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Episode-1632- Matt Powers on a New Educational Model

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permschoolMatt Powers is an author, educator, permaculturist, seed saver, innovator & family guy from California working on creating a new paradigm in education aligned to real life: permaculture + nature + small business while including families and mixed age groups.

Matt is starting a new kind of school: Permaculture Life School. It’s a school focused on real life skills – farming sustainably, running a small business ethically and profitably and enjoying nature as students develop the ability to read the landscape.

He joins us today to discuss the reasons why he is starting this school.  What’s wrong, why we need to change it, how we could change it & how we could do it best to achieve our goals – build with the end in mind.

There is no doubt modern education needs a re tooling.  I feel that Matt’s focus is one of many ways to do just that.  We need a new educational model that leverages 2015s technology.

There are fundamentals of reading, writing, math and science all children should learn, but we should have dozens or even hundreds of choices in a world were we already have over 10,000 options for how we dress up a smart phone in a colorful case.

Resources for today’s show…

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Comments

Episode-1632- Matt Powers on a New Educational Model — 22 Comments

    • No it is called common sense! We can choose to do unnatural things, a choice we make far to often.

    • In my view, nature never does anything unsustainable and even if it did, I would consider that unnatural. So humans do do several unnatural things.

      • How is this for more accurate?

        When something unnatural occurs in nature, the laws of natural systems correct it quite rabidly because such things are not sustainable. The problem is that humans have evolved far enough to violate natural law, and make systems that should be unsustainable, sufficiently sustainable for sufficient time to do real harm to natural systems.

  2. Great response to the history segment, Jack. I’m often torn on what to call “natural” since man is part of nature. Thus what the Indians did in the 17th century allowed the natural systems to work in balance. When the Indians stopped doing it due to disease and war, the natural balance broke down and everything went to … well… it spun out of control.

    BTW, I loved your point about “savages” and the 30 Years’ War, 80 Years’ War, fill-in-the-blank war. It is all so relentlessly savage and pointless.

    Alex Shrugged

    • If you want to really prove how pointlessly savage we are, try the years 1914-1918

    • I’d consider controlled burns to be completely natural. There are western forests that have natural cycles of burns.

  5. Selecting the President and Vice President at random from the phone book might not be that bad of an idea.

    • Ya might want to watch the movie before you think so. Parking Ticket, well to the firing squad with you!

    • I was thinking that too. In a properly constrained government then random appointments make perfect sense. Properly defined so that no one should want to be President or Congressman. Just obligations with few benefits, like a Scoutmaster.

  6. And on the theme of 1000 things everyone should know, I’ll throw in a quote I love: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

  9. I’ve been listening to every episode for the past three years or so. This is one of my favorite episodes. A great guest, a great topic and Jack is getting to be a much better interviewer.

    Keep up the good work! I talk about your ideas so much to my friends and coworkers that they know you on a first name basis.

    • Thanks for the kind words and THANK YOU SO MUCH for sharing TSP with others.

  10. I’m thrilled to hear about this new permaculture school. I homeschool my 6 year old, and this is exactly what I want to teach her. But I’m still not completely sure what the site will end up doing. Is this a full, ongoing 12 year program? Or do I sign up for the 3 month class & use that as a basis for her full education? I’m just not sure how the 3 month class translates into the upcoming years. I looked on his site, and listened to the episode, but I’m not clear about how to proceed after the first 3 months. It seems that each 3 month period will be a different class. I understand this is a new project, just trying to plan how I would use this for years to come. Excellent show. I can’t wait to see what this becomes.

  11. Is the September 15 cut off the only time this will be offered? I am interested but dropping 500+ on the course is going to be rough right now. I just dropped 1k on a soil course from another permaculturist.

    • Yea that is the cut off because this course is time based and there are things students have to get finished in fall.

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