If you took a high school English class at any point over the past five decades, chances are that you had the choice to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian novel where people numb themselves into a life of colorless obedience to authority. Year after year, the novel continues to resonate — such that it was recently turned into a TV series. In an age where our devices often numb us, something about the story rings true.

But Huxley himself wasn’t fully satisfied with the message of Brave New World, feeling it didn’t leave a hopeful possibility for humanity. Thirty years later, in what would be his final novel, Huxley outlines his vision for the future.

Tragically, Island was overlooked — a fact that almost certainly devastated Huxley. In fact, after his death, his wife wrote that “the meaning of [his] last day becomes clearer and clearer to me and more and more important. Aldous was, I think (and certainly I am) appalled at the fact that what he wrote in ISLAND was not taken seriously.”

What wisdom is contained in this forgotten book, and what can it teach an anxious generation growing up amid unprecedented challenges?

One answer to this question has to do with Huxley’s vision for education, which a character summarizes in the following way:

“What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining, training in applied physiology and psychology, a training in practical ethics and practical religion, a training in the proper use of language and a training in self-knowledge. In a word, a training of the whole mind-body in all its aspects.”

For Huxley, holistic education — meaning mind, body, and spirit — is the key to an alternative future. The challenge is helping children recognize their humanness and their ground of being.

Because most public schools in America are nowhere near this ideal, the onus, unfortunately, is on parents to fill in the gaps. Below are eight principles of Huxley’s vision you can apply at home to round out your child’s education.

1. Study nature and ecology to understand all of life is relationship.

“Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation,” Huxley writes, “Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”

The notion that learning happens at school, inside a building, while reading textbooks and taking tests, cuts kids off from their connection to the natural world. Yet an essential insight, available in any encounter with nature, is that all of life is a relationship.

He goes on to explain that nature contains a built-in lesson on morality:

“Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you…the difference between ten acres of meadow and ten acres of gullies and blowing sand is obvious. Sand and gullies are parables. Confronted by them, it’s easy for the child to see the need for conservation and then to go on from the conservation to morality.”

A child who understands relationship will intuitively live a moral life.

2. Build connections between different subjects.

Despite all of life being relationship, most subjects in school are taught as distinct from each other. Science and math, humanities and art — these fields compete for status within our education system. As a result, students treat the knowledge in each field as separate from that in others.

After a deep dive into a topic, students ought to be given ample time to connect what they’ve just learned to other subjects they know about. Huxley calls this a bridge-building session. “Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge,” he says.

The reason for these periodic bridge-building sessions isn’t merely information recall. As students spot patterns across academic silos, they uncover creative insights. The value doesn’t end, however, with improved memory and pattern recognition. Huxley reveals the importance of taking this process as far as possible:

“The bridges have to be built in all directions. One starts with botany — or any other subject in the school curriculum — and one finds oneself, at the end of a bridge-building session, thinking about the nature of language, about different kinds of experience, about metaphysics and the conduct of life, about analytical knowledge and the wisdom of the Other Shore.”

By making these connections, children begin to understand the underlying unity in all of life.

3. Personalize learning to address diverse needs.

Although we’re all connected, each of us is also unique. We have physical and mental differences and may prefer different learning styles, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. At a young age, through these differences, we might show signs of the individual gifts we have to share with the world. They should not only be accepted, they should be embraced — even celebrated.

But differences can cause tension between people. To acknowledge this fact and coexist peacefully with others, Huxley suggests carefully mixing children together with those unlike them, helping them see that others have just as much a right to exist as they do.

“Even very small children can understand the facts of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness,” he writes.

Indeed, a better world is where children develop their unique strengths as they learn to appreciate both the necessity and benefits of diversity.

4. Teach ethics through timeless stories.

Schools tend to fill students’ heads with facts. Teachers ask students to memorize information. But stories are pivotal in learning and development, especially at younger ages.

“Children find it very easy to understand an idea when it’s presented to them in a parable about animals,” Huxley says. “We give them an up-to-date version of Aesop’s Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals.”

Stories not only capture the imagination and leave children with inspiring images and wonderful feelings, they effectively transmit universal values that give rise to human flourishing.

5. Encourage emotional expression rather than repression.

Our current approach to education sidelines emotions. Repression harms us, and the inevitable explosion of repressed emotions harms others. But even as social and emotional learning gains steam in schools, cognitive intelligence continues to reign supreme.

Huxley wants a world where children learn to channel their emotional power appropriately. But the principle of redirecting power is more than a release valve, as this passage explains:

“Violent feelings, we tell children, are like earthquakes. They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature. You get cross, something inside of you cracks and, through the crack, out comes a whiff of the heavenly smell of enlightenment…It’s there every time you get cross. Inhale it, breathe it in, fill your lungs with it. Again and again.”

Conscious awareness of difficult feelings brings us back into contact with our true nature.

Practically speaking, dance and movement, in addition to harmlessly moving uncomfortable feelings, are modes of positive expression.

In Huxley’s vision, children aren’t left with only commandments to observe. They’re also given techniques to use when confronted with challenging material.

6. Practice letting go of disturbing thoughts.

Just like emotions, upsetting thoughts can erupt out of nowhere. With the exception of introducing mindfulness at school (a recent trend), children are given very little guidance on how to work with their uncontrollable thoughts.

In one scene from the book, a classroom teacher guides the students through a visualization. They practice conjuring up images of their choice, a skill to help them deal with disturbing thoughts that appear in their minds.

It’s an empowering lesson: “The point is to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we’re disturbed by what’s going on inside our heads, we can do something about it.”

7. Use games and puzzles for learning how to learn.

Everything in our education system ends with an exam, as if students are algorithms to be optimized. We easily forget, though, that children learn best through play.

Huxley argues for the usefulness of play. He says, “Logic and structure in the form of games and puzzles. The children play and, incredibly quickly, they catch the point. After which you can go on to the practical applications.”

He gives an example of how to lay the foundation for scientific thinking. By teaching games with cards, boards, and dice, children learn about probabilities, which are the bedrock of science.

8. Balance conceptual learning with intuitive knowing.

In his biggest departure from convention, Huxley suggests we complement conceptual, abstract, analytical thinking — the focus of today’s education — with other ways of knowing.

“But don’t look analytically, don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners,” he admonishes. “Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.”

Soul education demands the best of both worlds — appreciating the unique and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, analysis and vision, knowledge and wisdom.

He reiterates that both kinds of training are indispensable. Concepts point to, but aren’t, reality. We should raise kids to access experience directly, unmediated by thought. Without capacity in both ways of knowing, a child won’t grow up to be a fully human being.

Knowledge is great, and society has progressed as a result of science and technology. But without wisdom, we’re doomed to continue on a path of destroying our planet.

The benefits of a spirit-infused education (like the one Huxley describes) are profound. Lisa Miller, Columbia professor and author of The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain, has found that “children who are raised with a robust and well-developed spiritual life are happier, more optimistic, more thriving, more flexible, and better equipped to deal with life’s ordinary (and even extraordinary) traumas than those who are not.” Spirituality is the missing piece that prepares kids for the precarious future ahead.

Huxley went to great lengths to leave us this message. When a fire burned down his home in 1961, the manuscript for Island was all he rescued. He published it the following year and, in 1963, passed away from cancer.

His dying wish was for the world to take the ideas in Island seriously. He believed his vision, including widespread holistic education, is possible here and now. We can raise kids to be more than insatiable consumers, more than obedient citizens. We can raise whole humans who are authorities unto themselves, who will lead the world in a new direction.

Drew Hansen co-founded UpliftKids.org, a curriculum and lesson library helping parents give their kids a spiritual foundation. His business writing is on Forbes.