School is for nurturing children’s innate talents and helping them figure out where those gifts, necessarily diverse, fit in the whole.
Excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed:
Throughout the first five years of my older daughter’s life, I watched her dance through the clover, climb trees, puddle jump and play her way through the day. As she stood on the threshold to kindergarten, I pictured her stuck inside at a desk, cut off from her relationship to the wild, and my stomach sank. I believe that school is for nurturing children’s innate talents and helping them figure out where those gifts, necessarily diverse, fit in the whole. The school system, by contrast, tends to produce a monoculture. Despite the heroic efforts of many thoughtful, caring teachers, public school mostly prepares children to be obedient workers and fails millions of students who don’t fit the mold.
So I developed a method called Wildschooling, a form of home-schooling that celebrates an interconnected, relational view of nature, which I now practice with my two daughters and two nieces on our farm near Cedar Springs, Mich. We’re hardly the first people to approach education this way; numerous earth-centered cultures, such as the Anishinabe of our region, and Richard Louv, the author of “Last Child in the Woods,” are just a few important influences.
Wildschooling looks different for each family. If you browse the Facebook group I started six years ago, 90,000 members strong now, there are single parents and city dwellers practicing it all over the world. And while it’s a privilege to undertake any form of home-schooling, Wildschooling does not require a rural setting or big backyard. As long as you’ve got a tree on your block or a community garden nearby, you can Wildschool.
Sometimes, people assume that Wildschooling means there are no lessons or that it means letting your children run aimlessly through the woods. My girls do plenty of running around — usually after lunch for about two hours — but in the mornings, we do a standard math curriculum and practice our music. Right now we are learning to sing and to play piano and violin. Violin is taught by a fellow home-schooler who is 13.
After math and music, we do our farm chores, like gathering eggs and harvesting the never-ending supply of zucchini from the garden. We recently had to build a new chicken coop, which became a lesson on how to use graph paper to draft something to scale. Once you start approaching learning this way, you realize life is the curriculum. If we need to write a letter to someone, for example, we’ll learn how to write a letter. If the frogs are singing, we’ll learn about frogs.
