Recently Mercedes and I have been thinking of starting a farm school. So here are some of the reasons why I think a farm school is a good idea.
The most important reason to support a farm school is that it can give kids an opportunity to feel empowered with respect to their physical environment. Kids can tell when work is bullshit. And most of what they do is either entertainment or bullshit.
In the modern world, children are either incapable of, or protected from, almost every kind of meaningful work. They are not sufficiently well developed to engage in a modern economy. Hence, the work we give them often has no import other than to teach them something. But doing things that don’t matter is infantilizing.
So, one of the objectives of a farm school is to give kids the chance to do work that matters. Namely, they can learn about, and they do work maintaining a property and living things on the property. The work matters in the sense that if they don’t care for things, the property can become run down, and living things can suffer or die.
Of course, the work done on a farm school might not be much more important in terms of the global economy than a bullshit social studies worksheet. But the idea is that it can be made to feel more important, and that feeling is the healthy psychological development.
So let’s talk a little bit more about what I have in mind when I say healthy psychological development. Mostly, what I mean is a sense of empowerment. One key fact about children is that they start out pretty powerless, and then slowly grow into powerful adult human beings.
In my view there are two main kinds of power: the power to form your own local environment, and the power to compete in the external environment. Also, there are three main areas of development: Physical, Social, and Intellectual. Many of the things that a young person needs to learn can be placed on graph defined by these axes (i.e., Physical-Social-Intellectual on the horizontal axis and Local-Universal on the vertical axis).
Most schools tend to focus on the upper right hand quadrant. Also, note there is a correlation between the two dimensions. That is, local things tend to be more physical and universal things tend to be more intellectual.
I am not really claiming any of these subjects are perfectly placed on the chart, it’s just to give you an idea. ( Also, I added one of my own subjects, Filiology, by which I mean the study of small group dynamics — especially family dynamics). Anyway, the term “school” is so biased towards the upper right hand quadrant that adding the term Farm can be seen as a semantic representation of the need for a balanced education.
Specifically, there are two kinds of balance. Schools need to be more focused on physical and social development (as opposed to just intellectual development), and they need to be more empowering in the sense of giving people the skills to build local worlds, rather than just preparing them to compete in the global one.
Thus, the central philosophy of farm school (at least my idea of farm school) is one of balance and empowerment. Since young kids are very physical and social beings, they are more capable of developing a sense of empowerment in a local context. Schools that provide no explicit ways of developing tools for creating, maintaining, and manipulating a local environment will find themselves reduced to giving bullshit tasks that have no purpose other than training for some far off (and likely non-existent) competition.
In my view, one of the reasons that schools focus on intellectual development at the expense of physical and social empowerment is that they are based on an ideology in which external engagement (i.e., competition and cooperation with strangers) is more important than internal engagement (i.e., cooperation with friends and family).
In a way, this is totally predictable because most schools are the paid for by external institutions (i.e., governments). We don’t really expect (or want) large scale institutions to take responsibility for teaching people how to live their small scale lives. As a consequence, I wouldn’t expect government to really take an interest in a balanced education. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. It just means we need smaller institutions to do it.
In other words, a Farm School is almost certainly going to be a local school. That means no far off institution going to do it for you. If you want a farm school, you need to build a farm school. Of course, your own education was probably so focused on external engagement that you don’t know how to build local institutions. Neither do I. But we have to start somewhere.
