Practical vs. Vocational Education

An important distinction came up yesterday when talking with David about education. He was advocating the value of a liberal arts education at a four-year university vs. vocational education at a community college. His example of a vocational degree -- studying to be a radiologist -- made me realize that when I speak of bring back vocational tech, I am interested in vocational training for what it teaches us about the material world and the tools at our disposal for interacting with it. But I am not interested in vocational tech in the narrow sense of being trained for a particular role in a particular industry with particular tools, and that's often what it is.

The value of an education in practical skills -- as opposed to vocational skills -- is the transferrable nature of what you learn. As an example, rather than learning how to assemble cabinets, you could learn about the essential properties of wood, and concepts and techniques in woodworking. When we reduce the value of a practical education to be training for a specific job, we are doing a disservice to the individual and society. Frankly, job training should happen on the job.

I believe we should all be competent or at least have the opportunity to be competent observing, understanding, and problem-solving in the material world. Vocational tech can teach this -- welding and fabrication skills gleaned in getting an A.S. in Aeronautical Technology, for example -- but it does not necessarily do so. A radiologist likely learns only how to use one technology in one place. This does not contribute nearly as much to the human capital of a society as a set of foundational skills would, in that this person is far less likely to take what they've learned and innovate with it.

David pointed out that we can't all learn everything. Excel and computer programming are also practical skills, no? But I wonder if we can. We take years and years to study history, and learn very little of it. What we should do is learn a small bit of history, intensively. We should learn how to study and think about historical events. We should bother very little with attempting a survey of human history. We have the rest of our lives to go more deeply into subjects that interest us. The best we can expect from an early-in-life foundation is to be on a good basic footing with most of them, and know where to start when we want to learn more.

We live in an information-rich age. Information is a click away, or a book away. What most needs to be fostered is critical thinking, and we can do this in any field, with any subject, at any time. We should do it at all times, whether that means critically analyzing an engineering problem to see it in a new light, critically re-assessing an employee hiring process, or critically considering the role of a cattle in a diversified small farm operation.

I suspect we could learn everything, if we reduced most subjects to their essence. We could study the world through the lens of time and human behavior (history), through the lens of the material world (practical skills and materials), the virtual world (computers and networks), the biological world, and so on. A broad survey and intro to techniques for each, followed by focused application in an in-depth project. I believe this would be an educational approach that would provide a solid start to life-long learning, self-directed learning, and societal innovation and growth.

And the obvious thing: a class which critically engages the notion of self-sufficiency

What does it mean to be self-sufficient?

Have people ever been self-sufficient?

Is self-sufficiency a goal worth striving for?

How do we become more self-sufficient?

What does self-sufficiency look like in modern America?

Can we be competent at everything?

What are the economic trade-offs associated with being a generalist vs. a specialist?

Is there a happy medium?

Reading List: 

Helen and Scott Nearing, "The Good Life"
Gene Logsdon, chapter on Amish from "Living at Nature's Pace"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "The Last American Man"
Thomas Thwaites, "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch"
William Coperthwaite, "A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity" (?)
Something about the biodynamic "whole farm organism"
Thoreau, "Walden"
Something about the Open-Source movement
Marcin Jakubowski's curriculum for K-Ph.D. education
Bland and Bell, 2007, "A Holon Approach to Agroecology"
An Indicator Framework for Assessing Agroecosystem Resilience
Jane Jacobs, "The Nature of Economies"
Thomas Jefferson's Agrarianism

The Renaissance Man Ideal

Apparently Aldous Huxley wrote:

Know something about everything and everything about something.

I do believe this is an identical goal to my own,

Jack of all trades, master of one.

And this is what I come down to being interested in: being a renaissance man! Here we develop systems thinking, integrative intelligence, abstract thinking, intution, and so on, by saturating oneself with information while practicing constantly. We develop a person that can approach any problem with a diverse set of experiences and thus creative, novel, or "emergent" solutions. He or she is capable, response-able. He or she knows enough about things in general to be able to learn any new thing quickly. By exploring the lay of multiple geographies, one comes to develop an intuition for how geographies function, what the laws are that govern them, how they behave and tend.

Jacob Lund Fisker, in his book Early Retirement Extreme, identifies seven fields in which a person can develop him or herself. These are:

physiological
economical
intellectual
emotional
social
technical
ecological

He provided two illustrative graphs:

A specialists skill set

A Renaissance man's skill set

The original Renaissance ideal of a polymath believed a man should:

• Be able to defend himself with a variety of weapons, especially the sword. 
• Be able to play several musical instruments.
• Be able to paint and output other works of art. 
• Be forever interested in advancing knowledge and science.
• Be able to engage in debates regarding issues such as philosophy and ethics.
• Be a skilled author and poet.

In a school for Renaissance men and women, we might teach:

• basic fitness and meditation (discipline for body and mind)
• gardening or farming (for ecological intelligence)
• a craft such as woodworking or website design
• the scientific method
• money management
• communications, including presentations
• generic problem-solving and analysis

and encourage students to pursue, on their own time:

• a sport or martial art
• music, art, graphic design, poetry, dance, or other "fine" art
• an advanced subject such as higher math or science or literature
• debate

And these meta-subjects:

• strategy and tactics
• critical thinking and analysis

Corn patch instead of garden

Instead of planting a complex, homestead-scale, seed-saving staple-crop garden next year, I think I'll just plant corn.

Two to four types of corn, and make braids to sell in the October market.

This will streamline planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing, and accomplishes three things:

1. I can learn how use the two-row planter, the cultivating bar, and the hiller (David will show me after-hours)


2. The garden will pay for itself this year, and also for a grain mill!


3. I will be able to focus entirely on one crop that really interests me right now: corn, and corn only

I could grow 1-2 varieties of popcorn (Tom Thumb and Dakota Black), a flour corn (Painted Mountain) and a flint corn (Cascade Ruby-Gold).

COSTS

Tom Thumb, Dakota Black, Painted Mountain, Cascade Ruby-Gold: $18-$25 apiece for half-pounds at High Mowing

Fertility: $200-300
Grain Mill: $250

Total Net (after mill): ~$400

Teaching Financial Literacy

Talking about money should not be boring. The reality is that money is a resource flow that connects us to everything around us. It is a source of worry and a source of power. It can be used for good or evil.

At Seattle-Eastside Farm & City School, we will study money in a holistic sense. We will understand it as a connective, generative flow within the social system, which acts much like energy (sunlight) within an ecosystem. We will understand how it behaves and what it can do for us, and we will learn to take responsibility for it in our own lives, and put it to work in the world around us.

The core of our Money program focuses on:

• understanding what money is in the world
• understanding how money functions in our lives, and how it frequently determines our choices
• budgeting (using MS Excel) to ensure our income always exceeds our expenses
• learning the value of set-asides, savings, and investments
• learning how to weigh trade-offs when making financial choices

More on money-as-energy

Sunlight enters an ecosystem and is transformed into usable energy by plants through the process of photosynthesis. This energy then circulates around the system, as animals eat the plants and are likewise eaten, or defecate, or die and decompose. Then the decomposers receive the energy, work it into the soil, where it is taken up by plants again, cycled around and around. Sometimes the energy is "embodied," such as in the trunk of a tree, in the bones of an animal, or in the humus of the soil, and is stored for some time, taking it out of circulation temporarily, allowing more energy to enter the system and circulate.

The result is a complex system of stocks (stored energy) and flows (circulating energy), which the ecosystem constantly rebalances to remain stable and healthy. In the most robust and healthy ecosystems--and on the most robust and healthy farms--a tremendous amount of energy is stored in the system, made available as necessary, and the overall "biomass" of the system is very high.

An individual part of the system, however, is not guaranteed to benefit from the stored energy in the system as a whole. Since human beings are each individually a small part of our economic system, if we want resilience, stability, and health in our own lives, we have to ensure we keep our own stored energy -- maintaining our own "stocks" (assets) so we are not entirely dependent upon "flows" (incomes).

Core belief:

Kids and young adults are capable of understanding very complex ideas if those ideas are presented well while they are being exposed to those ideas experientially. Diversity & Complexity are core drivers of our curriculum, worth understanding for their value in the social realm, in economics, and in ecology and farming.

A couple useful links:

The economics of Robinson Crusoe:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/the-economics-of-robinson-crusoe.html

Compare this:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-year.html/

to this:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm

Consumer Expenditures in the US:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/~/media/7B5B9C4B68924A7AB0E93A3C64E1B41E.ashx

"Hackschooling"

Note the part where he references one day per week spent at something like a wilderness awareness school -- connecting with nature, making spears and bows&arrows and starting fires with bow drills, learning how to be aware and sensitive to the environment.

The Great Skills

The Great Books is a compelling idea, but how about a Great Books for the non-Western canon?

And the critical skills to arise from a Great Books education? Critical Thinking and Analysis. Communication. Maybe even the beginning of Self-Knowledge.

And let's add to that "The Great Skills":

1. Grow your own
2. Fix it when it's broken
3. Think your way through any problem (abstract what you know)
4. Cooperate with others
5. Fight

The first two may fall under the heading 'Manage your internal affairs (Keep a sound ship)'.
The last two may fall under the heading 'Manage your external affairs (Think like a citizen)'.
And the 3rd point -- "Think your way through any problem" -- bridges the internal and external.

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.

Spending per student in Washington State

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

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.