TOWARDS A FUTURE.

"My second grader has decided on a career in electrical engineering. He is leaning towards MIT, but I do not find them helpful and would prefer a Southern culture. Would you please tell me how to prepare him for admissions?"The amazing above quote comes from an episode of This American Life called "How I Got into College" where they talk to an Admissions Director at Georgia Tech who lets them read real letters from parents. And as you can tell, they're exceptional.However, I get it. And so do they. We all do. We all want the best for our children and as the world grows increasingly more competitive we feel pressured to get our children started on the path to success as early as possible. (It is no mistake that I am thinking about this with a 2 week old baby in the other room.)But for what kind of future do we need to be preparing them? Will their future be much like today, only with robots and autonomous cars, drones and Martian colonies? Or will it be a future with an even more cavernous gap between the rich and poor, month-long floods in coastal cities, widespread oil, water and food shortages worldwide or [insert any other depressing potentiality scientists are predicting by the year 2050]? Maybe it will be neither. But it could also be both. No matter the case, the future looks much different for our children than it did for us. And we need to at least consider (while we're, ahem, preparing our second graders for college admissions) that the latter is a possibility, too––that they might need a different set of skills to get along in their world than we did in ours.So for us we hope to prepare Further for both possibilities. And our plan, since no one has opened the Bugtussle Waldorf school yet, is to educate him on the farm. Here, his education can be both practical and prepatory. We can teach him math through baking and carpentry. We can teach him biology in the garden and forest, astronomy staring at our amazing view of the stars. English and history will come from the books we read together on rainy days, while science and chemistry will be everywhere. But he will also learn to hunt and forage and take care of animals and grow food which isn't really most public schools' thing. Hopefully these skills won't ever be a necessity, but at least they will be available for his use. By the time he's old enough, our only hope is that he will be prepared to thrive in whatever kind of future he finds himself in. Whether that's a world of academia, or a simple life back here on the farm, he'll have the luxury of being able to decide for himself. At least, that's the goal.-Jesse