THE COUNTY EDIT CONVERSATION · THE FIELD SCHOOL OF HVAR
ONE OF FIVE · CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ, FOUNDER
Before Hvar,
she was one of us
Charlottesville, the Aspen Institute, Dupont Circle, business school,
climate finance — and then a school on a Croatian island she did not
move there to build.
HOSTED BY ANNETTE SCHMITZ · JELSA, HVAR · 26 MIN
Jelsa, from the water.
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EPISODE ONE OF FIVE · THE FIELD SCHOOL OF HVAR · 26 MINUTES
The first thing Carolyn Matijević said, before we had asked her
anything, was that she is kind of from the DMV. The second thing
she said was that the school has got DMV fingerprints all over it. Both
are true, and together they are the reason a publication about the capital
region opened its first season four thousand miles from home.
Carolyn, mid-sentence.
She is a Charlottesville native. She began in
placemaking — she helped start a festival of
culture and technology in her hometown —
then spent about three years at the Aspen
Institute, living in Dupont Circle. From
there: business school, and a stretch of
work in climate finance.
She did not move to a Croatian island to
build a school. She moved, in her words,
“through love,” and then looked around.
What she found was an argument for the work she had already been doing. She
had spent the pandemic years trying to manufacture something in the United
States that she could not find — launching a conference, learning to bake,
chasing a kind of community from scratch.
“I came here and I thought — it already exists. There’s
already this authentic harmony between people and their
landscape here that I’ve been searching for.”
CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ
The climate work gave the idea its shape. Tourism, she points out, is generally
either indifferent or actively hostile to the cultural and environmental health of
the place it arrives in. So the useful thing to build was not a protest against
tourism but a better version of it: a hub that gathers the people who already care,
and gives the ones who do not yet a reason to start.
It is a serious thesis and she is disarming about how it reached her. “My mother
teases me that my life is like the movie Mamma Mia,” she says. City girl, fast
-paced, goes to a Mediterranean island, falls in love, never comes back.
THREE THINGS AT ONCE
The Field School of Hvar is a family slow-travel programme, a phrase that
undersells it. Three things run simultaneously. The children get full-time drop-off
enrichment that is nature-based, place-based and hands-on. The families get a
walkable co-living village in a town small enough that nobody drives anywhere.
And the parents — the part nobody expects — get a real programme of their own.
The school has three values, and she names them the way people name things they
have had to defend: stewardship, enlightenment, dignity. Every project the children
take on is tied to an impact goal. Regenerative agriculture. Low-carbon nautical
tourism. Artisanal entrepreneurship. Low-waste, zero-kilometre schoolwear.
She has lived on Hvar for six years. Her son was born there; he is four now. He
was two when the school began, and it began partly because of him — quiet
mornings wandering the olive groves together, and the thought that other
families needed this.
THE FIRST YEAR
She was standing in Vrisnik, a village near Jelsa, when she stopped considering it.
She made a web page. She put it on Facebook. She contacted a few people in the
press — among them Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker writer, who still lives in the
DC area and was an early public believer.
Then the families came, and she lists them by name, unprompted, two years later:
Lauren, Liberto, Victoria, Ivan and Katie, Evelina, Kelsey. Not only families —
educators too. Her own background is not in education, and she knew from the
start that the entire promise rested on finding people whose background was.
“It took a village to make a village.”
CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ
Year one was thirteen weeks of summer and, by any honest accounting, chaos.
There was no classroom, so they met in the park. There was no accommodation,
so families found their own rooms around Jelsa. The schedule ran eight to twelve
and four to eight — the good parts of the day, on paper — which gave the
teachers a twelve-hour day with a long useless middle. “Which is insane,” she says
now.
Year two added fall. Year three — this one — adds spring. There is a classroom
now, at the Fontana. And there is a curriculum, built this year by Zoe Klute, the
school’s academic dean and learning designer, which the faculty have made their
own.
THE HARDEST PART
Ask what nearly broke it and she does not reach for a logistics story. She talks
about grace — that childcare buys you an unusual intimacy with families who all
move through the world differently, and that their trust is a thing you have to
learn how to hold.
Then she talks about being a mother while doing it.
“Whenever there’s pressure in a system, it is the most
vulnerable people who end up bearing the burden of that
pressure.”
CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ
In year one she could see it plainly: at twelve, sixteen, twenty-four hours in a day
there was not much left for a two-year-old. “You can’t just say, the baking of the
donuts can wait until tomorrow,” she says. “There is no tomorrow.” The guardrails
has built since are, to hear her tell it, what she is proudest of.
The other lesson was about the teachers — that year one had been designed
around what she knew a parent needs, and not around what an educator needs in
order to be out in the heat for eight hours bringing an idea to life.
THE QUESTION EVERY PARENT ASKS
There is nothing digital in the classrooms. For a certain kind of parent — ours,
frequently — that raises the obvious worry.
The answer is more rigorous than the setting suggests. The school runs
Renaissance Star diagnostic assessments at the beginning and end of each term,
watching for progression in literacy and maths. The upper school programmes are
aligned to GCSE assessments — the British counterpart to roughly pre-AP,
grades nine and ten — so older learners make progress toward their diplomas and
transcripts while they are on the island.
She is not finished with the question and says so. Assessment inside project-based
learning is genuinely hard: you can build a portfolio as vast as the experience
itself and still miss the thing you meant to measure. There is a US-registered
501(c)(3), and a plan for a diploma-granting school in the States, to stitch the
experiential work to the legible kind.
HOW IT ACTUALLY GROWS
There is no marketing budget. There has never been one. The school has filled on
social media, a little press, and families telling other families — many of whom
come back. It also runs a feedback session in every session, which is not a
formality: the welcome dinner exists because parents asked for more of exactly
that, so it became the first night. Sunset, long table, strangers who will not be
strangers by Wednesday.
Underneath the parents’ programme is a real idea about adults..
“One of them was to create a little bit of that freshman
dorm experience for people in their prime years.”
CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ
We are, she points out, going through the most momentous decade of our lives —
careers, children, ageing parents, bodies — and are so compressed between
competing demands that there is almost no time to process any of it alongside
peers. The programme does not solve that with a facilitated round table. It makes
room: seven hours in which you are not actively managing another human being,
and someone to spend them with.
An archaeological exhibition on the island.
THE CROATIA MOST PEOPLE NEVER SEE
Most people who know Croatia know Dubrovnik, Game of Thrones, perhaps Split,
and Yacht Week. Sun, surf, dolce far niente. There is more, but you have to know
where to look, because what is here is small families and individual artists and
intellectuals quietly pursuing something in a little paradise.
“The island is about the size of Manhattan — you’re not
going to just step out and see everything all at once.”
CAROLYN MATIJEVIĆ
So the school takes families to a wine museum in a village nobody would think to drive to,
and to the beaches that are on no list, and the point lands: there is more
here than you were told.
“When they want to, they do.”
That last line is hers, about children, and it is the most efficient summary of the
place we heard all summer. Ours were the first ones through the door every
morning. Nobody made them.
IN THIS CONVERSATION
GOLD = timestamps to be added from the recording. Everything else on this page is final.
“It’s got DMV fingerprints all over it”
What the Field School actually is — and the three things running at once
Stewardship, enlightenment, dignity — and a project tied to every impact goal
Five years ago this did not exist: moving for love, then looking around
The climate-finance thesis, and why tourism was the target
The hardest part: grace, trust, and being a mother while building it
Year one — thirteen weeks, no classroom, and the twelve-hour day
“It took a village to make a village”
What she wishes she had known, and what she would tell the teachers
The climate-finance thesis, and why tourism was the target
No marketing budget: word of mouth, and the families who come back
The question every parent asks — Renaissance Star and GCSE
The parents’ programme, and the freshman dorm for people in their prime years
The Croatia most people never see
“When they want to, they do”
← THE SERIES
All five conversations
The Field School of Hvar
IN THE INDEX
The Field School of Hvar
Jelsa, Hvar, Croatia · Family & Kids · Away
THE SERIES · FIVE CONVERSATIONS
We never feature just an owner. The Field School of Hvar is five conversations
— the founder, her two teachers, and two of the families who came.
01
Carolyn Matijević— the founder
Before Hvar, she was one of us · YOU ARE HERE
26 min
02
Jordan Reese McClain — teacher
The childhood we all deserve
30 min
03
Artemisia Buonerba — teacher
You cannot get lost in a classroom
35 min
04
Jelena and Alex — parents
We were going to remodel the house
20 min
05
Haley Keely — parent and midwife
Nobody tells you what to ask