Homeschooling Values

Children learn best from their parents.  Long before there were schools and parents delegated their responsibility for educating their children in survival skills to professional teachers, children learned from 'doing' what was necessary to live a self-sufficient lifestyle.  This was 'first hand' experience helping older members of the family on the farm -- clearing the land and preparing it for cultivation, planting seeds, tending gardens, doing chores such as milking cows and feeding chickens, building fences, cleaning out the barn, herding cows, etc.  In the modern world, children are taken away from this 'hands on' experience and placed in an artificial environment -- the classroom -- where 'book learning' has replaced direct experience.  Children are now learning through 'artifice' -- unnatural experience once removed from reality.  Homesteading the Future's 'education' will be a return back to natural learning through a lot of one-to-one mentoring, tutoring and actual experiences out of the classroom.  Children who know something about farming will teach other children useful skills -- whether it is catching fish, digging for mud crabs, or learning how to weed the garden.  

Buddhism's Contribution to Natural Farming

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."
Masanobu Fukuoka

In his books, Fukuokadescribes Natural Farming as "… a Buddhist way of farming that originates in the philosophy of 'Mu' or nothingness, and returns to a 'do-nothing' nature." He writes about Mahayana Natural Farming (Mahayana is one of the two major schools or sects of Buddhism) as "… the very embodiment of life in accordance with nature… [it] is realized when man becomes one with nature, for it is a way of farming that transcends time and space and reaches the zenith of understanding and enlightenment."   "Although natural farming — since it can teach people to cultivate a deep understanding of nature - may lead to spiritual insight, it's not strictly a spiritual practice. Natural farming is just farming, nothing more. You don't have to be a spiritually oriented person to practice my methods. Anyone who can approach these concepts with a clear, open mind will be starting off well. In fact, the person who can most easily take up natural agriculture is the one who doesn't have any of the common adult obstructing blocks of desire, philosophy, or religion... the person who has the mind and heart of a child. One must simply know nature... real nature, not the one we think we know!"

Read more here

Mother Nature's Classroom

Our children have already spent a lot of time on their own while previously homeless.  I and many volunteers who have visited have noted their ability to scour the countryside for edible fruits, herbs and living creatures.  If it moves, crawls, or swims in the water it is likely that one of our kids has already caught it and eaten it on the spot.  While snails are an expensive delicacy in France, we are able to dig in the mud and agricultural ponds, harvest them and eat them for free at the shelter.  I have only tasted better sea snails in Korea.  We should be able to raise fish in our rice fields if not also mud crabs, snails, crayfish, fresh water shrimp, and eels.   I spent a lot of my own youth at play in forests and wild areas.  We hope to learn from our children how to collect wild herbs, plants and -- especially -- fruit before we establish our orchard.  This is an education we can only grasp by staying out of the classroom and going into Mother Nature's wild kingdom.