by Jacob Hundt – Founder & Director of Thoreau College, Camphill Academy Board Member
The past two years have witnessed unprecedented changes in the landscape of post-secondary education in the United States. Facing a perfect storm of rapid change in technology, demographics, economics, and politics, the US has seen an accelerating wave of institutional closures, including some of the most innovative and intimate colleges, such as Hampshire, Sterling, Northland, and Goddard, as well as smaller public and private colleges of all kinds. These are places where young people have been able to go seeking deeper connections with each other, with the Earth, and with themselves during the delicate period of transition from childhood to adulthood. Whatever the reasons, the loss of these programs could not have come at a worse time for our youth – anyone who works with teenagers and young adults today knows that many of them are in the depths of profound existential crises of meaning, mental health, and vocational purpose. In many ways, the urgent questions of this generation rhyme hauntingly with those of the young people Rudolf Steiner addressed just over 100 years ago in lecture series like The Younger Generation, in the shattering aftermath of the First World War.
It is in the context of this deepening cultural crisis that Thoreau College, and the wider microcollege movement to which it belongs, finds its calling. Rooted in the green ridges and valleys of the unglaciated Driftless Region of rural southwestern Wisconsin, Thoreau College seeks to experimentally rethink and renew education for young adults from the grassroots up. Since incorporating in 2015, Thoreau College has prototyped and staged a variety of immersive full-time residential programs for small groups of young adults. These programs range in length from three weeks to a full year. In addition to Henry David Thoreau and the American transcendentalists, this project has drawn inspiration from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf pedagogy, from the Danish folk high school movement, and from Deep Springs College (https://www.deepsprings.edu/), a remarkable and highly respected microcollege with twenty-six students that has operated on a remote cattle ranch in eastern California since its founding in 1917. Today, Thoreau College stands alongside Deep Springs and a number of other young initiatives around the world as representatives of a growing movement of “microcolleges” seeking to reinvent post-secondary education with a human face. For information about other members of this movement, visit https://thoreaucollege.org/microcollege-movement/ or tune in to “Microcollege: The Thoreau College Podcast, which features interviews with education scholars, teachers, and leaders of microcolleges, gap year programs, and folk schools. There are also several interviews focused on the Camphill Movement, including one with Camphill Academy Executive Director Libby Sanders.
Although the movement is young and necessarily diverse, microcolleges, as we define them, share elements of at least four characteristics. To one degree or another, they are all humanly-scaled, place-based, meaning-centered, and committed to offering a holistic curriculum that goes beyond academics or vocational training. These characteristics are all strongly manifested in the core program at Thoreau College in its Metamorphosis Gap Semester. Beginning in 2019, this roughly four-month-long residential experience for up to twelve students per cohort has brought young people from across the country and around the world together to engage in a curriculum organized around Five Pillars – Academics, Labor, Community, Nature, and Art. Students participate in seminar-style discussions of classic texts and natural phenomena, work in our kitchens, gardens, and small farm, and practice a variety of fine arts and folk crafts, ranging from community singing and drama to spoon carving and botanical drawing. They also participate in shared community governance and celebrations of the cycle of the year and immerse themselves deeply in nature through weeklong canoeing and hiking expeditions, as well as wilderness solos.
Thoreau College and other members of the microcollege movement are engaged in an effort to develop and model an educational community that is in strong contrast with the bureaucratic, mechanical form that the modern university has taken. Organically and experimentally, we are striving to craft a context in which our students can be physically, spiritually, and intellectually engaged in vital and meaningful ways with real questions and practical problems, in a specific, real place, and with one another as members of a real, embodied community of shared striving and responsibility. With a student body of a dozen students or less, everyone’s insights, talents, effort, and challenges matter, and nothing can safely be taken for granted in a generic or formulaic way. If we hope to cultivate a world and a society with the capacity to address the challenges we face today, it seems essential that our educational institutions seek to embody Rudolf Steiner’s “Social Motto”:
“A healing social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living.”
Steiner, Rudolf. The Motto of Social Ethics. 1920. Translated by George and Mary Adams, GA 263a.
There is a deep yearning for this kind of community among young people and people of all ages, in our time. I believe that microcolleges can be one of the most effective ways to address this longing and plant seeds of healing social renewal for the future.
Update: Thoreau College is in the news!
Forbes Magazine ran a piece on the emerging microcollege movement, and Thoreau College shows up there as one of the examples. If you are curious how folks are rethinking higher education right now, and how microcolleges fit into that picture, it’s a thoughtful read. “Inside The Emerging Microcollege Movement” by Kerry McDonald.
