HomeSteading School27thMarch
Whether you home school or not, this blog may be relevant to you. One day I was hanging out with a circle of Trackers staff. We were having pizza that Jason made from his sourdough starter. It was topped with buffalo we recently butchered from a local rancher. I asked the question, how can we provide an immersion experience for kids, not just young adults? How can we take the best of our full-time program and truly bring it into family life? After a few more quips, the answer dawned upon us. What we do in the immersion program is what we all should experience at a much younger age...
-foraging and gathering food in bountiful amounts to feed the village
-learning how to work with local resources to shelter and clothe our family
-finding real connection to the natural world
Conventional outdoor education tries to tell us that "nature connection" is the most important piece. At Trackers we see accountability to family and care for land as inseparable. You're not really connected until your life and livelihood depends on it. We realized what nature immersion actually means: leaving behind this abstract connection to the wilderness, instead moving through the seasonal cycles that help a child's days find real purpose, with real tasks for their family and village.
Kids learn about plants and natural history while gathering nettles to take home for the family. They learn about life processes while working a real garden. There are countless opportunities to read, do math and fully apply hard academic subjects while staying informed as to local harvesting laws, making cottage industry budgets and business plans and practicing the science of food preservation. The goal cannot be the cursory or watered down experiences schools now call "project based learning", instead it has to be full immersion. Like the child who is an integral part of the working life of an indigenous village or a homesteaded farm, this experience would need to make a poignant contribution and impact to the health and livelihood of the family...
-the gardening would need to yield better or more then a CSA
-fish or meat harvest would have to mean a full freezer of fillets or pantry of sausage
-canning would need to provide enough to be used everyday throughout the winter and spring
-clothing would never be purchased again but resourced from all kinds of fabrics to produce a whole new aesthetic and comfortability of kid fashion
-business plans must be designed to grow and become a legitimate road map to making a living as the child transitions to young adulthood
-kids have to be able to get around the urban wilds safely and competently by bike, walking, bus and more
-areas of harvest must dramatically and clearly increase in diversity and abundance over the years
Does your community, charter or private school accomplish these things? They easily could, human children have been doing this for millions of years before we ever developed pedagogies or models of education.
During that night of buffalo pizza, the idea of an HomeSteading School was born. Get the pun. "Home school" plus "Homesteading" equals HomeSteading School. For awhile now we've been doing some initial planning behind our not so closed doors. At this point we're opening the conversation to parents. What do you think? Would you want your kids to literally be Urban Homesteaders for two, three or even four days a week? Would you worry if the skills they learn are actually relevant? Do you want to challenge our hypothesis and say that these are not important to have? Tell us more, my email is tony@trackersnw.com. Join the conversation.
Class roll...
Nature of the Village Spring Family Camp: May 30-June 5, 2009 Permaculture Village at Lost Valley
Nature of the Village Fall Family Camp: September 6-12, 2009 Village at Trackers Land
Learn more about Nature of Village
Homeschool Outdoors, Spring Session: Not yet HomeSteading School, just being free outside. Begins April 7 in 8 week sessions
Learn more about Homeschool Outdoors
Camps for Waldorf Spring Break: April 6-16, 2009
Learn more about Camps for Waldorf Spring Break
