Home Grown Read online

  What I gain from these moments—the quick bloom of warmth they bring, the quiet sense of knowing that there is nothing else I need—cannot be readily measured, and because it cannot be measured, it cannot be traded. It is my own wealth. It is unique to me and therefore it is secure.

  It is at once liberating, daunting, exciting, and, it must be said, occasionally frightening to realize the extent to which my world is in my hands. I am freer than I was told as a child; I am freer than I was led to believe.

  This is my true power, and it is not the false power of that which can be bought or traded or accumulated. What I do with my life—how I raise my children, how I engage with others and with the natural world, and how I pass my time—is an expression of my belief in what is possible. It is an expression of my vision for the world I wish to inhabit, and for the world I wish for my children to inhabit.

  It is a huge honor to share my vision for this world—or parts of it, at least—with you. I am grateful for the opportunity, and I am grateful for the gift of your time and attention.

  MOVING COWS

  In the early mornings of summer, before it is fully light, I walk the rutted farm road to the lower pasture, where I’ll move the cows into a fresh paddock for the day’s grazing. The road curves past the greenhouse where the slowly ripening tomato crop hangs from weary vines, then past the sawmill with the unfinished frame of its roof looming over me like an admonishment, one of those tasks that never seems to rise high enough on the ever-shifting list of priorities to earn our attention. Past the currant bushes Rye planted the summer before, hauling fieldstones in his wagon to fashion a protective border around them. He’d been afraid I’d crush them with the tractor, and how could I blame him? There was precedent for such concern. Past the chicken coop, where our rooster, Blood, crows lustily, tending to his harem in the manner of all roosters throughout millennia.

  Of all the daily chores I perform on this small farm, moving the cows feels most like a dance, its movements rehearsed and refined over thousands of mornings. My partners lumber and shuffle as they position themselves by the corner of the fence they know will be first to drop. When it does, they move with uncharacteristic zeal, heads bent to the dew-wet grass rising above their knees like ocean surf. Cows are not terribly ambitious creatures—this is much of what I love about them—but a paddock of lush fodder awakens something primal in them. I suspect it’s not dissimilar to the thing that awakens in me when Penny pulls a batch of cookies from the oven.

  I love moving cows because I get to come back from moving cows, retracing my steps in the milky light of predawn. Often, I am returning at just the moment my family is emerging from the house, embarking on their respective chores, and I stop simply for the pleasure of the scene before me. Penny going to collect Apple for morning milking, striding down the cow path in that purposeful way of hers, the sun just beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon behind her. Rye walking toward the goat pen, the implements of his task dangling from his small hands: the pail of warm water for washing Flora’s udder and his little quart milking jug. Behind him, Fin carrying a flake of hay and a bucket of water. For a moment, one of those fragments of time when everything seems to coalesce in a way that answers some unasked question, I know everything I need to know. I feel everything I need to feel.

  I am just realizing, late learner that I am, the extent to which it is not just the sights, but also the smells, sounds, and tactile sensations of our little farm that add to my life. Past the tomato house, the thick scent of soil and sharp, strangely acrid-sweet smell of ripening fruit. Past the sawmill, and the smell of sawdust, like bread baking. At the sugar bush, the movement of the leaves, like someone whispering something in your ear that you can’t quite make out, and with it the push of breeze across my face, maybe lifting off the pond or funneling down the pasture on a northward trajectory. Past the chickens, and the learned response of pleasure at the smell of their manure, knowing what it does for the tomatoes. Growing food is one of those rare undertakings with the capacity to alter your perceptions so completely that something that might once have seemed objectionable and even disgusting becomes beautiful as the elegance of its true purpose is revealed. Down by the cows, the distinctive smell of bovine—the warm, contented essence of their being.

  In winter, there is a distinct shift. Instead, the air smells of hay as I feed the cows every morning and evening. At least once a day, one or more of the cows kindly tolerates me burying my face in their soft hides and simply breathing for a minute, one of the small, strange luxuries in my small, strange life. And fresh-cut wood: for the sawmill, fir and spruce and hemlock, and for the woodstove, maple and beech, birch and ash. Even the saw has a smell, the specific acridness of a two-stroke motor run hot and fast. Every morning, before anything else, the first hungry flame of the cookstove fire, and then the burned odor of coffee bubbling over onto the stovetop.

  The older I get, the more I find myself sniffing the air, or reaching to run a hand across one of the animals’ backs, or simply standing and listening to the ever-changing melody of our place. I did not used to do these things, or if I did, not so frequently and consciously, and I think this is because the more I have allowed myself to experience this place, the more I have come to appreciate it. And the more I come to appreciate it, the more I am able to experience it, to become immersed in it, to perceive myself as being what I truly am. Not master of my domain, but in truth little more than a thread woven into its fabric, merely one of the millions of small threads—some visible, but many more not—that comprise the whole.

  1

  The Reckoning

  A BIT MORE THAN FOUR YEARS after we first walked the land we would eventually purchase, Penny and I became parents when our first son, Finlay, was born. (Rye was born nearly three years later).

  Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent (and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I’ve ever learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children. This is in no small part because we cannot be masters of our children’s fates, and to pretend otherwise is to engage in both delusion and hubris. This does not stop parents from trying, of course. We are forever attempting to engineer our children’s lives, most often in ways we believe will deliver them to some predetermined future, and I often remind myself that whatever stories my sons choose to write with their lives are not mine to tell or even to imagine.

  This is not to say that we are helpless to direct our children. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the simple fact that our sons and daughters will always find ways to surprise us, and that often these surprises will thwart specific hopes we might have held on their behalf. In my experience, the more specific the hope, the more likely it will go unfulfilled. But of course I cannot fully stop myself from wanting on my boys’ behalf. I am their father, after all. I am only human.

  Of all the things I want for them, connection to place and a sense of knowing how they fit into this world usurps all others. I want this for them more than happiness, because I think mere happiness is a shallow elucidation of the human experience, and by itself is not a particularly sturdy emotional foundation upon which to build a fulfilling life. I want this for them more than success, at least insofar as our culture has come to define success as being a product of money and power and recognition. I want this for them more than physical vitality, because I believe that good health—and not just health of body, but also of emotion and spirit—is only possible when one feels connected to and secure in their place.

  To be clear, this does not mean that my sons must remain on this land until the end of their physical lives; while the connection I’m talking about can surely be instilled by a particular place, this connection can also travel, because this connection is a bond that cannot be broken. It is permanent and unconditional, and it is impervious to distance or circumstance, much like the bond between siblings or parent and child. In this sense, it
is not even a connection to a specific place; it is a connection to oneself. It is a sense of understanding how one fits into a great, vast world in which both beauty and tragedy can overwhelm.

  I don’t know precisely what this connection looks and feels like, in part because Penny and I are learning the shape of this connection alongside our sons. Like most children of our generation—indeed, like most children of our sons’ generation—we did not grow up free to determine our place in the world. Like most children, we were told our place. We were not told this unkindly, nor without tremendous love. We were not told this overtly. Rather, we were unquestioningly expected to do as the majority of our childhood peers did, with little consideration given as to what was truly being asked of us and what the cost might be. Along with the vast majority of our peers, Penny and I passed the formative years of our respective childhoods in school, as students of what we were told we must learn. That there are other ways of learning was never considered. That there are other things to learn, many of which cannot be measured or graded or segregated by subject, was never discussed. That our prescribed educations might actually erode our self-confidence, rather than develop it, occurred to no one.

  It is not difficult to understand why these things were not considered or discussed; it is not difficult to understand why it occurred to no one that passing the majority of our childhood in school might strip us of confidence. Because the same thing happened to our parents. To call into question the wisdom of convention requires a degree of self-assuredness that rarely survives the eroding impact of standardized, hierarchical education. Such questioning also places one in the uncomfortable position of cutting against the cultural grain, of being perceived as arrogant, eccentric, perhaps even dangerous, and few parents—including Penny and myself—wish to be perceived in this manner.

  I realize there is nothing I can do to guarantee that Fin and Rye will develop the connection I speak of. The uncomfortable truth lurking in every parent’s heart—including mine—is this: we cannot know what will become of our children. This is what I mean when I say it might even be dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children, because the almost inevitable truth is that at least some of our desires will remain unfulfilled. Ever since Icarus disregarded his father’s advice and flew fatally close to the sun, children have surprised and defied their parents, and I sometimes think my greatest challenge is to not grant surprise and defiance the power to disappoint me.

  So, yes, I cannot know what will become of my sons. But I also know what I have seen, which is that the more freedom and autonomy I allow my children to follow their passions and to learn on their own terms, the more passionate and eager to learn they become. The more engaged they become. And, inasmuch as I grant myself the same freedom and autonomy, the more engaged I become. The more I learn.

  Since Penny and I cannot know what the future holds for our sons, we have chosen to focus intently on what the present offers them, on how the small moments of their days can teach and nurture them in ways that are both intentional and, often as not, unintentional and entirely unexpected. We have chosen to educate Fin and Rye in the context of a life-learning process known colloquially as “unschooling.” This means that our sons do not attend public or private school, and they do not follow a structured curriculum, unless exploring the fields and forests around our home can be considered a “curriculum.” They are not assigned homework, and they do not take tests. Their performance is not graded, nor is it compared to the performance of their peers. They are not compelled to sit at a desk, or to study any particular subject for any particular period of time.

  There is a popular perception linking homeschooling to religious beliefs. In a 2007 National Center for Education Statistics survey, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” influenced their decision to educate at home. Of course, “moral instruction” can occur in the absence of religious instruction, so it’s impossible to know with certainty if a full 80-plus percent of the estimated two million US homeschoolers are motivated by religion. What is indisputable, however, is the public perception that homeschooling families are, by and large, stridently, if not fundamentally, religious.

  We do not identify with any particular religion (which does not mean we are not spiritual). In fact, I am not aware of a single homeschooling or unschooling family in our community—and there are many—that chooses home education in order to provide religious instruction. Perhaps our community is merely anomalous, or perhaps our experience is indicative of a shift in the broader community of homeschooling and unschooling families. Probably, it’s a little of each. Whatever the case, it is clear that most of the homeschoolers we have contact with choose home education for roughly the same reason we do: their vision for what a child’s education should and can be does not align with what the institutionalized educational system offers. Often, they are further motivated by a desire to spare their children the indignities they suffered at the hands of the public school system.

  The first known recorded use of the term unschooling came in 1977, in the second issue of a magazine called Growing Without Schooling: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools non-compulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”1

  Growing Without Schooling was published by the late John Holt, an educator and author of the seminal How Children Fail (along with ten other books on the subject of children and education), which forwards Holt’s observation that children are innately intelligent and inclined to learn. The problem, according to Holt, is that these innate qualities are actually stunted by institutionalized education, which is simply unable to serve the individual child in the context of its need to usher large groups of youth through a standardized, performance-based curriculum. Apparently, at least a few people agree, because How Children Fail has sold over one million copies.

  Holt was a proponent of both homeschooling and unschooling, which are understandably often confused and thought to be one and the same. This is because unschooling generally occurs at home and can rightly be considered a subset of homeschooling. But unschooling is also very different from traditional homeschooling, which relies on textbooks, study time, and in some cases, prepackaged curriculums. I don’t mean to suggest that Fin and Rye do not spend plenty of time with their noses in books, or that they don’t study things. On both accounts, they very much do. But the subjects of their study are extensions of their natural interests and passions. These subjects are not assigned to them; they are chosen by them. It is within the context of these choices—of their personal interests and passions—that they learn the rote, essential skills such as math and spelling which enable them to function in

  the world.

  Perhaps the best way to clarify the connection between unschooling and homeschooling is to understand that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. It should also be said that the two are not mutually exclusive; indeed, we know many families that combine elements of both unschooling and more traditional homeschooling. One of the beautiful things about choosing to educate your children at home is that it affords you the freedom to explore and experiment. And, not incidentally, it allows you to observe your children, because you cannot truly know how your child responds to a particular learning style unless you are there to witness its effects.

  Of the educational options available to parents in America, unschooling is surely the least formal and structured. For precisely this reason, it is also the most difficult to describe with any accuracy, if for no other reason than that it has no exact definition. Wikipedia calls it “a range of educational philosophies surrounding the primary belief that education is a greater undertaking than school,” which I suppose is close enough, although the word range certainly leaves plenty open to interpretation. But then, that�
�s sort of the point: Unschooling cannot and should not adhere to any particular definition. It should be as fluid, imprecise, and individualized as the families and children practicing it. In this regard, it is the antithesis of contemporary institutionalized education, with its strict adherence to schedule, standardized testing, and age-group learning. The definition Penny and I have settled on is “learning through living.” It is perhaps no more precise than what Wikipedia offers, but it feels most accurate and honest to us. Finlay and Rye live their lives. And as they live, they learn.

  Having spent the past few paragraphs attempting to define un-schooling, I must now admit I don’t even like the term all that much. To me, it suggests undoing and rejection, when in fact we strive for a style of learning that is active and inclusive, that encourages engagement and leverages a child’s natural curiosity and love of learning to nourish body, mind, and spirit. If that sounds far-fetched, I contend it is only because we have come to expect so little of our children’s education.

  Furthermore, we are not undoing school; Fin and Rye have never even been to school. There is nothing to undo. And while they do not attend a formal educational institution, we are not so much rejecting this option as actively choosing an alternate path. In fact, we are grateful for our town’s public school and for what it brings to our community. Are there problems inherent in institutionalized education? Obviously, I believe there are. But I am not blind to the fact that home education is simply not an option for many parents, even if it might be their preference (this fact, which is directly related to issues of income and debt and other cultural expectations surrounding success, will be a subject of discussion in further chapters). Given this reality, I am extremely thankful that at least our community has the option of keeping its school-aged children in town.