“In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.”
Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods
When I swapped city for countryside I was not yet a father. In fact, it was the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to transform my way of life, not beget offspring.
Thrilled as I was to suddenly find myself living in the great outdoors, I didn’t really expect to start a family in such a setting—magnificent as it was.
Family is a gift. I am thankful for the opportunity to create one with my partner; raising children on the land in a healthy setting.
From the moment I first discovered I’d become a father, there was one aspect that quickly excited me. Education. Or rather, edification. Edify means to build up whereas educate means to lead out.
Consistent in its spirit of self-reliance, rural living has a long-standing tradition of home education. In fact, it is one of humanity’s most enduring customs—as grassroots as grassroots can get. Modern schooling, however, has only been around for a little over a century.
State functionaries and tycoons lobbied for and funded the creation of the compulsory model of education commonly called “school” helped to establish schoolhouses all across the countryside of North America. These men were inspired by an earlier Prussian model of institutionalizing children. The reason for this was simple: in order to staff their wretched factories and their deathly mines, or to die on their battlefields, they would need an obedient, halfwitted workforce for generations to come. Children raised and educated by their mothers, fathers, siblings, and community members in a self-sufficient setting was a major barrier for the barons of industry in their pursuit of profit and control.
All in all, the tycoons behind the modern school system have had great success in fashioning “people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it,” as the late George Carlin once put it. Despite such reforms, home educators managed to preserve the tradition going forward. For that I am supremely grateful.
That torch is mine to carry now.
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In this brave new world I now encounter with my children, a world for them to eventually navigate without me, I want to make sure they are equipped for their voyage into choppy waters. A deluge, even.
As a rusticator, I am empowered to be an educator for my children.
Because I was able to achieve a good deal of financial freedom coupled with a knowledge of self and a deep affinity for learning, I have the time and the will to invest in my children’s development. I am thankful for that; I won’t take it for granted.
I am duty-bound in this era of profound stupidity, cowardice, and tribalism to equip my children with a healthy capacity for critical thought, creative expression, and adaptability. A healthy physical education is just as important for me to teach my kids. It’s appalling how the neoliberal digitization of childhood is creating an entire generation of youth whose computerized hypnosis will render them physically lame as they age (this is to say nothing about the intellectual, emotional, and social lameness that will arise as a result). The majority of urbanized parents enable this, encourage it, even, with the feeble rationale that such a dismal habit is “educational” merely because the alphabet is gamified.
Rather than throwing a tablet computer in my toddler’s lap, I will begin to teach them elements of the liberal arts. The trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (music, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry). That’s my hope, anyway.
The fact that my kids will be able to see their rusticator father build, repair, beautify, demolish, experiment, and so forth, means they too can have the opportunity to partake in such endeavours if keen.
Education is a lifelong pursuit with no destination. I’m delighted to have my kids walk beside me on that meandering path, wherever it may lead—rustic or otherwise.
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