Electric fans and open windows alleviate the muggy air filling the classroom. The school’s academic building is located near the swine pen, on the far end of the farm, and the students enjoy greeting the surly boar caged outside as they walk into my class. They arrive well dressed in blazer and tartan tie, greeting their teacher with eye contact and well wishes. One time a young lad trotted in with a three-foot rat snake wrapped around his arm, which he had caught while finishing chores in the chicken shed. Unsure how to respond, I let it slide. Given that it was non-venomous, that the other students were not distracted, and that the lad was able to take detailed notes with his right hand while the snake coiled around his left, I started my lecture on the Merovingian dynasty.
The scene comes from St. Martin’s Academy, an all-boys boarding high school in Fort Scott, Kansas. The fledgling school is now in its eighth year and draws its student body from a copious pool of applicants living across the country. Along with a six-hour regimen of academic study followed by two hours of exhausting athletics, the seventy students spend their days engaged in abundant chores and ample free play. When Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms visited, he concluded that America needs a thousand such schools. Sustainable farming is a central part of school life, whose mission is “to heal the imagination.” For most teenagers today, the raw material of the imaginative faculty is harvested from an average five hours spent daily on social media. Since the imagination, indispensable to the mind’s operations, can only use what each person has individually experienced, today’s teenagers are provided with little else as food for thought.
As St. Martin’s has realized, just as ultra-processed food malnourishes the body, so ultra-processed digital content malnourishes the mind. The remedies we can prescribe are much the same. The malnourished body is healed by denying it junk food and feeding it food taken more directly from nature. It is likewise for the mind. Thus, students at St. Martin’s must surrender all phones and computers upon arrival, where they spend zero time online during the school year. If a student needs to call home, a couple shared landlines publicly situated provide all that is necessary. But mere deprivation is not enough. The mind must be properly fed, which the school does by having students experience reality in less mediated ways than the digital world can offer: calloused hands, pungent smells, raw foods, bleating sheep, rosy skies, and whatever else mother nature chooses to give.
In this spirit of direct participation with nature, we would, for instance, look askance at the typical laboratory experiment of dissecting a thawed frog purchased online, calmly analyzing its inner mechanisms. Yet we embrace the intimate chore of raising and butchering farmyard chickens. Indeed, there are no classes called “Biology,” “Physics,” or “Chemistry” at the school. Rather, the students progress through an alternative curriculum beginning freshman year under that older name, “Natural History.” Students spend those classes outside, observing, naming, and memorizing things: local birds, insects, plants, and trees. The goal is not simply the production of accurate observations, but to develop a kindly relationship with the object of study. As the school’s president, Daniel Kerr, is wont to say, “Birds are friends when you know their names.”
This approach is only possible because St. Martin’s cares little for that prized goal of modern education: critical thinking. John Dewey’s phrase has no settled definition, but it summons attendant modifiers such as “skeptical,” “un-biased,” “analytic,” and “objective.” Such ultra-processed thinking has become the goal even of elementary education, and most educators would be hard pressed to imagine a different purpose of education. Yet this approach comes at a high cost. Critical thinking creates a distance between the student and the object of study. It makes the object of study impersonal and thus erodes the personal motivations people have to study it in the first place. The typical outcome of this training is not the brilliant scientist who impartially follows the truth wherever it may lead, but the unmotivated skeptic, the cynical and aloof student. Educators should seek instead to eliminate the distance between students and the object of study, encouraging them to engage in their studies with wonder, affection, sacrifice, and the whole capacity of the human person.
Samuel J. Klumpenhouwer, Ph.D., teaches liberal arts at Saint Martin’s Academy in Fort Scott, Kansas and serves as general editor of the Glossa Ordinaria series, published by Emmaus Academic and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.