Why a Farm?
Maria Montessori left a fairly detailed blueprint for an environment she envisioned for adolescents, even though she never had the chance to develop the environment herself. She suggested it be a farm. She saw the need for a balance of “manual and intellectual” labor for all human beings. She recognized the importance of the work of the hand as fundamental to holistically experiencing the world in order to understand and belong to it. She observed—even before modern neuroscientists—the role the hand plays in building intelligence, language, and social connection. She saw an environment where food is grown and economics are connected to local and land-based activities as an opportunity to offer “a limitless field for scientific and historic studies.” She saw the farm as a first-hand experience of the foundation of all civilizations and the development of organized and interdependent human work. She also saw it as a place to be in touch with the natural world—a place to heal.
A farm as a context for study, work, and human development conjures up a wide variety of personal responses from people. For some it suggests a simpler, more earth-bound, self-reliant life connected to the seasons, the land, the origins of human civilization, with a close awareness of nature and the gift of natural resources. Some see it as an important alternative to a life of a non-stop stream of interactions with and through technological devices.
The value of a farm as a prepared environment for adolescents is not about becoming a farmer, but about having rich and real adult-level experiences.
For others—particularly Americans—the farm can suggest historical and current oppression of people through slavery, indentured servitude, migrant labor, Depression era poverty, and a life of intense physical labor dependent on the elements and the expenses of land ownership and tenancy.
Farming as a life has been all of these things. The question is—what CAN it be now for the emerging adult who is growing up in a world of climate change reality and virtual existence through electronic devices?
The value of a farm as a prepared environment for adolescents is not about becoming a farmer, but about having rich and real adult-level experiences, handling adult responsibilities, understanding how people organize themselves to take care of one another and their communities. It’s about experiencing genuine social organization in which adolescents themselves meet their own fundamental needs and solve their community’s problems—physical, social, environmental, and intellectual. It’s about building, designing, creating, managing, feeding people, understanding production, exchange, sustainability and diminishing returns. It’s about the opportunity to have real impact and real agency with just the right amount of adult support. It’s about experiencing adulthood before completely entering adulthood.
Many past participants of the Orientation to Adolescent Studies Course have remarked that without living on the farm while they worked, they never really would have understood the power of the communal, land-based social organization that Montessori envisioned to support emerging adults. In the process, many of them discover that adults have lost that sense of Earth and human connection in their own lives and long for it. They take it back with them as spiritual grounding for their work and find that it reveals the core understanding that Montessori education provides for all of us—the truth of human interdependency on the planet.