The School's Central Tenets

Kids master concepts before moving on, and move on when they are ready to move on. This means they can take more time to get something, but it also means they can accelerate as they get things, rather than waiting for every other kid to get it, too.

Kids teach each other. It is through teaching that we gain confidence in our competence, and distill what we've learned into clear concepts and practices.

Theory and practice go hand in hand. We best learn concepts by applying them as soon as possible.

A Living Farm Museum

Like Old World Wisconsin except with an East-West emphasis, and spanning more historical time.

In Western Washington, we could have a Native American garden, a Norwegian settler's homestead, and a 1940's market farm. We'd also have medieval European peasant fields, organized in strips and worked collectively, a Neolithic hoe-farm, and a flock of sheep with a shepard. Oxen would provide animal traction where applicable, horses where applicable, and old tractors would provide it for the 1940's pre-Industrial farm. We would also have an Asian farm, with terraced rice paddies worked by water buffalo. There would be an example of a house for each. This could be located near Camlann Medieval Village.

Old World Wisconsin's charity navigator page.

Tactile Activities for Babies in the Home

Our standard of living has gone up, but for babies, at least, the home has become an impoverished environment. We do much less at home, and those things we do do are inaccessible to babies.

Reality #1

Babies live at floor level

Reality #2

Babies explore with their hands and mouth

Reality #3

Babies know what's up

To expand on the first point, the height of a baby's world grows from about 6 inches to 2 feet over the first year. Almost all of our activities take place at 29 inches and up -- the height of desks, tables, and counters. We can put kids in high chairs, and we do, and that's far better than nothing, but it confines them to stationary activities, restricting their locomotion and styming their their curiosity.

To expand on the second point, babies use their hands and mouth to explore the world, so they need to be up close to things. Standing in a crib watching is not the same. A baby wants to crawl over to something interesting, and put it in their mouth. We usually see this as a hindrance. Most things will not kill a baby, and exposure to the sort of innocuous germs we mostly have around is probably more good than bad.

To expand on the last point, I believe that kids -- babies, even -- know the difference between real activities and play activities done for their benefit. They know what creates value for adults and for the home, what is useful, and what is extraneous. The vast amount of activities that babies are exposed to and involved in are extraneous -- either they are play activities designed for baby ("Hey baby, isn't this interesting!? Do this with me for a bit! Hey baby, baby, try this, here, no, pay attention, here try this! Look, daddy's doing it...!") or they are extraneous for us. After all, most of what we do at the home isn't work, but grown-up play. So, in one fell swoop we fail to engage baby in meaningful, tactile activities, while modeling primarily leisure activities. The work we do at home often involves staring at a screen, which may mesmerize a baby, but provides little intelligible stimulation.

Change

People used to do a lot more at home. In traditional societies, people did everything at home, and that was an incredibly rich environment for babies. On farms, people did a lot more at home, too. But even in the cities, in little immigrant apartments in New York City in 1938, people did a lot at home. Here's a quick, top-of-my-head list:

• Cooked From Scratch
• Preserved Foods
• Baked
• Sewed
• Fixed Things
• Read Aloud From Books
• Wrote Letters By Hand
• Cleaned
• Chopped Wood For Heating and/or Cooking
• Washed and Folded Laundry

Of all these, only two are left in most homes, and those only partially:

• Cooking, not usually from scratch
• Folding, but not washing, laundry

Even cleaning has been outsourced in many homes, and happens during the days when no one is around.

I don't emphasize cooking from scratch because of some value judgment, but only because when you start with a whole variety of different-looking ingredients -- bright orange pointy carrots, chubby brown potatoes, leafy green celery, spice powders of various textures and colors, spice pods of various shapes and scents, chunks of bright red meat, and so on, gloppy cream from the top of a milk jar -- it is a lot more interesting tactile-wise than starting with canned or frozen things that have already been cut into similar sizes and pre-mixed powdered spices from jars.

So what can we do to reintroduce valuable, tactile activities into the home and make them accessible to babies and children? Here are a few ideas:

1. Cook at home
2. Do more at ground level, like chopping vegetables 
3. Get the baby up to counter level when you're cooking
4. When a lamp or something breaks, take it apart and try to fix it, on the ground; no harm in trying!
5. Grow a garden if you have the space, and let the baby crawl around in the dirt
6. Clean as often as possible with warm water only. Babies can crawl around in warm water, even grab the sponge and manage a nibble before you catch them, with little risk
7. Have a big part of the floor or a big mat that is made of non-toxic material, which you can do activities on, and which you can easily clean with warm water
8. Make whole rooms of the house safe for a baby to crawl around in freely, but leave some objects around that have interesting and different shapes, textures, scents, colors, and even temperatures (stone tends to be cool and wood warm); I'd stay away from plastic
9. Heat with wood

Topic for a future post: rhythm. The rhythms of traditional life -- rocking on a mother's back while she works at some rhythmic task -- are gone. What rhythms do we have left?

(Interesting article here on sensory play)

If classes on Jubilee...

...we could work with the cows without needing to have our own, except a dairy cow, and a couple oxen...

...we could use their food storage, equipment shed, and wash room, etc.

...we would need to build or gain access to a kitchen

....we would need to find a heated place to work, though the market could work, if a woodstove was put in

...if we could use the blue house (and El and I live there) and lease out the couple acres beside it, we could:
(1) have our big garden there -- an acre
(2) keep our dairy cow there -- an acre, with the hay being brought in from elsewhere.

But what about flooding??

Home school problems

(1) Aligning it with the school year means, first, that it is not aligned with the growing season, and, second, that the growing season is freed up for farming. The latter is convenient, the former is not.

End of September (or earlier) to mid-June. We could harvest in the end of September, and start harvesting in mid-June. We could grow cool-weather crops to maturity in the third quarter (end of spring). We could plant cover crops if we started mid-September, and we could plant winter grains end of September. We could keep a cow, breeding her in October, with calving in May or early June. We could do a lot of food preservation, fermentation, and "home ec" type stuff as the harvest comes in. Spring would see a lot of seeding and planting and bed preparation, including field work with the oxen.

We would miss grain harvest, corn harvest, bean harvest, summer vegetable harvest, and even a lot of spring vegetable harvest.

The summer camps could be based around: (1) haying, (2) grain harvest, (3) corn harvest.

(2) Where and how to find the land and infrastructure?

The ideal site would have:

• an acre garden in a several-year rotation between: 
1. fall/winter vegetables
2. summer vegetables (incl. potatoes)
3. corn and grains
4. legumes
5. pasture/ley
• enough pasture for a milk cow, a calf, a steer, and a couple oxen -- maybe 10 acres
• enough land for growing our own feed for
• a couple pigs -- maybe an acre
• twenty ducks or chickens -- maybe an acre
• buildings:
• heated classroom (or yurt/tent with woodstove)
• kitchen
• greenhouse
• small animal barn
• poultry house
• equipment shed / wash room
• cold storage for potatoes, warm storage for squash, and walk-in fridge for vegetables

Alternatively, we could have the garden and keep the cows on pasture, and buy in feed for the pigs and poultry.

Home school classes revisited

A dialed-back version after meeting with Becca. You can fill 2, maybe 3, days with 8-10 students if you

(1) hit the right price point -- $2100-2300
(2) don't count on most students enrolling in all three days -- just one, maybe two
(3) offer similar curriculum to different age groups -- an age 7-12 day, and an age 12-15 day

I can make this work if I

(1) Don't hire a co-instructor
(2) Don't buy a van

• Keep it focused, specialize, do what I do best
• Offer a solid day; kids should go home having learned a lot and feeling jazzed
• Parents should feel like they can check something off: writing and math are key
• What sounds compelling:
• Farm Economics
• Farm Ecology
• Applied Math
• Work experience
• (Farm History is cool, too) 
• The day would be 9am-3pm, with optional 3-5pm aftercare where we would play games.
• Session would be 33 weeks, following the school calendar.
• Summer farm camps would be popular: day camps for younger kids (way less insurance), but older kids would need a residential camp...(Henning?)

Available: 

seattlefarmschool.com

seattlefarmcamp.com

eastsidefarmschool.com

...etc.

Natural Baby

Surround the baby with things that are tactile in nature and made of natural elements. A sheepskin rug (naturally tanned), a mobile made of driftwood pieces painted with bold stripes, with strings of driftwood beads.

Polished stones on the floor, big enough to move around, too big to stick in mouth.
A sand table with sand, clay, stones, beans, lentils, etc. for when they are old enough.

Make a trip to the coast this winter to collect driftwood and stones and sand and shells.

Clothes: cotton, silk, leather, or wool. No plastic derivatives. This will be hard.

Is it ungrateful to not use so much of the stuff that has been given to us?

Is it smart to spend the money on new "natural" products?

Anything the baby will spend a lot of time on/in: yes. Clothes and anything it will be on without clothes, like a bed, in a chair.

Wooden baby chair. Cotton liners for bouncy chair. Etc.

Non-plastic pack and play: Arm’s Reach Original Co-Sleeper

Baby names and baby playlist

Boy

Louis Marion

Marek

Adrian (Adrien, Addy)

Emil

August

Gabriel

Han Solo

Girl

Isabelle (Isobel)

Annabelle

Alex (Alexandra)

Madelaine (Maddy)

Alouise (Alois)

Anca (Anka, Annika)

Dakota

Ida

Jita

Kata

Nina

Silvie or Sylvie (Belafaonte song) (Sylvie Irving Smaus) (French form of the name Sylvia, meaning "of the forest".)

PLAYLIST

Sylvie (Harry Belafonte)

The Sweetest Gift (Sade)

We Bid You Goodnight (Grateful Dead)

Winter's Come and Gone (Gillian Welch)

Amazing Grace (Alan Jackson)

With a Little Help From My Friends (The Beatles)

California (Joni Mitchell)

Historical Adventure RPG

Campaigns in historical settings, or the characters as time travellers through historical settings.

Games are based on historical reality but include magical elements and action for the simple reason that kids enjoy them more. If time travellers, the magical elements could be technological -- NPCs from the future manipulating elements in the past with "powers".

Character development is based on points gained from accomplishing real-world things, like skills unique to the time, or applicable mathematics.

Players would study history of the time, which would give them advantages.

What do we do? We finish.

Motto for a school. Make a bunch of leaders. We set goals, starting with Number One. All other goals are subservient to Number One, and they have, beneath them, other goals. We learn how to make decisions, learn about efficiency. We cut what we don't need to ensure we meet our priorities. If we meet not a single sub-goal, we will meet Number One.

And then we could do a class on goallessness. Start with no goal at all. Do what we feel like doing, See which is better, or which is better for what, or which suits whom.

Sudbury Schools

Free and Democratic. Students at Sudbury schools, including Clearwater and Trillium in Washington state, do whatever they want at school, so long as it isn't breaking the school's rules, which are made and enforced, largely, by students. The staff simply supervise, making sure everyone's OK, and checking in with students.

Some students play video games all day. Some 11 year olds study algebra. They can do what they want, go where their inclinations take them.

It seems like a very liberating model, and more aligned with free, non-industrialized human nature than anything we currently have, but it is missing one thing: grown-ups. Kids in a kid world isn't how kids have always grown up. Kids certainly had a lot of that, as they could not be supervised all the time, but kids spent most of their time involved with, or in proximity to, grown-ups doing grown up things. There is a crucial transmission here that seems like it would be lacking in the Sudbury model.

How experimental?

How experimental could a school in Washington be and still meet the minimum standards?

180 school days with 6 hrs of instruction per day would meet the 180day/1080hr minimum. Q: Do "hours of instruction" include only class time, or all time spent in school?

180 days is 36 five-day weeks or 45 four-day weeks. A full school year.

You could have a full-time school staffed by at least one teacher certificated in each essential subject, and then let it play out organically. Look for "teachable moments" in which to introduce the content which students will encounter on that year's standardized testing. This would likely require at least in 5-6 teachers (English, Math, Social Studies, PE, Foreign Language). To reflect the one-room schoolhouse ideal, we would have 36 students, but break them up into three or four classes. The teachers would float, the students would teach each other. Teachers would deliver lessons as appropriate, or as asked to. They would be research monkeys, supervisors, and role models.

There is nothing in the rules about:

1. How the school day is structured
2. How classes are organized
3. How lessons are taught
4. The type of curriculum that must be used

Washington Private School and Home Schooling Standards

Takeaways from the state law governing private schools and home instruction:

1. You must offer at least 180 school days or 1080 hours of instruction per year for middle and secondary students
2. You must have certificated teachers, or oversight by certificated teachers
3. You must offer instruction to meet the state subject and credit requirements -- 24 credits
4. You must have a building that meets the same code as school buildings, unless you're a homeschooler teaching only your own children in your own home
5. Home schoolers cannot instruct other than their own kids
6. Home schooled kids must pass annual assessment tests or be assessed annually by a certificated professional, and if they are deficient for their age, parents must rectify

Regarding the home school classes, 30 weeks of 3 day weeks with 8 hour days is only 90 days or 720 hours. So we couldn't run this as a school. It would have to be supplementary activities for home schoolers. How does the Wilderness Awareness School do it?

Regarding the one room schoolhouse, must each subject be taught by a teacher certified in that particular subject? That would require a minimum number of teachers above two, since you are also required to teach all of the subjects, including foreign language and music!

Regarding the whole learn at your own pace thing, forget it, kids gotta keep pace with their peers in public school, and, I presume, learn the same kind of history (world vs. state, etc.) in the same year.

And so much for holding classes in a yurt.

Nothing

If at the end of our lives there is only for us to vanish into nothing, it is the same nothing, and I will see you there.

Spending per student in Washington State

is about $9,500, only $5,800 of which is spent on instruction.

Baby Environment

Babies are tactile. In the beginning they can hardly see. They can focus further and further away over the first few months. But they primarily want to touch, grab, and taste everything. Surrounding a baby with things they can touch, grab, and stick in or against their mouths seems like the best way to stimulate their senses, and through their senses, their mind.

I want to build a mobile. Bold colors and stripes. Natural shapes and textures, preferably natural objects. Hanging, several layers deep, more and more intricate things further away.

Some way to get the baby up to counter level while we cook, which is one of the only things we really do with our hands around the house, and involves all sorts of interesting colors, smells, and motion, and it could play with (stick in its mouth) scraps of food.

Some environment at ground level for crawling around in that has features. For example, a sand box (or dirt box, with finer dirt) with pieces of wood, large polished stones, shells, etc. Find the fine line between things it can't choke on and lots of different, handle-able things. I told El today about my brilliant idea for the baby room: make the whole thing a giant sandbox, mix in some bentonite clay, and you've got a tactile floor/giant catbox. No need for diapers, just scoop it out!

Alternatively, sheepskin rugs, leather, polished bones, etc.

Life in the house. I now know what a cat is worth when it's the only non-human living thing in many homes, especially cats that put up with a little abuse from kids. What other life can we bring in? How can we create (or simulate) a living environment, an ecosystem? Houseplants? Other animals? Rabbits? How about a way that chickens can come into a part of the house? A little chicken door into a little indoor chicken run....

Learning Life School

A nonprofit school that serves twelve students, employing two teachers in an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse on a small farm with a barn, shops, and a van for exploration and summer quests.

Tuition: $12,000 for the first child, $10,000 for the second, $8,000 for the third.

• A woodstove for comfort, coziness, and wood-splitting work. 
• A kitchen for cooking nutritious homemade meals -- students take turns cooking in pairs, preparing meals from scratch.
• State of the art computers.
• In the garden, students learn practical skills. The younger kids learn how to mix potting soil and plant seeds and plant starts. The older kids graduate to larger tools, then the BCS walk-behind tractor, and then the large tractor.
• Ideally, we would have a wood and machine shop. Between the computers, garden, and the shop, students could pursue projects as diverse as video-game programming, a market garden enterprise, or the rebuilding of an old tractor.

Additional possibilities include:

(a) having a cooperative option where homeschooling families (or any families) can become members to have access to the site and participate in classes and workshops. They could get their "kitchen certification" to be able to use the kitchen, and their "dairy certification" to be able to milk the cows, after which they could carry on a cheese project, and so on

(b) making it also a cooperative farm where members learned to produce food and took home the bounty; could roll this into the same member price.

www.learninglifeschool.org is available.

Video clips for systems thinking, and inspirations

To learn to identify system traps, use video clips, and have the students decide which it is. Drill this.

EXAMPLES:

"Shifting the burden to the intervener": the scene from Spirited Away where she helps the little sprite carry its piece of coal, and all the others drop their pieces of coal and wave for help.

~

An approach to learning: Saturate yourself with information and do, do, do. Find mentors.

Inspirations for the school:

Donella Meadows
Peter Senge
Russell Ackoff
Carol Deppe
Lao Tzu

One Room Schoolhouse, and Core Notions

Russell Ackoff makes the point that students learn best when they can learn at their own pace. In the traditional one room schoolhouse, students of different ages taught each other. Some learned to read when they were 4, some when they were 12. There are fewer reading disabilities among these kids.

What if the school was modeled as a one room schoolhouse, complete with wood stove but also stacked with state of the art computers and learning aids. We would chop our own firewood, feed the stove, work together in groups and alone. There would be a large garden outside, chickens or ducks, maybe a dairy cow. The room would be a microcosm of the world -- one can travel from Rome down any road and similarly from this room one would have access to the universe of knowledge.

One teacher, one co-instructor, twelve students ages 10-16.

Core Notions:

• We don't try to get it right the first time. We do a thing, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and do it again. We build on experience constantly. Grit is the ability to build on one's repeated failures to achieve a goal. Sometimes we have a "do or die" project, like a performance or presentation or competition, which mirrors the real world.
• We are always striving to see the forest beyond the trees, and the world beyond the forest, and to make decisions based on long-term rather than short-term consequences.
• We seek knowledge and data in order to inform good judgment, while understanding that good judgment does not arise from knowledge or data, but from experience.
• We believe that the role of creativity or intuition is to integrate knowledge in the moment, forming from multiple pieces a coherent and meaningful whole. At times this process can result in something akin to magic.
• We treat separate disciplines as multiple perspectives for understanding and interacting with reality. Reality transcends disciplines, and integration allows us to see reality most clearly.
• We follow young people in their pursuits of whatever interests them, while encouraging rigor and focus. A student must weave everything they learn into coherent projects with real-world applications.
• We use play a lot. A lot. It's the tool nature gave us to make learning fun.
• We hope the students will come up with questions for which teachers do not have the answers. Learning together with an actively-engaged adult learner is the best way to model lifelong investigative and learning skills.

Creativity. Focus. Integration. Experience. Grit.

12 kids: first child $12,000, second child $10,000, third child $8,000. Average ~$10,500.

Gross (12*10.5k) = $126,000

Sci-Fi Short Story: Crowdfunded Video Game Drone Warfare

A near-future in which an empire fights its wars using drones almost exclusively. These drones are operated by gamers, who pay real money to outfit, customize, and expand their drones. They receive points and status. The military provides the technology and manufacturing, the gaming platform, and the missions. Citizens crowdfund the war machine, and "play" for free.

Free-form Learning

Khan Academy "History of Education":

Summary: The classroom "flipped" -- the place for interactivity rather than imbibing information. Learn the subjects at home, interact about them or get through stuck points in class.

With the internet, information and even world-class lectures are easy to come by. Creativity is not. Focus is not. Experience is not. Grit is not.

Creativity. Focus. Interaction. Experience. Grit.

The most free-form learning environment. A place where students pursue what interests them and the instructor constantly alters the structure of the program to accommodate those interests. A pod of learners. Multi-age. Add "Working Memory" ... the value of flash cards in gardening: information you want to have available with you at all times, or that helps you integrate other information during experiences. Plant families are a good example from gardening.

We will learn advanced subjects using books, Khan Academy and other online tools, and coaching. Real-world "immersion" experiences will be facilitated by the teacher. This will be centered around the farm, growing our own food and reflecting on systems, stewardship, and self.

"Plug Into Life"

Class Leader rather than Teacher.

New program for existing school, and a professional bio

Or we could suggest the whole thing to an existing school -- for example, one of the KC area private schools -- as a new program. Sell it as a farm which could grow all the vegetables (at a minimum) for the school cafeteria, and which students could work on to learn about work, agriculture, and systems.

With 300 kids eating one meal per day, we would need about 3-5 acres. If we were to also grow our fertility (dairy cows, or egg flock, or windrow meadow composting), we would need another 10-15 acres.

Necessary equipment would include a tractor, or at least a walk-behind, a greenhouse, and irrigation infrastructure. Staffing needs would be at least two.

PROFESSIONAL BIO:

Matt is a system (self) within a system (society) within a system (biosphere) who teaches about systems. He turned his own at-risk youth around and went on to work in leadership positions with kids and young adults for 14 years at one school, two farms, three residential homes, and four experiential wilderness programs. He has spent 1,000 nights outdoors, traveled extensively in developing nations, operated large machines, worked in carpentry and landscaping, written policy reports and grants, and is an artist and graphic designer. A student of poetry at Berkeley, he returned to the academe to study social systems (Master of Social Work) and economic/political systems (Master of Public Administration) at the University of Washington, graduating as part of the Pi Alpha Alpha honors society. He developed the experiential curriculum for a respected wilderness therapy program, built the back-end administrative structure for a youth gardening program, has been farming for three years, and believes ecological agriculture provides the perfect context for the study of complex systems.

Growing your own food as core of curriculum

For both the experiential value, systems immersion, and home ec benefits.

A school that grows its own food, including a landrace wheat vs. modern, high-yielding variety (study inputs, outputs, stocks...in systemic context). Bakes its own bread in wood-fired oven. Corn, too -- the staple of the Old World alongside the staple of the New World. Produce eggs. Grow all vegetables. Have a dairy cow/goat or two. Even raise chickens and ducks for meat.

Five years, from age 12-16. Begin with a reading intensive: catch everyone up so they can all ready fast and effectively. By age 16, most students should be ready for transfer to college early, if desired, or to transfer to high school (for socialization) and kick butt.

Five Kids, One Teacher. $20,000 per child per year. $70,000 budget for the school, from which would draw wage ($50,000) and expenses ($20,000).

Is there a way to do this nonprofit? Provide this level of attention and quality?

Thought Experiment: One Teacher, Five Students

Learning stripped down to its essence. One person dedicated to a very small number of students, completely customizing their educational experience, with both individual learning experiences and group experiences/socialization.

Faith in this idea: Give me (or any competent teacher) five children to focus on, and I will ensure they are educated much better than most of their peers.

If we needed to take home a salary of $60,000 (equivalent to a 5-year Seattle teacher with an MA), then the per-child cost would be about $15,000, accounting for the need to pay taxes as a small business. Unless we ran as a nonprofit with the parents as board-members.

Alt model: A dozen kids with a co-instructor (paid $30,000) = $10,000 per kid, or about $7,500 if nonprofit.

This is assuming no costs. Work from home? No van?

If six kids per instructor, and 2*1.5 hour individual chunks per kid, half our time would be spent in individual sessions and half in group activities. That means the kids would spend half of each day either working on individual projects, or on team projects without direct supervision, or just enjoying group activities.

If we had a van ($1000/mo for payment and insurance), we'd charge and additional $1000 per student.

It would also be great to have

(a) a nice space to spread out for games and activities

(b) a battery of nice computers for online learning, projects, and games

(c) a yard/farm for outdoor activities, although field trips might suffice

Beast

"Systems" and "systems thinking" apparently don't sound very interesting to most people. I find the words fascinating, but I can see how they might sound too technical. So, if I'm going to base a curriculum around systems thinking, I'm working on alternative terminology.

How about "Beast"?

A Beast. How do we understand this Beast?

beast (n.) 

c.1200, from Old French beste "animal, wild beast," figuratively "fool, idiot" (11c., Modern French bête), from Vulgar Latin *besta, from Latin bestia "beast, wild animal," of unknown origin. Used to translate Latin animal. Replaced Old English deor (see deer) as the generic word for "wild creature," only to be ousted 16c. byanimal. Of persons felt to be animal-like in various senses from early 13c. Of the figure in the Christian apocalypse story from late 14c.

A wild animal, or wild creature. That's what a system is. Except there are some negative connotations, too.

From the Fantastic Mr. Fox: "I'm a wild animal." Used as an excuse/understanding for why certain behaviors persist despite his best intentions. His behaviors are part of a complex system.

Thought on systems: The news (newsfeed) is an output of a system.

The School vs. Eastside GardenWorks

Two competing ideas:

Business: home school classes for middle-school aged kids

Non-profit: farming/employment/personal development/systems thinking program for at-risk youth, modeled after SYGW and similar programs but for the Eastside

The tuition for the school is expensive -- upwards of $90 per day per kid. The cost per kid per year would be ~$12,000. The salaries for 2 FTE's would be approximately $35,000 and $25,000.

The expenses per year per kid for the nonprofit would be

Kids per year (continuing quarter-to-quarter): 14
Staff: 2 FTE + 1 Americorps
Annual expenses: $220,000 (including youth wages of $65,000)
Annual revenues: $20,000
Cost: $200,000
Cost/kid: $14,200 per year (including $4,600 youth wages)

Key Educational Themes:

• Systems thinking (economics, ecosystems, self) for understanding the world
• Financial Management -- use systems thinking concepts
• Based around the homestead rather than the commercial farm -- Oikonomaia
• Work skills and Intro to Entrepreneurship
• Nutrition and Health -- CSA for pregnant women

Systems Thinking Games

Excellent recap of a week-long systems thinking games workshop at BenthamFish's game page.

A thought: when we were kids, Jeff and I used to play Battletech. We'd build our Mechs in isolation, spending a set amount of tonnage on designing various mechs in various numbers. Then we'd fight. The Mechs are elements of the system in this case.

What if we were able observe the other person's Mechs during the design process? We would likely change our Mechs in response to what they were doing, and they would change theirs in response to what we were doing. We'd go back and forth, and may never arrive at finished Mechs. The design process, then would become the system. This is how multiple lifeforms in an ecosystem develop, and it's the reason we never arrive. We keep changing in response to the others.

And, as for the Systems Farm, it would be composed of enough subsystems that each student or pair/group of students could bite off an individual subsystem for careful study. Putting all the subsystems together, you would see how they all relied on each other. Each subsystem group could even recommend changes in the management of the subsystem to get more out of that subsystem. Putting them all together, you could see how those changes would effect, or what they would demand, from the other subsystems.

For example, one subsystem might be ducks. Inputs would include food and bedding and space and labor time. Outputs would include eggs and dirty bedding. What happens if you scale up the size of the flock to take advantage of unused space in the coop? You would get more eggs and create more dirty bedding (compost), but you would also need more feed. How does this effect the feed production? How much more land would they need and how much more time would it take? Do they have the necessary equipment? And how would this effect the vegetable fields? Do they need extra compost or do they have enough already? Maybe they, too, could scale up if they only had more compost...

CSA for pregnant women

6-8 months of goodies for awesome prenatal health for baby and mama. Weekly deliveries of probiotic --  sauerkraut & kimchi, yogurt, live culture cheese, beef jerky, sausage, and chicken, kale and other iron-rich vegetables, snacky foods. Charge a premium: $200-250/month.

Could do biweekly or monthly deliveries, since we're not trafficing in perishables, and locate further away and/or serve a wider area. Could grow and produce as much of it ourselves as possible, and/or just consolidate into boxes.

$200*6mos=$1200*2(perYr)=$2400*50members@oneTime=$120,000 gross annually.

Sample biweekly delivery:

1 quart kimchee
1/2 gallon yogurt
1 lb. cheese
1 lb. beefy jerky
1 roaster chicken
2 bundles kale
etc.