The first book was Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America (1977). Berry argues that the increased mechanization of agriculture and the "get big or get out" mentality have caused a shift in American farming. No longer about the generational commitment to the land and connections to a larger community, farming has instead become a highly specialized business. The shift has had profound consequences for our food system and cultural perception of the earth. With the advent of efficiency and technology as the standard, Berry suggests that agriculture has absorbed and adopted the values of soulless production and consumption. Instead, Berry wants us to return to the notion of farming as an art, as practically a religious profession that threads together "cult" (as in devotion), "culture," and "cultivation." This would mean smaller farms, less technology, and more localized, family agricultural endeavors. In his words, "a healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safe-guards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace" (47).
The second book was John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down (1992). This text is a classic of alternative education that attacks our system of compulsory schooling (K-12, 8am - 3pm, distinct subjects separated by Pavlovian-bells, desks in assembly-line rows, etc.). Gatto argues that our school system, though ostensibly intended to teach reading, writing, math, and so forth, actually has a "hidden curriculum" of instilling obedience to authority, conformity to social class, and reflexive consumerism for the next generation in the market economy. As a thirty year veteran of public school teaching, Gatto maintains that these factors are an open secret and that we have learned to shrug even as we realize that compulsory schooling doesn't work: students are bored and teachers complain about teaching, but we have convinced ourselves that this way (even though it only dates to about 1850) is the only way. The solution? Get rid of school. Here's what he suggests: "It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy...when children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cell-blocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them" (23).
So what do these two books have in common? (First, by way of full disclosure, they lean into my area of bias, as my family homeschools and my wife works at a small-scale, organic, family farm.) Both authors are pointing to how entrenched systems of thought come to hold sway over our behaviors and outlooks. I know that, at least for myself, growing up I thought we had to go to school to learn and that to get food you had to go to the grocery store where it came in neat cellophane packages. These "have tos" are what post-modern philosophers like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault called doxa, the unquestioned assumptions that undergird the architecture of society. No one questions these assumptions because they are buried so deeply that everyone takes them for granted. Bourdieu and Foucault both argue that social institutions have the most control not when they are big and powerful, but when they are invisible. People do not question what they do not see. Does "school" really equal "education"? Does "agriculture" really equal "farming"? Or does the second term in each pair potentially point to something greater and more expansive? If nothing else, Berry and Gatto pull back the veil to reveal the assumptions behind our agricultural and educational institutions and suggest they ought to be interrogated like everything else. It is always good to ask the questions, "Does it have to be this way? Is another life possible?"
Both authors reveal another problem in society: the lack of holistic thinking and an inability to appreciate the "big picture." In agriculture, Berry thinks this is the extraction of farming from the cultural web of human relations and knowledge to the point that it becomes a specialized profession. For Gatto, this is the isolation in school of different fields into supposedly separate areas - science from literature, politics from philosophy, demarcated by arbitrary bells and placed in distinct rooms. These phenomena are not unrelated, as Berry points out:
That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other
disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the
universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching
disciplines are divided, according to "professions," into fragmented, one-
eyed specialties. It is suggested...that farming shall be the responsibility
of the college of agriculture, that shall be the sole charge of the professors
of law, that morality, shall be taken care of by the philosophy department,
reading by the English department, and so on (47).
Now, look at what Gatto says:
The first lesson school teaches is the un-relating of everything. Everything
(history, reading, language, dance, math, economics, etc.) is out of context
and order. Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek.
Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession
with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well
concealed (2-3).
Both point out the tendency toward fragmentation in our societal attention-spans: focus on the part, not the whole. In contrast, life is a single cloth with each segment interdependent with the others; Berry and Gatto show that when we extract single aspects and reduce them to isolated realms, it costs us, both in terms of understanding those single aspects as well as the larger world around us.
Both even invoke the power of soil or dirt as a way to talk about the issues they say we face as a people. Berry writes, "The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life" (90). Though speaking metaphorically, Gatto says this, "After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves" (105). In both statements, I detect a stirring call for far-reaching humility and respect for the inherent abilities and strengths we -- humans and the rest of the natural -- all possess together, and the beauty that can result if we acknowledge one another in this way.
Besides writing books, Berry and Gatto have both engaged in a number of projects to bring their views into wider application. Berry and his farming program in Kentucky have recently created an agreement with Sterling College to promote sustainable agriculture. Gatto has a series of lectures and videos on the problems with compulsory schooling as well as alternative methods of education.
I realize that many will greet these ideas as quite radical. Having friends in both agriculture and education, I'm sensitive to that fact and think there are ways we can all work together to reconsider the ways we have all done things over the decades. For me and my family, I'm grateful that the realms of nature, farming, and education so often overlap. For us, education often looks like this:
And this:
And our classroom often looks like this:
And this:
We are very fortunate. But I also wonder, if we would all think about nature and education as not being discrete, segregated entities, but an atmosphere that permeates us all, how different life would be. When next I write, as a related piece, perhaps I will reflect on my time volunteering at the farm that employs my wife. Specifically, that farm has a lot of turkeys. A lot of turkeys. And I have come to see the turkey as a very interesting animal, indeed. So, until next time, which may very well be turkey-time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), take care, and remember, the ways things are is not necessarily the way they have to be.
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