The first child who ever walked into La Semilla — a small, quiet boy named Rodrigo who arrived barefoot and said almost nothing for the first three weeks — is now twenty-three years old. He teaches ecology to schoolchildren in the Osa Peninsula. He speaks about the rainforest with the authority of someone who grew up inside it and learned, in a classroom that had no walls when the weather was good, to understand it as home rather than background.
I did not know, when I started the White Hawk Foundation in 2008, that this is what I was doing. I thought I was providing educational resources to children who lacked them. I thought the problem was access — to books, to teachers, to learning materials. I was not wrong about any of that. But I was wrong about what the work was actually for.
"I started with the belief that what these children needed was education. What I discovered is that what they needed was the same thing we all need: to be seen."
What I Got Wrong at the Beginning
In the early years of La Semilla, I approached the work the way a healer approaches a new client — with competence, with intention, with a program. I knew what good holistic education looked like. I had studied it. I had visited schools in India and in California that were doing extraordinary things with integrated curriculum, arts, and ecological learning. I brought those models to Carate and began building.
The children were polite. They came. The program worked, by every measurable standard. But something in me kept feeling like I was missing the actual point. Like I was giving people bread when what they were hungry for was something I had not yet named.
It was a child — not Rodrigo, a different one, a girl named Sofia who must have been seven or eight — who showed me what I had missed. She had been at La Semilla for about six months and was sitting with me one afternoon after the other children had left. She was quiet for a long time, and then she said: "You see me, don't you? Not my grades. Me."
I have thought about that sentence for fifteen years.
What Love Has to Do with Education
The educational research is clear, even if we do not like to use the word: the single most powerful predictor of a child's academic and social outcomes is whether they feel consistently seen, valued, and safe in their learning environment. Not the quality of the curriculum. Not the credentials of the teachers. Whether they feel that someone in that place knows who they are and cares about what happens to them.
This is not a new finding. It has been replicated across cultures and decades. But we keep designing education as if the content is the point, because the content is easier to measure and harder to argue with than love. You can audit a lesson plan. You cannot audit the quality of attention a teacher brings to a struggling child at 10am on a Tuesday.
At La Semilla, we try to make the quality of attention the primary curriculum, and everything else secondary. This does not mean the academics suffer — in fact, they improve, consistently, when children feel secure. It means that we train our teachers primarily in presence, in the art of seeing a child whole, and trust that the rest follows from that.
"We keep designing education as if the content is the point — because content is easier to measure than love. But love is what the research keeps finding."
What the Children Have Taught Me
Every year at La Semilla has taught me something I did not know I needed to learn. The children of Carate have grown up in a place of extraordinary natural beauty and genuine material hardship — many come from families where food security is uncertain, where the adults are exhausted from work that leaves little room for the kind of presence Sofia was asking for.
And yet. These children have a quality of vitality, of humor, of direct engagement with the world that I find consistently astounding. They are not damaged by their circumstances. They are shaped by them — sometimes in ways that hurt, and sometimes in ways that have given them a groundedness and a resilience that children of greater material comfort often lack.
What they need is not to be saved. They need what all of us need: to be witnessed in their full dimensionality, to be offered tools adequate to their intelligence, and to be trusted to know what to do with those tools. My job, after fifteen years, has become less about providing and more about trusting. The children know what they need. The work is creating enough stillness in myself to hear it.
Rodrigo is now teaching ecology. Sofia is studying environmental law in San José. There are others — dozens of others — who carry in them something from La Semilla that I would not know how to name. Not knowledge. Not skills. Something more like the memory of having been met. That memory, I have come to believe, is the most durable thing education can offer. Everything else can be learned again. Being seen — really seen — does not leave you.
