Pal Buddhist School

Pal Buddhist School has a strict anti-bullying policy. Our zero tolerance approach to any forms of verbal, physical, psychological and emotional abuse, as well as all forms of gender, religious, sexual or racial discrimination, is emphasised by our commitment to develop respectful, disciplined and honest young people. All members of the school community contribute to preventing bullying by modelling and promoting appropriate behaviour and respectful relationships.

At Pal Buddhist School, all students, teachers and parents are connected by an innovative cloud-based data management system called SENTRAL. Students are able to access their timetable, homework & assessment tasks, attendance and school resources via a centralised online platform. Because it is cloud-based they can view, submit or retrieve class work using any connected device such as tablets, mobile phones and laptops. Teachers are able to provide almost instantaneous feedback, as well as easily share online resources hosted by Sentral Likewise, parents are also able to view online the progress of their child, as well as interact with teachers as easily as students can.

Pal Buddhist School is the first school in the region to implement such innovative technology in our learning and teaching platforms. Don’t go by tradition, nor by lineage, nor by hearsay, nor by scripture, nor by skeptism, nor by philosophy, nor by pedantry, nor by dogmatism, nor by charisma, nor by thinking, ‘the recluse in our guru’, but when you know for yourselves:

‘This idea is wholesome, this idea is praiseworthy, this idea is praised by the wise, this idea, when takes up and acted upon leads to happiness and welfare,’ Then you should take it up and live it out. Our School is open to all people interested in the good life. Although our basis is early Buddhism, we are confident that our education approach is congenial to good people of all creeds. Buddhist of all traditions will feel a connection here as early Buddhism is the seedbed of all types of Buddhism. Non-Buddhists will also be able to use the clear-headed rationalism of early Buddhism to clarify their own beliefs. Through a discovery of Buddhism, all students are taught to become wise, disciplined and compassionate learners.

Our School takes an approach to education that integrates the universal qualities of faith and wisdom, one that remembers and builds upon enlightened civilisation through independent investigation, empiricism and reason.

As such, we are not a religious School in the sense that we hold to any ideas on the basis of pure faith and mere dogma, or in the sense that we use faith as a trump-card to reason. Rather we are a School of Science in its truest sense: we aim to foster in our students a love of the pursuit of truth in all domains, the material and the spiritual, the discovered as well as the undiscovered. We hold that truth becomes dead tradition and dogma unless we constantly strive as individuals to use the tools of empiricism and reason to directly discover and rediscover truth for ourselves.

The capacity for independent thinking, empiricism and reason does not come from nothing. It is sown, cultivated and stabilised in the soil of all-round character development. As a Buddhist School, we use the Buddha’s teaching as a rich resource in this regard.

The Buddha taught both secular and spiritual knowledge. However, to guard against the institutionalisation of blind belief, our approach is to keep a strict line between classes about secular knowledge (ie knowledge that can be verified through ordinary experiences) such as maths, science, English and meditation (as a form of body-mind exercise), and spiritual knowledge (ie knowledge that cannot be verified by ordinary experiences) such as how to see the operation of karma over many lifetimes across the many realms of rebirth.

Our policy is to teach secular knowledge during school hours and offer spiritual teachings to our students outside school hours on a strictly voluntary basis. Siddhartha’ was the Buddha’s birth-name. It means ‘One who achieves his own goals’. The Buddha was an advocate of ambitious goal-setting, constant striving and discipline for the sake of attaining one’s own goals.

Thus, while accepting the different potentials of each individual, we rouse in our students the desire to be the very best person that they can be. We celebrate high achievement in both academics and sport, and hold to strict disciplinary standards.

We are also a School that encourages friendly competition. While ultimately where we stand in relation to others matters little – for how we stand in relation to ourselves is what really counts – it is good to engage in friendly competition to bring out our best.