Back to School, Back to the Land

This week as our youth are going back to school, our farmers are busily attending to their last yielding crops, preparing the squash and pumpkins.  The anticipation for September is ubiquitous; felt in the urgency of the migrating birds moving south, the kids who have already separated from summer and the beginning of fashion week's global tour. And the leaves are marked in colour with the appearance of fall.

As I helped Farmer Steve at his farm in the Catskills today, I thought about all those youth, suddenly sitting in hard chairs in their classrooms.  The tomatoes were dripping off the vine and we were trying to keep up with them, plucking out the perfect ones by the gentle handful.  We filled buckets and leaned over our legs, reaching forward and down. 'This is a primal position' Steve told me, 'it just feels so good... as though you are operating from an ancient place of humanity.' In the morning light the grass was still dewy and our motions were matched with conversation and then silence as we each moved down the rows.

Overcome by rich smells of soil, ripening tomatoes and rotten ones I thought about the ways that students are able to use their senses in the classroom.  Our hands and nose, ears and eyes are such valuable tools for deep learning.

“Deep learning is learning that takes root in our apparatus of understanding, in the embedded meanings that define us and that we use to define the world.”  

What better way for something to become relevant,  than if it is experienced first hand and with all the senses.

I think this is one of the defining characteristics of 21st century education.  And it's not a new idea; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote about it in his 1762 treaty 'On Education' or 'Emile.'  His ideas were radical at the time, but now his belief in 'natural education' could be essential for the technology driven next generation.  He believed in embodied knowledge.  Rousseau believed in bringing the student to life.  He wrote, 'to live is not to breath, it is to Act! to make use of our senses, our facilities (42).'

Having the skills to cultivate land has long been considered one of the virtues of the wise.  It has the capacity to teach us crafts both technical and conceptual.  We are made to understand seasons, inter-relativity, responsibility, ownership, exchange, morality.  We are meant to know and recognize our relation to other living things and their flourishing.  So as we're pulling carrots out of the ground and shaking the moist soil back to the earth, I'm thinking about the senses of our next generation.  I'm remembering how freedom as a child is learning and that nature provides the greatest playground.  I want our youth to understand that the boundless connectivity of the World Wide Web is also visible in the natural world.  So how can we get more youth onto farms and into the woods?  I know that my own capacity to pay attention is increased by the feeling of sun on my neck, clean air and expanse.  Why is it so easy to diagnose ADHD, but rarely a finding of 'nature deficit disorder (NDD)?'

Richard Louv coined the term NDD in his book 'Last Child in the Woods,' which brings together new studies indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for a child's healthy physical and emotional development. Our beloved American naturalist Thoreau said it;

"Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature lying all around, with such beauty, such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society; to that culture which is exlusively an interaction of man on man."

Many educated Boomers, X and Y-generations are making their own return to subsistance or community farming.  I know countless farmers with countless degrees who have given up high paying jobs in order to cultivate land.  What is this shift?  And how can we get youth on board?  As we move beyond outdated modes of educating, let us remember how freedom in youth and connection to  'place' are at the core of deep learning.  In a world of constant flux and accelerating information we could all use more connection to the soil.  It's those moments of loosing time to nature's harmony that we begin to come back to ourselves.  And in our flourishing, we are learned.

Photos and text by Rebecca Thom, 2012