Horticulture Magazine Excerpt

Bill McElwain, a Harvard man who had taught French, run a laundromat, and become a discouraged farmer, moved to the prosperous town of Weston Mass, and saw a lot of fertile suburban land going to waste, on the way to and from his work in Boston (rehabilitating houses in the South End.)

He saw suburban teen-agers with few alternatives to football, tennis, drama or boredom, and he saw poor city people paying more for food in Roxbury than he was in Weston. (Bill surveyed the cost of twenty-five identical items in both areas and counted a 13% difference).

In April 1970, Bill began with borrowed hand tools and donations of seed and fertilizer. With a handful of dedicated helpers, he cultivated almost an acre; the produce was trucked into Roxbury and distributed free to a children's food program and a housing project. There, residents collected donations that found their way back to the farm.

Within a year, Bill was hired as project director of the new Weston Youth Commission. In 1972, he convinced the town to buy the farmland. He ignited a small but dedicated cadre of supporters, including enough people in the volunteer government to insure the continued support of the town. More kids got involved with the farm, and with the proceeds from the vegetables (now sold in Boston for a nominal $1 a crate) he paid workers a minimum wage. The town put more money and equipment into the project, and by 1975 the farm was growing as much as 100 tons of produce a year. About 25% of this was sold locally; the rest went into Boston.

Bill McElwain was 50 years old when the town bought the farm. He is still project director for the Youth Commission, despite his cavalier view of keeping fiscal records, and he still writes a column for the Weston Town Crier, in which he proposes dozens of other activities for the young to take part in.

One fall, for instance, Bill counted 600 maple trees along Weston roadsides. In a year and a half, he and a crew built a sugarhouse near the junior high school (using pine boards milled from local trees); scrounged buckets, taps, and evaporating equipment; and produce a cash crop of 250 gallons of grade A maple syrup. There was cider pressing, orchard reclamation, firewood cutting, crate making, construction of a small observatory, and an alternative course at the high school with regular field trips to Boston's ethnic neighborhoods, and to rural New Hampshire.

Virtually all his plans, large or small, have these common ingredients: they provide young people with paying jobs that are educational, socially useful, and fun; they operate on a small scale, need little capital, and use readily available resources, preferably neglected ones; and they bring a variety of people together to solve common problems in an enjoyable context. Building community is one of Bill's more crucial goals, and he'll seize any opportunity--planting, harvesting, "sugaring off", a woodcarving workshop, or May Day--to bring folks together for a festive occasion.

Teach Your Own, updated

The latest edition of Teach Your Own is interestingin that it takes the original text from John Holt, written in the 70s, and interlards it with commentary from Pat Farenga, who ran Holt Associates before and after Holt’s death, and who provides commentary from actual parents who wrote letters to the Holt newsletter, Growing without Schooling.

• p. xxviii At the same time I was seeing more and more evidence that most adults actively distrust and dislike most children, even their own, and quite often especially their own. In a nutshell, people whose lives are hard, boring, painful, meaningless–people who suffer–tend to resent those who suffer less than they do, and will make them suffer if they can.

• …schools were doing exactly what they had always done and what people wanted them to do. Teach children about Reality. Teach them that Life is No Picnic. Teach them to Shut up and Do What You’re Told…what they want their child to learn is how to work. By that they don’t mean to do good and skillful work that they can be proud of…they want their children, when their time comes, to be able and willing, to hold down full-time painful jobs of their own.

• p. 21. Some researchers have noted the loss of spontaneous neighborhood and family play among our young because, in addition to more homework than we had as kids, they are being taken to more enrichment classes, organized sports run by adult professionals, and extracurricular activities. Parents do this believing that children need to do these things in order to get good jobs as adults, or scholarships, or just entrance to colleges.

• p. 32 Most schools are far more concerned to have children accept the values of mass society than to help them resist them. When school people hear about people teaching their children at home, they almost always say, “but aren’t you afraid that your children are going to grow up to be different, outsiders, misfits, unable to adjust to society?” They take it for granted that in order to live reasonably happy, usefully, and successfully in the world you have to be mostly like other people.

• p. 41. To the extent that teaching involves and requires some real skills, these have long been well understood. They are no mystery. Teaching skills are among the many commonsense things about dealing with other people that, unless we are mistaught, we learn just by living. In any community people have always known that if you wanted to find out how to get somewhere or so something, some people are better to ask than others. For a long, long time, people who were good at sharing what they knew have realized certain things:
• to help people learn something, you must first understand what they already know;
• showing people how to do something is better than telling them, and letting them do it themselves is best of all;
• you mustn’t tell or show too much at once, since people digest new ideas slowly and must feel secure with new skills or knowledge before they are ready for more;
• you must give people as much time as they want and need to absorb what you have shown or told them;
• instead of testing their understanding with questions you must let them show how much or little they understand by the questions they ask you;
• you must not get impatient or angry when people don’t understand; scaring people only blocks learning.
• p. 43 Years ago I read that one or more inner-city schools had tried the experiment of letting fifth graders teach first graders to read. They found, first, that the first graders learned faster than similar first graders taught by trained teachers themselves, and secondly, that the fifth graders who were teaching them, many or most of whom had not been good readers themselves, also improved a great deal in their reading.

• p. 56 (book recommended) The Four-Thirds solution: Solving the Childcare Crisis in America Today by Stanley Greenspan in which parents take 2/3 times jobs, work from home, etc.

• p. 108 (quote from Growing without Schooling letter): It is my habit to wake up early and spend an hour or two quietly planning my day according to what needs doing and what I feel like. But on my “work” days I find it very difficult to “get into” that kind of contemplation. Such a large chunk of the day is already planned for me. If I go to work several consecutive days, by the fourth or fifth day I feel very removed from the core of myself, and find it much easier to contemplate doing what at other times would seem irresponsible to me…When I abdicate the responsibility for structuring my own time, a certain moral strength seems to be lost as well.

• p. 119. It would be a fine thing if in any community there were more places for children, and indeed people of all ages, to get together and do various kinds of things…In some ways, the country clubs that rich folks belong to are a much better model of what we want than a school. Take away the eighteen-hold golf courses, the elaborate tennis courts and other facilities, the palatial clubhouse, and what’s left is very close in spirit to what we are after. You don’t have to play golf just because you go to the golf club. You don’t have to do anything. There are certain kinds of resources there for you to use, if you want, but you can spend the day there sitting in a chair and looking at the sky.

• p. 203. The other day a young person wrote me saying, “I want to work with children.” Such letters come often. They make me want to say, “What you really mean is, you want to work on children. You want to do things to them, or for them — wonderful things, no doubt — which you think will help them. What’s more, you want to do these things whether the children want them done or not. What makes you think they need you so much? If you really want to work with children, then why not find some work worth doing, work you believe in for its own sake, and then find a way to make it possible for children–if they want to–to do that work with you.” The difference is crucial. The reason my work with the leaves and worms was interesting and exciting to those boys was precisely that it was my work, something I was doing for my good, not theirs. It was not some sort of “project” that I had cooked up because I thought they might be interested in it. I wasn’t out there raking up leaves in the hope that some children might see me and want to join in.

• p. 212. We have already discussed the claim of the schools that they alone know how to teach children. Most of the time, they make this claim with no reservations whatever. Yet when they are sued in court for not having done what they say they and they alone know how to do, they suddenly become very modest. A most revealing article on Teacher Malpractice in the American Educator journal of the American Federation of Teachers said:

• p. 232. A British study, described in the book Young Children Learning, compared tapes of the conversations of working-class parents with their four-year-old children to those of nursery school teachers with four-year-olds. It revealed that the children who stayed home asked all sorts of questions about a diverse number of topics, showing no fear of learning new words or concepts. The children under the care of professional teachers had much less range of thought and intensity, and they asked many fewer questions.

• p. 254. List of homeschooled people (or no college): Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Goodall, Alex Haley, Patrick Henry, Claude Monet, General Patton, Bertram Russell, Harry S. Truman, Woodrow Wilson, Gloria Steinem, Mark Twain, The Wright Brothers…

• In 1972, parents of a graduate of the public school system in San Francisco brought a $500,000 suit against the school district charging that after a total of 13 years of regular attendance, their son was not able to read….The CA State Court of Appeals rejected the parents’ claim of the school system’s failure to educate their son. The court declared it was impossible for any person, most of all the courts, to set guidelines for “proper” academic procedures which must be followed by all schools and all teachers.

  “Unlike the activity of the highway, or the marketplace, classroom methodology affords no readily acceptable standards of care, or cause, or injury. The science of pedagogy itself is fraught with different and conflicting theories of how or what a child should be taught, and any layman might, and commonly does, have his own emphatic views on the subject,” read the court’s opinion.

  The court was, of course, quite right in saying this. But what then becomes of the claim, which the schools make all the time, that they alone know how to teach children?