Environment
Farming And Foraging Are Part Of The Newest Course In This Top Private School
By Mayukh Saha on March 22, 2020
Where are schools headed? Is textual learning enough for sustainable life on our planet? Here’s what a school in England came up with to better equip their students for the future.
Bedales, a school based in Hampshire has developed an A-Level curriculum that focuses on survival. In this course, the students get to learn farming, foraging, and other methods of sustainable development.
This is an accredited 2-year course titled ‘Living with the Land’. This institute has Daniel Day-Lewis and Lily Allen as its alumni. It is very progressive of them to include this field of study as a course. In the current scenario, it is an important thing to focus on environment and environment-friendly living.
In the ‘Living with the Land’ module, tradition and modernism come together. Old practices are mixed with new knowledge to create a base for learning ecological and sustainable development. The students enrolled in this course will be taught cooking, craft skills, and building. These would be combined with aspects of sustainability, ecology, and community living.
This course is being taught to the students to prepare them for the worst. With this kind of knowledge under their belt, these students would be ready to save themselves and others in situations where the earth would no longer be the home we know it to be. When the biggest question would be what is the next meal, and where to get it from, the school hopes the students will be better prepared.
This program aims to create individuals who can lead the mass to live in the wilderness should our systems crash. They would have to deal with important matters like finding food and shelter first-hand. So, they are taught the most primary techniques to arrange a living before progressing.
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There are three modules in this program- food, shelter, and craft. In each of the modules, creative thinking is as much a part of the curriculum as learning pre-existing methods.
In the shelter module, the students are urged to look for a way to utilize anything that they come across in their journey to build a shelter. It aims to teach the students how to build sustainable houses using quick thinking with anything available to them.
The food module focuses on being able to make food, which instead of being fancy, would rather serve the required nutrition to survive even harsh winters.
The crafts module is a little different than crafts as we know it. It focuses on animal husbandry, blacksmith’s work, carpentry, weaving, and other similar skills.
Magnus Basharaat, the head of the school said that this curriculum is Bedales’ contribution to extinction rebellion. He added that this incentive would make sure that no one goes hungry on a climate-ravaged planet.
This type of outdoor course has been considered by many private schools. Also having them at A-levels instead of GCSEs gives them more importance which is a requirement for the future.
