Home Grown Read online

  “In this fine and eloquent and moving book, Ben Hewitt takes a principled stand for the unconventional childhood, for the intellectual and emotional and soulful nurture of nature.”

  —Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle

  “Ben Hewitt walks you along the lanes of his small family farm right into the heart of parenting. He does not judge the new normal of life’s fever-pitch pace but fills you with the courage to follow your hopes, which may well transform your family.”

  —Kim John Payne, MEd, author of Simplicity Parenting, Beyond Winning, and The Soul of Discipline

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In this most personal of his books to date, Ben Hewitt shows us how small, mindful decisions about day-to-day life can lead to greater awareness of the world in our backyards and beyond. In telling the story of his sons’ unconventional education in the fields and forests surrounding his family’s northern Vermont farm, he demonstrates that the sparks of learning are all around us, just waiting to be discovered. No matter where we live, Home Grown reminds us that learning at any age is a lifelong process, and that the best education is never confined to a classroom.

  Hewitt’s story will inspire you to reclaim passion, curiosity, and creativity, not only for your children, but for yourself.

  BEN HEWITT is the author of Saved, The Town That Food Saved, Making Supper Safe, and articles for magazines such as Bicycling, Discover, Gourmet, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, the New York Times Magazine, Yankee, Taproot, and many others. He and his family live in a self-built, solar-powered house.

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  An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

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  © 2014 by Ben Hewitt

  Cover photograph by Tara Reese

  Cover design by Daniel Urban-Brown

  Illustrations © 2014 by Janet MacLeod

  Grateful acknowledgment to Jennifer Bickart for the poem “The End” by Jeff Bickart in Chapter 6.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hewitt, Ben, 1971–

  Home grown: adventures in parenting off the beaten path, unschooling, and reconnecting with the natural world / Ben Hewitt.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2995-4

  ISBN 978-1-61180-169-9 (paperback)

  1. Home schooling. 2. Non-formal education. 3. Education—Parent participation. 4. Parenting. 5. Nature study. 6. Outdoor education. 7. Experiential learning. 8. Sustainable living. I. Title.

  LC40.H56 2014

  371.04′2—dc23

  2013050554

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: The World at Hand

  Introduction

  Moving Cows

  1. The Reckoning

  Overseers

  2. Coming to the Land

  Fitting into Trees

  3. The View

  Choosing for Ourselves

  4. Drive

  Held

  5. The Early Years

  Then I Walked Home

  6. Big Sticks

  Ask the Cows

  7. The Downside of Convenience

  The Practice

  8. Work of the World

  Letting Them Be

  9. Risk and Responsibility

  Only Human

  10. The List

  The Freedom to Learn

  11. How It Ends

  Epilogue: Moonstruck

  Note to the Reader

  Notes

  E-mail Sign-Up

  Acknowledgments

  More so than anything else I’ve written, this book belongs to my family, and my gratitude to them is boundless. Without my sons, ever-generous in the sharing of their wisdom and delight, it could not have happened. Without Penny, whose commitment to our family and the land endlessly inspires me, it could not have happened. Generosity and commitment are acts born of love, and I am humbled to be the recipient of such gifts. I only hope I can return at least a fraction of what I receive.

  I also wish to thank my editor, Rochelle Bourgault. Only Rochelle truly knows how much this book has evolved from its early drafts, and if I can ask just one more favor of her, it’d be to keep that little secret between us. In return, I will loudly and repeatedly let it be known that without Rochelle’s guidance, insight, and enduring patience, this book would be merely a shadow of what it has become.

  Finally, thanks to my friend Janet MacLeod for generously contributing the art that adds so much to these pages.

  Prologue: The World at Hand

  FIN HAS MADE A BOW. It is gorgeous, long and slender and burnished, its surface silken to the touch. So many hours with his hands on that one length of wood, carving and sanding, or merely for the pleasure of feeling, and it occurs to me that he knows this piece of wood in a way that no one else ever will. In some unspoken way, in a language older than words, he has come to understand its intentions, even as he has communicated his.

  “Watch this,” he says. He pulls back the string and the bow bends. It seems to me as if it should not be able to bend so far without breaking. He slowly releases the tension. “It’s my best one yet.”

  How many bows has Fin made? Thirty? Forty? Certainly more than I can say, more than I’ve kept track of. The first ones of simple sticks, short whips of red maple or yellow birch, notches carved into each end where a string could be wound. The arrows were sticks, too, straight-ish but not straight, capable of a dozen feet of wobbly, slow-motion flight, like a fledgling leaving the nest for the first time. And now, this: a bow hewn of black locust, not merely made but crafted, exactingly tillered for even draw, micrometers of wood fiber shaved at a time until the top and bottom halves flex in perfect symmetry. It is the evolved embodiment of all its predecessors, some long ago broken and fed to the fire, more simply forgotten, abandoned in a corner of the barn or basement. I stumble across them but cannot quite bring myself to discard them. They are evidence of my older son’s studied persistence, an immersion into whatever wild corners of his heart and mind have given rise to this passion. For that reason alone, I leave them where they lie.

  My children do not attend school, and often when people hear of this, I am asked how my sons (Fin and his younger brother, named Rye) learn, or how we teach them, or some combination of the two. And I struggle with my reply, probably because I feel as if the answer being sought will never satisfy the assumptions inherent in the question: that children must be taught to learn. That learning is something that happens primarily in isolation from other aspects of their lives. That teaching is best left to specialists. But of course children needn’t be taught how to learn; they just do. It is as natural and obvious as breathing, as necessary to their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual beings as food is to their physical manifestations.

  Like so much of what my sons know and do, Fin did not learn how to craft a bow because someone told him he should learn to craft a bow. He learned because he had no choice but to learn, because his innate curiosity and desire to learn simply could not be overcome. In the same way that you cannot stop children from learning to walk, or to talk, you cannot stop them from learning anything they set their minds to.


  That is why I say that learning is my children’s nature, just as it is every child’s nature. I am reminded of this when I see Fin bent over his bow, rubbing it again with an oiled cloth, so intent on the task that his world has folded in on itself. What does each pass along the bow’s spine teach him? What does it tell him about the bow, about the tree, about the process? About himself and his place in the world? And I am reminded of this on late-winter mornings when I look out the window above the kitchen sink, the stars still visible in the brightening sky, and I see Rye tromping through the snow, laden with the implements of tapping sugar maple trees in preparation for the season’s first sap run: a cordless drill, a hammer, a small bucketful of taps. Like his older brother, my second child is drawn to tasks that involve the hands and that yield something tangible.

  In these moments, it often occurs to me that while we are socialized to believe that our children’s lives should be constantly expanding into new horizons and opportunities, could it be that we are ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the value of having their world contract? Perhaps we should pause to stem the distractions of this big and wondrous world, so full of possibilities and choice that no matter how determined we are, we cannot expose them to more than the smallest fraction of its offerings. Maybe we could start to show them the richness of experience that waits directly outside our front doors, in our neighborhoods and communities—in our imaginations, even. This is the dream I can’t quite kick, although I sometimes wonder if it’s not a selfish one: my boys will not chase the infinite possibilities of the world at large, but wherever they may be, they will instead continue to find fulfillment in the world at hand.

  A few days after Fin rubbed the final coat of oil into that slender stave of bow wood, I watched from my home-office window as he carried it across the long expanse of our meadow. It was a cool morning, and a soft rain hung in the air. My son walked quickly, and I did not know where he was going, or what purpose drew him, and for the briefest of moments I was visited by the sense that it was not he who was taking the bow with him, but rather the opposite. The bow was leading him. I imagined pushing away from my desk, running down the stairs and out the door, calling after my boy, “Wait! Wait! I want to come!”

  But I did not, and I knew it was right that I did not, and so I merely watched as he disappeared into a dense stand of fir.

  Introduction

  AS I MENTIONED briefly in the prologue, my sons do not attend school. The manner and content of their learning outside the boundaries of the formal education system is much of what this book is about, but because this manner and content cannot be separated from so many other aspects of our life on this Vermont hillside, the stories that follow are not at first glance solely about learning, at least not in the manner we have come to think of learning in this culture. What’s more, the stories I share in the following pages are not merely about my children’s education but also about my wife, Penny’s, and mine and our evolving understanding of how to make our way in this world, informed by our connection to this very piece of land and our work upon it. They are not merely stories about all we are learning but also about all we are unlearning, and about our imperfect quest to inhabit a balanced place that allows us to remain part of the broader world while also living in a way that is true to our values and vision. In a sense, for us this has been the easy part. I have found that the harder part is determining how to conduct our lives in a manner that honors these values and this vision, even as we are continually confronted with evidence that such a quest is impractical, if not downright naive.

  It is the longing for connection to nature and place, along with our belief that such connections are essential to the development of human intellect and spirit that largely informs our decision to keep Fin and Rye out of school. Every hour a child spends in school is an hour he or she is not free to develop these connections outside the microcosm of the classroom. And those hours are not insignificant: Recently, Penny and I calculated the amount of time our sons would already have spent in a classroom if such were their destiny. For Fin, who would likely have already spent six of his twelve years in school, it added up to approximately eight thousand hours, not including homework and commuting time. For Rye, it’d be about half that. When we tacked on the thirty-four hours of television the average American child watches each and every week (we do not own a television), we arrived at the stunning conclusion that in just the past half-dozen years, our elder son would have spent nearly nineteen thousand hours either in school or in front of a TV screen. Assuming he spends fourteen hours of each day awake, that’s more than three-and-a-half years of his waking life, out of only the past six. None of these calculations even includes the plethora of digital devices that command an ever-increasing portion of our children’s attention.

  Is there really anything my sons might learn in school—to say nothing of what is learned in front of the television or peering into a smartphone—that is worth giving up so much of their lives for? Already I have seen how quickly and willingly they master the rote information necessary to make their way in this world, the reading, writing, spelling, and basic math every person needs to communicate with their community. Having witnessed my sons’ capacity to assimilate these skills without interference from an accredited educator or even from Penny or myself, I can report with confidence that formal instruction in these subjects is unnecessary. And while I am not prepared to say there is nothing else of value my boys might learn in those thousands upon thousands of confined classroom hours, I am certain there are more beneficial ways for them to pass their time. I have seen that what they learn when they are granted freedom of exploration and expression, and when they are given opportunity to pursue their true passions without fear of judgment or failure, is much more than a formal education can offer.

  Penny and I do not believe that school is a place of ill intentions. Indeed, it is almost certainly the opposite. But the problems with the way the vast majority of schools are currently structured are inherent in that structure. They are built into the system, with its grading and confinement and stratified social order. In fact, they are so much a part of the way children are educated that even the many well-intentioned and devoted people working within this system cannot overcome the flaws intrinsic to structured compulsory learning. These decent and caring people cannot give my sons back all those thousands of hours. They can do relatively little to help them know and feel and love the very place where they live, or their community beyond their immediate peer groups. They are unlikely to bring my children closer to the plants and creatures of the land, or the land itself. They will not follow them to a century-old maple tree and sit quietly at its base and wonder with them if perhaps they really can feel the tree breathing.

  These are things we wish to provide for our children and, it must be said, for ourselves. These are the things that we believe will allow our sons and us to develop into full expressions of the people we can be. We have come to see our ability to live in this manner as the defining blessing of our time on this earth and the greatest measure of our wealth.

  The stories in the following pages are rooted primarily in observation and experience. They are merely the findings of one person and one family. Still, I will occasionally support my layperson’s perspective with opinions and data supplied by experts in the field. But even though I offer these findings as support for my positions, I hasten to remind you that just because someone—including myself—says something is so does not make it so for you. In other words, it is not so much my intention for this book to convince you of anything in particular but rather to share my family’s journey toward gaining the confidence to trust in our own beliefs and innate wisdom with the hope that it may help you trust in your innate wisdom.

  My intent is not to show you how perfect our life is, nor how we’ve mastered the fine art of educating and parenting in place, all of which would be a lie anyway. Our life is imperfect in no small part because we are imperfect people inhabiting an im
perfect world. We have not mastered the fine art of educating and parenting any more than any other educator or parent has. Like our children, we are learning all the time, and I hope the only thing that can stop us from learning is death. All I can say for certain is that our lives, like yours, are full of joy and despair, struggle and triumph, certainty and uncertainty, and that our views continue to evolve with the passage of time.

  In my own life, I am repeatedly struck by the truth that the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have. In some regards, this is obvious, because if I’m not devoting my days to the accumulation of money and status, I am liberated to pursue other things. But the freedom I speak of is more than temporal; it is also a freedom of emotion and spirit, to know that happiness and fulfillment can be found in the smallest and simplest of places and things. I think of the austere dullness of a November day, the gradations of color reduced to slim subtleties, beauty defined as much by what is absent as by what is present. I think of the way I’m so often caught off guard by some small, commonplace moment: the sight of our pet Muscovy duck, Web, waddling across the pasture; or seeing Fin and Rye moving over the land together on their way to or from the woods. From the way their heads are tipped just the slightest bit toward one another, I know they are talking. Sometimes, I cannot even identify a trigger, like when I am walking down the farm road and I am suddenly swept by a sense of knowing my place. Not just in the here and now, but in the grand, infinite scheme of things and forces far beyond my capacity to even imagine.