In our latest video we give an insight into the philosophy and structure of our bush school, Forest & Free, which we established several years ago. This is a ‘school’ built upon gifts, with few organisational costs, little administration, and a whole bunch of community trust where the principal teacher is Mother Country.
Composting industrial schooling to regrow the forest village
In our latest video we give an insight into the philosophy and structure of our bush school, Forest & Free, which we established several years ago. This is a 'school' built upon gifts, with few organisational costs, little administration, and a whole bunch of community trust where the principal teacher is Mother Country.
For those turning away from the polarity trap of AI schooling and the neoliberal-transhuman programmes attached to it, or you'd like to start your own community-based learning group, you may find some useful things here.
Here's the audio-only version,
[audio mp3="https://artistasfamily.is/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Audio-master.mp3"][/audio]
and here's the version with added visuals.
As always, your comments are not just welcome but appreciated. We'd love to hear your thinkings and doings as you push further away from the global culture of hypertechnocivility and lean deeper into your local culture of magic making.
Oh, I wish I was a child again and could come to your Forest School. Then I did have a wonderful, slightly wild childhood, growing up in walking distant to a forest, where my friend and I would escape to on a very early Sunday morning. Where we had a secret place, where we could lite a fire and cook our breakfast on a stick. I love to see freedom in children and it hurts me to see them constantly attached to some device or an other. Arms around.
Your childhood sounds wonderful, Ellen. Every child needs a secret forest underworld.
Thank you so much for this! To me this is the greatest gift you’ve shared on your blog so far. There is so much knowledge and skill that you both have that you bring to your bush school, and getting this taste of it is gold for me.
We have a small forest school “nga tamariki o te ngahere” (the children of the forest) in the Kāpiti coast in NZ. We’re just starting out and it’s a cocreation between the parents. It’s definitely still evolving. None of us are as experienced with bush skills or facilitation as you two are, and there are no drop offs at this stage. The children are younger, from babies to 7 years old currently. We visit different locations in the area each week, though we’d like to have a “home base” to build and interact with more. One of my favourite elements is that we make a soup on the fire for lunch and we all bring diced vege to add to the pot.
I love being a part of it so much. Because many of us parents are there we try and find time when the kids are playing to check in between ourselves about talk about our parenting that week.
Again thank you for this peek into the way you hold your space. It’s a real gift.
By the way, have you been following Daniel Schmachtenbergers work lately? I know someone mentioned him in your comments previously and feel like I heard some of his threads coming through as you talked?
I would be extremely interested to hear anything more you have to say about Woodys home / community eduction or details of your family routines if you ever felt inspired to share more on those topics.
Thanks so much Natalie, yes we’ve been following Daniel’s work, alongside Paul Kingsnorth, Toby Rogers and many others. We love your shared lunch soup cooked on the fire. Beautiful!
Hi Artist as Family.
Such a beautiful sharing!
I’ve got to say, forest and free and the household managing are two of my favourite subjects.
I also get a lot of knowledge and inspiration from Peter Gray’s books, and now I’ve started reading “The essential guide to forest school and nature pedagogy” by Jon Cree and Marina Robb. But your videos sharing are a treasure to me, in such a community sense that fills up my whole body with joy and life, kilometres away from Australia!
For almost 2 months now, I’m been a part of a project that it is still on his first steps… an outdoor complement to home schooling, to children from 6 to 12 years old. And the most challenging thing I’ve been facing, has one of the facilitators, it’s that parents want an outside project to complement the home schooling, but they truly don’t want it…. they want it in theory but not in practice…. they still want to control what and how children do things, with minimum risk involved, even coming around to solve children’s problems and things like that. I do believe that people do want the romantic view of this subject but still have the urge of creating an “outside-castrating-protective-adult control-bobble”.
Again, I’m always hopping to hear again from you, I do feed on you videos to inspire and learn 🍄 I’m already hopping for the next one 💛 thanks for you opened hearts and beautiful sharing!!! They are magic to me! I hope you know you’re community is also living far away from Dja Dja Wurrung (Djaara) country, and that there’s a bit of your spirit here in Portugal to! With all my love and admiration… 🍒Cláudia🍄
What a rich and joyous comment, Cláudia! Thank you. We were not aware of that book, so thank you. The ‘minimum risk’ parenting movement is killing children’s learning and setting children up for a lifetime of anti-depressants. It’s so sad.