Slow Learning: A Manifesto

I had never heard of slow food before. Mostly, I wanted to spend the summer in England on as little money as possible. So two friends and I signed up to work at organic farms. Sprint Mill in Cumbria, run by Edward and Romola, was our second stop.

Their farm was a living organism, each patch of land and each animal a necessary part of the whole.  A garden, some goats in a paddock, a compost bin, a little scrubby wilderness a ways off. The slugs we hand-picked off the strawberries we fed to the geese. The thistles we pulled from the hedge we fed to the goats. Nothing was wasted. What came of it was goat cheese and eggs, vegetables in their season, a stove that ran off sustainably-coppiced wood. Each part contributed to the flourishing of the whole.

Edward was proud of what they had accomplished and had plans for further stewarding. He was a man of enthusiasms–fold-up bicycles, cold dips in the river, scything, the beauty of  manure and straw layered in a winter stall ready to be transferred to the compost bin. He made artwork that consisted of panels of double-paned glass, some filled with cross-sections of processed food and others with fresh food, demonstrating the natural decay of “living” food in comparison with the unnatural perfection of the artificially preserved.

We were at Sprint Mill to work, but Edward stopped us often to talk about what we were doing and why. They nicknamed us “The Land Girls” after the young women from cities who worked on farms during World War II. It was, in part, a commentary on our ignorance, but Edward and Romola taught the philosophy and practice of sustainable living with passion and without condescension. It was they who first told me about “slow food.” I’ve never forgotten their lessons, their laughter, or their meals of fragrant bread, unexpected greens, and hard, pungent, particular goat cheese from their particular goats.

So, in honor of Sprint Mill Farm, where I first heard of “slow food,” and in honor of all other such pockets of stewarding,  I would like to propose an ideal for education. We’ll call it slow learning.

Slow food means that the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food should guide the rhythm of our life in community. Slow education says the same thing about learning–we’re working toward life-long communal habits of reading, thinking, and expressing, not just  individual preparation for “the next step.” Here are some components:

a. Small scale. Slow learning encounters smaller quantities of material rather than processing massive volumes of information without true engagement. Slow learning classes and schools are small.

b. Local and Communal. Slow learning is not mass-produced or one-size-fits-all. It fosters community connections. Slow learning communities are comfortable within the boundaries of who they are and what’s available to them, working within the limitations and strengths they’ve been given rather than demanding a perfect, controlled, uniform “product.” Slow learning communities digest together, not producing or consuming in isolation or competition.

c. Sustainable. Slow learning doesn’t burn students out. It passes through tasks in their own time without hurry or delay. Slow learning communities use their resources with care. They make their practices simple and transparent enough that they can sustain them and train others in them easily. Slow learners care for the health of their mental and communal-resource “soil,” taking the extra steps to give nutrients back through thankfulness, service, and rest.

d. Content-rich. Slow learning communities spread a feast.

e. Prioritizing appreciation over use. Slow learners value truth, goodness, and beauty for their own sake.

f. Practicing a permaculture approach. In permaculture, you think of a plot of land as having several usable layers, starting with the canopy and working down, and you design cultivation that takes advantage of the land’s natural propensities, placing many crops in one space. Slow learners efficiently design their use of time and resources so that each activity serves more than one purpose. They cultivate symbiotic connections between subjects and projects, avoiding monocultures or over-planting “one crop.” They value diversity in people and subjects and opinions.

g. Balanced. Slow learners both produce and consume, receive and create, practicing both activity and passive reflection.

h. Slow paced. There are no shortcuts. Slow food uses real, whole ingredients and processes them from beginning to end. Slow education uses real, whole texts and ideas, without pre-digestion, and spends the time to let them “simmer” in students’ minds.

i. Rejecting artificial growth. Slow learning communities don’t use entertainment, behavior modification, or other means of rapid but artificial and unbalanced growth.

Part of the power of the slow-learning terms is that, around here at least, a lot of people have heard of slow food. A lot of people already believe that it’s a good thing. If food can work that way, there’s no reason that learning can’t. We’ve started to use some of these cultivation and food analogies only recently around here as we plan, but the more we reflect the more parallels we discover. If you can think of any more, please leave a comment!

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CC image “Sprint Mill on the River Sprint” courtesy of Andrew Bowden on Flickr.