claim that, before learning, a child needs to learn how to learn and imagines that she can learn how to learn because they were taught by other people, probably has never paid close attention to the physical, mental, emotional and social development of a child.

Those who created Lumiar asked the following questions:

• Why not build a school that works as a lever for this huge inborn capacity of learning that children display?
• Why not build a school that respects and fosters the innate curiosity of children, their interests and natural talents, their preferred way of learning and their own learning pace?
• Why not build a school where learning is as pleasurable as it is out of school, even when faced with difficult tasks that require major effort and concentration?

For many years there have been critics of the traditional school – some of them quite famous. And there has been criticism for over a century. Many have proposed different schools: anarchists, libertarians, progressive, constructivists… However, the majority of these proposals are often degraded into a “negative”, or a “laissez faire”, or even a “a la Rousseau” education, in which the role of the school as a learning environment virtually dies out, or into a learning environment which is completely structured, and not very different from the traditional one, where interests, natural talents and the freedom to learn are disregarded.

Those who conceived Lumiar intended it to navigate boldly between these two dangerous extremes – torn between Scylla and Charibdis of history.

The school of São Paulo was established in 2002 with Lumiar Institute – later named Lumiar Association. The Institute was in charge of devising a pedagogical proposal of the school and ensuring that the pedagogical proposal should never drift away from the proposal. The school is located in the rural neighborhood of Lageado, in the municipality of Santo Antonio do Pinhal, close to Campos do Jordão city, which joined the network at a later date. Others will come.

The theoretical reference developed by Lumiar Institute has been daring and Lumiar Schools have been really innovative, democratic schools which respect the students’ interests, their individuality and their freedom to learn.

Lumiar Schools are not schools that evade their responsibility for their students’ learning and, consequently, are not anarchical, libertarian, laissez-faire: they follow a clear pedagogical proposal that encompasses curriculum, methodology and assessment, in addition, naturally, to a management system.

Lumiar Schools are specially targeted at those who are not only dissatisfied with what is being offered by other schools, but also unwilling to see their children become victims of a regimented education, aimed exclusively at passing the college admission test or at being successful in the workplace.  Lumiar Schools are not schools for all: they are schools in search of an innovative, coherent and efficient pedagogical proposal. Its proposal is not utopian, on the contrary, it is feasible and applicable and thus contributes to the transformation of its students into conscious, critical and responsible people, active and participative citizens, competent and successful professionals, who never forget that learning is the continuous and on-going destiny of human beings – who are born ignorant, incompetent, dependent, but with a large capacity to learn, and learn to become adults who are aware of the reality in which they operate, free and autonomous to define their life projects and with the competencies and skills required to transform these life projects into reality, that is to say, in fully-lived lives.