On an early September afternoon, twelve high schoolers sit in a circle on a small hill next to an organic vegetable garden. The trees on the Green Mountains are just beginning to change, and the foliage makes an impressive backdrop behind their small congregation. The teenagers are taking turns going around the circle reading aloud from a short story: “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono. It’s about a farmer in Provence in the first half of the 20th century who, quietly and over the course of nearly 40 years, made it his life’s work to reforest his small corner of France.
This memory, dredged up from fifteen years ago, is from my first environmental science class at The Mountain School, an independent semester-long boarding school program in Vermont that places an intense focus on the natural world. On the 300-acre farm, high school students read Emerson, Thoreau, Wendell Berry, and Bill McKibben. But they also learn to eat what they kill, rotate the cows and sheep from pasture to pasture, draw sap from the maple trees to make maple sugar and even shovel the wood chips into the generator to keep the lights on. In other words, it’s not your average high school experience.
The school’s unorthodox curriculum is intended to connect the intellectual learning of a classroom with the experiential learning of working on a farm and living close to the land. “We are trying to help students get outside of themselves—by learning to work together for some good that they couldn’t achieve alone and to know what that’s like and to be interested in doing that later on in their lives,” Mountain School Director Alden Smith says. “I want them to be asking what the history is of a place, where does our energy comes from, where does our food comes from.” says Smith. “Part of what we’re trying to do is to make what is invisible in the rest of the developed world visible here so much so that they will be curious about it when they go home.”
It’s a lofty goal for a small, word-of-mouth, semester program. And yet despite it’s modest size, The Mountain School alumni network reads like a brief history of the modern environmental movement. Graduates include former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach (the organization’s youngest-ever president and a MYOO contributor), as wells as Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, producers of “King Corn” the acclaimed 2007 documentary on the dangers of industrial farming. Other graduates have founded campus gardens at Yale, Middlebury, Brown, Wesleyan, and Kenyon University; while the alumni newsletter’s where-are-they-now section is an encyclopedia of NGOs and nonprofits.
In a time when critics regularly write of the millenial generation’s deficit in empathy and an overall shift towards cultural narcissism in today’s youth, the Mountain School’s high ratio of students who go on to become social and environmental leaders has little in common with the navel-gazing self-absorption the “me generation” moniker implies.
Not coincidentally then, it was as I was finishing a masters program I found my thoughts returning to the school and wondering what it was the Mountain School gave me that my regular high school experience did not. How had those three and a half months in Vermont shaped me so that, fifteen years after the fact, I was still grappling with how to make my personal dreams work in tandem with my responsibilities to the world?
The question is an important one; at a time when the world is facing environmental challenges far beyond the scope of previous generations, the Mountain School’s booked enrollment points to a desire among today’s students for a more integrated approach to education as well as a sub-current of the Me Generation that is demonstrably eager to find ways to contribute to a larger good. It’s surplus of high-achieving do-gooder alumni has some educators wondering what’s in the water there, and whether the Mountain School’s alumni is proof that environmental leadership can be taught.
Even for an alumnus, it’s a difficult question to untangle. The student body is self-electing. Certainly not all adolescents would choose such a rustic experience, leaving room for the argument that the school simply draws a like-minded pool of student primed for a life of civic and social engagement. The Mountain School is also well aware of the contributions of it’s high profile alumni, further encouraging graduates by providing funding for those who are, as Smith puts it, “fulfilling the Mountain School mission of taking care of a place and working for the common good through community gardens, land trusts and the like.” Perhaps it is this rewards-based approach and access to funding that accounts for so much of the school’s graduate success.
Yet most alumni credit the unique curriculum itself with having a huge impact on them at a pivotal stage of adolescence. “The Mountain School gave me a sense of independence and the tools to wield that independence,” Werbach told me. “As a typical 16 year-old, I was looking for rebellion, looking for a way to be different, and instead of striking out against the people and things I loved, the Mountain School helped me channel that energy into something productive. There’s nothing like waking up at 6am on a cold, 10 degree below zero Vermont morning to break up the ice on the water in the chicken coop to focus your mind. The combination of having your hands in the dirt and your head in the clouds, reading Thoreau and Emerson, was magical for me.”
The Mountain School alumni network reads like a brief history of the modern environmental movement. Graduates include former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach, as wells as Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, producers of “King Corn” the acclaimed 2007 documentary on the dangers of industrial farming.
This connection to the land is one that the founders, David and Nancy Grant, have attempted to instill in students since the school’s opening in 1983. They asked: what is the relationship between humans and the natural world as this industrial century is coming to a close? In the outside world, it’s a question that has both grown and diminished in popularity in the intervening three decades as the world globalizes and life is lived increasingly online. And yet at the Mountain School it remains as fresh as a freezing Vermont morning.
Before founding the school, the Grants were career educators (David a teacher and Nancy an administrator) making their way at elite private boarding schools. They previously worked at the prestigious Putney School and Cushing Academy, before ending up at Milton Academy, where they were both working when the opportunity of the Mountain School presented itself.
Before the Grants bought it, (for about $300,000 in the fall of 1983) the school had been a four-year high school that had been founded in the sixties and followed a more conventional high school curriculum. Attracting high-quality students to a remote farm for four-years, however, proved an unsuccessful business plan. The school failed, and was for sale by the time the Grants learned about its existence.
Ideas of experiential learning in education first championed by the likes of John Dewey were on the wane at the time, replaced by increased standardization and testing as Regan-era cuts to social programs steered the cultural climate of the country in a more conservative direction. Thus, when the Grants decided to purchase The Mountain School they were consciously buying into an out-of-fashion, if not out-dated, model. The risk paid off.
The Grants had spent summers teaching at Three Mile Island Camp on Lake Winnipesauke, a rustic camp that is managed by the Appalachian Mountain Club and run entirely by volunteers. The idea of the Mountain School, says Nancy, “combined our summer life of work learning and our school-year life of school-year learning.” They began developing the idea of a semester school with a place-based curriculum that encouraged Socratic-style discussion and critical thinking, and deemphasized lecturing and note-taking.
Long successful at colleges, the semester model was a revolutionary proposition for a high school, and had never been tried among students of that age group. However the Grants believed it could work for two reasons: they felt high-school seniors were at an ideal balance between impressionable and mature enough to work within a community and understand it’s relationship with the environment, and that short, intense experiences had a longer lasting impact.
Hence, says Alden Smith, the semester-long idea was one of the Grants’ primary innovations. He calls it “the blueprint” that works as well for 2011 as it did for 1983, by providing students with a significant academic and life experience while still allowing them to return as smoothly as possible to their home schools and normal lives when the semester ends.
“There’s nothing like waking up at 6am on a cold, 10 degree below zero Vermont morning to break up the ice on the water in the chicken coop to focus your mind. The combination of having your hands in the dirt and your head in the clouds, reading Thoreau and Emerson, was magical for me.”
Partnerships with Milton Academy and other prestigious preparatory schools helped ensure the initial and future solvency of the school, but also did not mitigate a certain reputation for expense and elitism, which is still a somewhat touchy subject, given the school’s commitment to social justice and environmental issues. While I was there the students were almost entirely white and from wealthy backgrounds, and even today, the school’s semester tuition of $22,850 is a hard cost to swallow for most middle class families.
While those associations may have defined the school in its early years and adolescence, it’s a reputation, says Smith, that they have been working to mitigate. “It’s different from what it was a decade ago in that it’s much more diverse. It’s just that we’ve been in a position finally—financially—to make a commitment to diversity. Our economic diversity is much more than it used to be. As many as half of the students are given financial aid and we’re completely need blind.” He also points out that in the previous semester they had 37 schools represented among 45 students, none of whom hailed from Milton.
As government-funded education programs are encouraged to move increasingly towards standardization and technology, and some educators argue for moving education online, the Mountain School provides a counter-model in sharp contrast, focusing on individualized learning and experiential as opposed to virtual learning. It’s a model with a growing following. Since its inception, the school has inspired a slew of like-minded schools across the country. The Chewonki School on the coast of Maine opened in 1988 at the urging of the Mountain School’s faculty, who were finding they had more applicants than they could accommodate. In the more than three decades since, a steady stream of semester programs have been launched in America, some by alumni themselves including Chewonki, the High Mountain Institute in Colorado and, one of the most recent programs which opened in the past few years, the School for Ethics in Washington, D.C., all based largely on The Mountain School’s original ethos and semester model.
As to whether the Mountain School model will continue to replicate, Christopher Barnes of the High Mountain Institute says he has a suspicion that “semester schools are the product of passionate educators interested in supplying an alternative to existing secondary educational offerings.” He hypothesizes that, as study-abroad programs mushroomed in popularity for college-age students, the same could happen for semester programs for high school juniors.
While it is yet to be determined whether The Mountain School model will achieve mainstream success it’s impact on graduates is irrefutable. As it was for Werbach, the place was magical for me. A welcome respite from my public school in Virginia where the textbooks still said Christopher Columbus was an unqualified hero and the classrooms were we bent over our books were windowless and buzzed with fluorescent light. As with the most powerful life lessons, I didn’t see what I was missing until I saw that there was an alternative. In that fresh Vermont air I became aware that I was sharing my learning with a group of other people, and that in fact learning about them was part of my education. As I’ve grown older, this experiential education has led me to read deeply and to become a writer myself. Wordsworth didn’t write about a rainbow because he read about one in a book, he spent hours outside witnessing them. He knew better than anyone that “the child is father to the man.”
—Nell Boeschenstein is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, This Recording, The Millions, The Morning News, The Faster Times, and The New York Daily News. Check out more of her work here.
