Elevare
A School that Actually Prepares Students for Real Life
/e.leˈvà.re/ (latin) - to elevate
American Youth Crisis
America’s youth are facing a convergence of crises. More than half of young adults say their lives feel empty of purpose. One in five high school students has seriously considered suicide, and nearly one in ten has attempted it. Almost a third of young people between 18 and 34 experience loneliness every day. Childhood obesity has risen from 14 percent in 2000 to more than 21 percent today. Only half of those between 16 and 24 are employed. Research shows steep declines in conscientiousness and extroversion and a sharp rise in neuroticism. Half of teenagers spend more than four hours a day on screens, and one in four of those report anxiety or depression. On top of this, 83 percent of young people say their government has failed to protect their future.
Our School System
Schools should be places where children are prepared to meet these challenges, but instead they often reinforce them. The system has not evolved beyond its industrial roots. Still modeled after 19th century factories, schools value obedience over curiosity and standardization over self-discovery. Children are sorted into age-based classrooms, kept on rigid schedules, and taught one-size-fits-all curricula. Subjects are divided into silos that feel abstract and irrelevant. Creativity and play, which form the foundation of innovation and resilience, are pushed aside to make room for testing and performance metrics.
Health is often neglected. Seventy percent of high schoolers are sleep deprived. Students receive substantially less education about nutrition in order to shape long lasting habits. Physical education prioritizes short-term competitive sports rather than lifelong mobility and strength. Mental health practices like mindfulness, breathwork, and meditation, which could improve focus and reduce anxiety, are rarely included.
Emotional, moral, and spiritual growth is also overlooked. Secular schools avoid questions of meaning, while religious schools may teach only one perspective. Few offer a neutral environment where children can explore philosophy and spirituality openly, compare traditions, and create their own sense of responsibility. Without this space, many young people grow up without the tools to form a moral compass.
Families are often sidelined. Research shows that dependable adult relationships are essential for healthy development, yet parents of elementary-aged children spend on average only 1.45 hours per day in active caregiving. Most parents are not active participants in their children’s education and instead rely on schools and caregivers to fill the gap. Schools inadequately inherit this responsibility. They also cannot replace family bonds, leaving children without consistent guidance.
In the classroom, students are rewarded for compliance instead of curiosity. Memorization replaces reflection. Testing reduces individuality to a score. Very little time is spent teaching metacognition, or how to learn. The result is a generation entering adulthood with declining health, weakened creativity, shallow relationships, and little clarity about who they are or what they are meant to contribute. These challenges reinforce one another and create fragmentation where there should be coherence.
Elevare, a New Kind of School
We founded Elevare to be a school that creates a new model of education. We believe children need to be prepared for the reality of what life is, not a subsection or in hopes to just get a job in corporate America. This preparation includes not only knowledge and skills, but the inner maturity to live with integrity, resilience, and moral gravity.
Student-Led Life Design
At Elevare, students gradually learn to design their own lives. Early years begin with daily rhythms of mindfulness, movement, play, and service. Over time, they co-create their schedules with teachers, practicing responsibility in safe environments where mistakes are embraced as part of learning.
By graduation, students are not stepping into adulthood untested. They already have experience making decisions about their own health, building and sustaining relationships, exploring and refining their gifts, managing time and energy, launching real projects and ventures, and creating communities of belonging.
They have lived the practices of purpose, resilience, and contribution rather than waiting to figure them out later. In the process, they begin to build character through a thousand quiet adjustments; telling the truth when it is hard, pausing before reacting, and extending compassion when judgment would be easier.
Experiential & Embodied
Learning at Elevare is grounded in real, embodied experiences. Knowledge is not left in textbooks or theories but brought to life through practice. Students taste, touch, and move their way into understanding.
Instead of only reading about nutrition, they cook meals, cultivate gardens, and study sleep science through their own bodies and routines. Instead of treating consciousness as an abstract idea, they practice meditation, explore neuroscience through experiments, and engage in dialogue about awareness. Instead of memorizing economic theories, they build Sustainable Impact Startups that solve real problems while learning financial sovereignty.
One group might design a food business using local farming to serve their community while integrating biology, psychology, and entrepreneurship. Another might use AI tools to create water conservation systems, blending science, design, and teamwork.
These projects are not classroom exercises. They mirror the challenges of adult life, giving students both the confidence and competence to step into the world prepared. These experiences also become the forge of character, teaching students humility in failure, patience in process, and the ability to engage fully without clinging to outcomes.
Search for Meaning
We also restore meaning to education by directly engaging the deepest questions of human existence. What is the purpose of life? What does it mean to live well? How should we relate to suffering, death, and the unknown? What responsibilities do we have to one another and to the planet?
Students are invited to explore these questions in a neutral, judgment-free environment where curiosity and reflection are safe. They study world religions alongside scientific perspectives, compare traditions across cultures, and examine hundreds of competing theories of consciousness. Instead of being shielded from these questions or given pre-packaged answers, they practice wrestling with them themselves.
In the process, they learn that moral responsibility and purpose are not inherited but built through freedom, reflection, and honest exploration. This forms the foundation of character, teaching them to align their choices with what is true, good, and life-giving.
We believe that giving young people the tools to explore meaning in this way is one of the most direct responses to today’s crisis of purposelessness, equipping them with the clarity and resilience to navigate life with a sense of direction rather than emptiness.
Broad Exposure
Exposure is central to self-discovery. Its purpose is to help each child uncover their gifts, passions, and identity as a foundation for life. Students are not asked to choose blindly or make major decisions without experience.
Instead, they engage diverse cultures, professions, worldviews, and disciplines to see firsthand what resonates and what does not. They discover who they connect with, what kinds of work and communities bring them alive, and where their natural gifts emerge.
One student might find through theater and philosophy circles a passion for storytelling that becomes community-based media work, while another might discover through trades and engineering the joy of building systems for sustainable design.
By graduation, they hold a clearer sense of who they are, what they value, and the kind of life they want to create, with an awareness of how their direction can serve both community and world.
Unlike traditional schools that push students to commit to futures without experience, Elevare begins with wide exploration in the early years and gradually shifts to refinement, ensuring students enter adulthood with clarity and confidence rather than uncertainty.
Create Nourishing Relationships & Community
Community itself is part of the curriculum. Students are not only taught how to contribute to groups but how to find their people: the friends who share their values, the collaborators and co-founders who will build projects with them, and even the potential future partners or spouses who will walk alongside them in life.
They practice dialogue, vulnerability, and collaboration, learning how dependence, independence, and interdependence shape relationships and how to create communities that truly flourish. Parents and teachers are co-educators in this process. Families commit time each week to projects, workshops, and reflection with their children, ensuring school and home remain aligned. Teachers are trained to serve as mentors who model humility and lifelong learning, showing students how to build authentic bonds across generations.
We believe this coherence addresses both the loneliness crisis and the lack of parental involvement that weaken the current system, while also equipping young people to enter adulthood with nourishing relationships and networks that will sustain them for life.
Mental & Physical Health
Health is the foundation of learning and life. Students study sleep and circadian rhythms, build strength and mobility, and approach nutrition as medicine through cooking and gardening, with an emphasis on both lifespan and the quality of years lived.
They practice mental health tools such as mindfulness, breathwork, journaling, and cognitive reframing, alongside neuroscience-based methods for focus and resilience, learning how to retrain subconscious patterns that guide behavior.
Medicine is taught across its full spectrum, from pharmaceuticals to herbal remedies to sacred indigenous traditions, always with respect and safety.
In a culture where one in five children is obese and most teens are sleep deprived, we believe health must sit at the center of education, preparing students to sustain vitality, clarity, and resilience throughout their lives.
Coherence
We believe this approach works because it is coherent. Each part reinforces the others. Meaning gives depth to self-discovery. Self-discovery guides service. Service is sustained by the community. Community thrives when health is strong. Health is reinforced by rhythms that children learn to design themselves.
And through the daily practice of humility, self-love, and responsibility, character binds them all together, ensuring that learning becomes not just knowledge, but a way of being. These multiplier effects address the failures of the old system and prepare children not only to succeed, but to live with purpose, resilience, and coherence.
Elevare Vision
Since its founding in 2024, Elevare has focused on laying the groundwork: building a parent community, piloting workshops, training teachers, and creating the first frameworks that can be shared openly. In 2026, Elevare will launch its first Friday program for kindergarten through third grade in San Diego, bringing children together weekly for full-day immersions in the model.
In the years ahead, Elevare will expand into a full K–12 pathway, while publishing its curriculum, lessons, and trainings so that any school or community can adopt and adapt the model. The long-term vision is both local and global: a thriving San Diego campus and an open-source framework for educational transformation everywhere.
When children are educated in environments that cultivate meaning, health, community, service, self-discovery, and character, and when parents and teachers are trained to model the same, they grow into adults who are resilient, purposeful, and capable of building sustainable lives.
These outcomes ripple outward into stronger families, healthier communities, and a cultural shift in education itself. Elevare is designed for the world our children are inheriting. For families and educators who believe that schooling should prepare children not just for work but for life, Elevare offers both a living community and a global framework for change.