Continuing to read Laura Brodie’s book, Love in a time of Homeschooling, I hit another trigger point for discussion.
Brodie recalls seeing a young man, Grant Colfax, as a guest of Johnny Carson. Colfax was going off to Harvard, never having completed a year of formal school. His parents would later become famous in the homeschooling world as the authors of Homeschooling for Excellence. But this was the first Brodie had heard of anything like homeschooling. Colfax had grown up on a remote homestead in Northern California. This author summed his experience: “Much of his education had been hands-on, helping his parents clear land and build a farm. He had learned biology while raising animals, geometry while constructing a house, and his discovery of Indian ruins on the family property had inspired him to study North American archaeology.”
Investigating Ancient Methods
Reading this made me recall part of another book I recently read called, Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream by Gene Logsdon, a friend of author Wendell Berry. Logsdon’s book is a collection of essays in response to the dying vision of farming in America, seeking a return to traditional farming methods and wondering at their success potential. (more…)
