Two years ago, I enrolled my daughter in a farm school in our area. A friend of mine told me that her sons attended the forest school but that there was also a farm school that meets once a week for over five hours of outdoor time, rain or shine. The two schools have been developed for homeschooling families who want their children to learn outdoor survival skills or how to work on a farm. I viewed it as a great opportunity for my daughter to grow in discipline, husbandry, and to spend an entire day outside in God’s Creation each week.
The farm school continues to be a wonderful experience for her. She is now in her third year and is one of the senior students. In fact, the owner of the farm has hired her on as an intern, feeding all the farm animals one day a week on top of her farm school day. My daughter has developed a deep love for horses. She’s learning how difficult farming can be but that the reward is great when she perseveres through the challenges. In a time when children spend too much time indoors and on screens, this program provides a much-needed opportunity to live in Creation and in the real world.
Something started happening to the program this year that I have noticed time and again in different schools. It was one of the reasons my husband and I pulled her from the Catholic schools. Parents began complaining that the program didn’t provide enough STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) homework. The left-brain dominance of our culture seeks to take over everything. The only “real” fields to study are in the math and sciences. Not to mention that what was meant to be an apprenticeship is falling prey to the constant impulse to turn everything into some form of utility with recordable progress.
I saw this in the Catholic schools as well. There was a constant push for more required STEM projects while theology, literature, art, history, and other humanities were seen as secondary or unnecessary. The programs were almost entirely secular and seldom intertwined with our Catholic Faith the way classical schools and homeschool curricula are designed. On top of this, the widespread issuing of laptops to young students led to a breakdown in learning as students were introduced to the addictive nature of screens.
We are ruining entire fields of study and experiences for our children by following the zeitgeist that says only STEM matters. Every time I see a Tesla cybertruck on the road I turn to my husband and/or daughter and say: “The future looks pretty ugly.” The pure left-brain tendency to dominate and control everything is overtaking the need to experience the beautiful, good, and true for its own sake. The left-brained technocrats cannot stand doing something that doesn’t have a particular use. Farm school cannot be experienced for its own sake. It must serve as a quantifiable use on a transcript.
This mentality completely misses the point. Farm school is about experience, not getting a science grade. It is about returning to the land, seeing where our food comes from, being good stewards, and getting to know the rhythms of nature. We have become so used to everything being in a textbook that we have forgotten how to read God’s textbook that is Creation. My daughter learned more science when I used to take her out in my kayak on the lake to look for wildlife and habitats than she did from the textbook that talked about the same thing.
The farm school students don’t need a textbook or homework. They are learning by hand how to feed, water, and care for the animals. They are learning how to grow a garden, can, slaughter chickens, and collect eggs. Why would they also need to do a worksheet to confirm something they know how to do? Farmers don’t do worksheets to demonstrate they know how to milk a cow or sow a field.
My daughter knows how to pick hooves, groom, feed, water, and ride horses. She’s learning how to feed the pigs without them mobbing and knocking her down. She’s figuring out through problem-solving how to separate the baby calf who is in the same pen, so the pigs don’t eat the cow’s food. She frees goats who get trapped in fences. She chases chickens who escape as she tries to feed them. She’s learning how to mend fences and to build hutches for rabbits, chickens, and other fowls. She’s living science, not just reading about it.
We have forgotten that learning does not only come from a textbook and not everything should be reduced to STEM. It is the right-brain that allows us to build beautiful things, to paint incredible pictures, to relish a symphony, and to look out across the farm to see God’s glory in His Creation for its own sake, not to dissect it. Catholics need to avoid the impulse of following the crowd. We forget our own patrimony when we blindly turn everything into a use. There is a great danger at present that we have become more worried about fitting in with the world than being leaven for the world.
There is a reason classical schools are growing as a response to the direction many Catholic schools have taken. Too many Catholic schools forgot their own identity and modeled their programs off secular standards with a sole focus of getting students into the ivy leagues. I wouldn’t send my daughter to an ivy league school right now if it was free. Education is first and foremost an aspect of helping us grow in holiness and a means by which we walk towards Christ. It helps form us into well-rounded people. It should teach us to grow in virtue. Our Faith should be taught across the curriculum rather than being a check box in a secular education. We should be seeking to raise saints, not world power holders.
The same impulse of the parents who want to completely change the farm school is the same one that has driven Catholic education away from its primary goal. It is to allow the current zeitgeist to set the standard rather than hold firm to our true purpose. We should look different from the culture. We can’t transform the culture if we conform ourselves to it. Farm school was meant to be an apprenticeship not a science class. Catholic education is meant to help students become saints and to awaken wonder. Instead, conformity to the age keeps leading to an identity crisis and loss of purpose.
We live in an age when everything is being dismantled by competing ideologies. Everyone wants to impose their will on every aspect of our lives to the detriment of our children. We are teaching our children that nothing should be experienced or enjoyed for its own sake. We are teaching them that they should ignore the reality right in front of them that is tangible and instead embrace screens. We want to embrace the lesser thing rather than the real good right in front of us. No wonder Gen Z and Gen Alpha are racked with anxiety and listlessness. They’ve been taught to embrace illusion.
Our kids need the opportunity to freely experience the glories of God’s Creation. They need to be formed with a Catholic worldview rather than a secular one. They need us to show them how to embrace reality rather than imitation. They need to be taught that not everything can or should be reduced to utility. We need to reclaim our Catholic vision and reject the secular left-brain mindset that we’ve allowed to overtake our identity. We need to return to a place of greater balance between the different fields and hemispheres of the brain. More than anything, we need to stop trying to control everything.
Photo by Alvin David on Unsplash
