Down on the Farm and Out in the World: An Ode to Learning Both Locally and Globally

Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the vegetable garden. I remember eating handfuls of parsley, drinking the first sun-warmed spurt of water from the garden hose, watching for the radishes (always the radishes) to be the first seeds to sprout. There were beans to pick (and bean tents to hide inside), stalks of corn to wander through, and cherry tomatoes to pop into my mouth.

From the time I was ten, my family lived on a ten-acre piece of mostly wooded property three miles by gravel road outside a town of 350 people. In our acre-plus garden, we grew the usual range of vegetables, herbs and fruits, but played with new crops each year, from peanuts to currants. I could tell the difference between the various pepper starts and developed an educated palate that could easily distinguish between the flavors of a Hood strawberry versus a Shuksan or Northwest. I worked in the fields in my agricultural town all summer long–strawberries, beans, cucumbers, onions–and helped the farmers harvest the prunes, walnuts, and apples in the fall.

Being a farm kid came naturally to me, and when I wasn’t in the garden, I was in the woods. I taught kids at camp how to recognize the star-shaped tip of the salal berry (edible) and sample the delicious nectar obtained by scraping the root of the licorice fern. I knew my cones and mosses, and a high school field biology class (and a summer hoeing the weeds in vast onion fields) taught me about the native plants in the area and how to make a salad from purslane and dandelion greens.

During college, I spent a year traveling through Asia. I was drawn to the produce markets and the rice paddies and felt a kinship with the bent-over women in the fields. In Nepal, I studied the flora and fauna of the Himalayas, and stayed with a talented gardener on the seashore in Cornwall during the final month of my trip. She introduced me to climbing roses and perennials of all kinds.

After college, I moved to northern rural Japan where I taught English for several years. I lived in a small community facing the bay, and loved spending weekends exploring the meadows and forests in the area. My next-door neighbor had a huge garden in which she grew things new to me–soybeans and even mushrooms on a long row of wooden tree branches. We shared tips and I learned about the delicious wild mountain vegetables that were such a delicacy and the trees that turned the hillsides scarlet in the fall.

My next stage of life gave me a wonderful opportunity to live in a small Oregon town while raising four young daughters. My husband and I lived five blocks from Main Street, where we owned a couple of small retail businesses. My girls grew up knowing all the shopkeepers by name, and spent many happy afternoons playing in the room behind the store, going to buy candy three doors down and hanging out at the used bookstore up the street. We played a key role in the community, and my daughters understood the benefits of living in a place in which it was possible to work together in order to create a fun neighborhood event or raise money for a worthy cause right in their town. I became obsessed with gardening, seeking out the most obscure perennials and digging up swaths of lawn to plant new beds full of flowering shrubs and my favorite natives.

Later, we lived in suburbia, where we had a dramatically different experience. Some of our neighbors had lived in their homes for 25 years without ever meeting the families in the houses four doors down. There were plenty of grassy parks and manicured yards, but very few natural places open to anyone who wanted to explore them. The only stores in the area were the two strip malls mile to the north or the acres of big-box retailers across the highway to the south. There were no front porches from which to greet passing neighbors and many had landscaping services come to mow their front lawns. Most people spent their time on the decks and in the hot tubs in their private backyards.

I missed chatting with neighbors while spreading compost in my front flower beds. I missed vegetable gardens. I missed having a community in which it might take half an hour to walk two blocks because there were so many people to chat with along the way. I could go on a two-hour walk without ever passing someone on the sidewalk.

Now, we live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s a city of nearly 13 million people, and we live in the heart of it. I can enjoy stately parks full of old trees and a fascinating botanical garden just a few blocks away. There’s a produce vendor across the street who sells all kinds of fresh vegetables and fruits in season. I am learning about the native plants and the growing season, and getting to know the people on my block. Though I do occasionally long to dig in the dirt, I feel a connection to the land, the climate and the people.

During the past two weeks, I’ve been back in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the height of summer, and strolling through the old neighborhoods has given me a chance to admire the lush gardens and remember the joy of creating textural and fragrant art by designing plant combinations. I breathe deep and smile as the bumblebees buzz in the lavender plants along the sidewalks.

I have spent the last few years giving my daughters a chance to live abroad and learn more about themselves and the world. I just devoted a year to writing a book that promotes the idea of giving our children meaningful periods of time spent living in other countries. And I’ve had many conversations with people who are enthusiastic about giving their kids a global education.

But during the last few weeks of this book tour, I’ve come to recognize and appreciate the very local education I received growing up in Oregon and the sense of place that was instilled in me through those many, many hours in the garden, the woods, and the neighborhoods of my youth. Our children need a sense of place. They need to know where their food comes from–even if that’s a farmer’s market instead of their own vegetable garden. We must give them an appreciation for nature that goes beyond freshly-mowed lawns and crowded beaches.

It’s becoming more difficult to give our kids a chance to hike in the forests, muck about in ponds and run through meadows, but it’s imperative that we show them the bounty of the earth and teach them their responsibility in protecting it.

And though I am an evangelist for getting kids out into the world, I am equally passionate about ensuring that our children know where they are from, that they have roots into the land and joy in the changing seasons. As parents, we can give our kids enriching opportunities to learn both locally and globally and teach them how to dig into their own community–no matter where in the world it might be.

Being global means having a deep awareness of the world and the ability to see it from various perspectives. Sometimes it means coming back home and growing deep roots. Other times, it means moving abroad and planting oneself in a whole new place.

In every case, it means bringing the appreciation of a sense of place wherever you go and connecting with others in order to enrich each other.

When we raise global localists, the world becomes a greener, more compassionate place.

Tagged as: Bold School, Buenos Aires, creativity, distance learning, education design, global economy, global education, Maya Frost, study abroad, The New Global Student