Ah, Schumacher College. There’s a name to conjure with…

For so many of us, it summons magical memories of truly life-changing times. To this day, I remember the tingling surge of energy in my body during the fortnight of the “Life After Oil” course I took there in 2006 — as one attendee put it, I had the air about me of a man in an oasis, after wandering a desert for years.

And with good reason. It was there that I first found a peer group around my concern about our collective future. There that I began shedding the deep ache of feeling alone with the apocalypse. There that I met perhaps a dozen people who remain friends to this day, including luminaries like David Fleming, Rob Hopkins and Stephan Harding. And from there that I can trace a clear thread to the profoundly satisfying work I do today, helping others out of that solitude and into empowered community.

And indeed, it was in that very same place, a decade later, that I taught my own ‘Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics‘. What a profoundly-felt honour it was to myself ascend the forbidden stairs to the teachers’ rooms, to sleep in the bed where so many of my heroes had, to contribute the fruits of my past decade to nourish the place that had so nourished me…

A sketch of me, Mark Boyle and Rob Hopkins, by one of the participants

One treasured memory is watching the participants’ eyes widen during the first session, wherein Mark Boyle and I lifted the sheet in the centre of the room to reveal our pooled teachers’ fees, converted to cash (£5 and £10 notes actually, to make a decent heap!). This we then gifted equally to each of them, under only the condition that they must collectively decide what to do with it.

Initially taken aback, over the ensuing hours they eagerly talked through the decision — gradually revealing to themselves and each other their true beliefs about the value of money — while also processing our own complete lack of financial motivation to be there. That felt a true Schumacher moment, shifting the timbre of our time together far outside that of just another ‘course’, in a way that so many alumni know well.

As so often, David Fleming nailed the heart of what is wrong with most modern education,

If the intention is to provide serried ranks of dutiful contestants on a short fuse, alone and bewildered, with a high degree of accomplishment in the art of bluffing their way through, modern education is making good progress. But it is time, now, for a change of course.

Schumacher most assuredly represented that change of course. Yet for all those cherished experiences, two days ago news broke that the College is closing, abruptly. That my true alma mater (my three years at the University of York brought me just about nothing) is to be no more. So, what went wrong?

Well, others can speak to that story with far more knowledge and power than I can. Certainly I was horrified to see how atrociously the current students have (again) been treated:

From my distant vantage point, such disrespect smells like a classic case of institutionalisation. Of a college (or the owners of its assets) forgetting the wise words attributed to W.E.B. Du Bois,

Two things and only two things are necessary — teachers and students.
Buildings and endowments may help, but they are not indispensable.

Of course all institutions, at any point in history, can lose track of what made them worthwhile to begin with.

But in times like ours — times of cultural, ecological and economic collapse — there is another hazard to navigate, as conventional models of employment cease to function in the ways we might be accustomed to. As ever more parasites seek to profit from anything worthwhile, those doing the real work that Du Bois spoke of will find it ever harder to find security (at least when sought in the form of money). Much of great value will accordingly continue to be lost.

And yet, and yet… the teachers still exist — unemployed though some now suddenly are — as do those who wish to learn about life well lived through such times.

And so happily, perhaps inevitably, as small, alternative colleges around the world seem to be falling like the proverbial flies, many of us are already creating the simpler, lighter, less money-dependent structures within which that can take place.

Off the top of my head, in very different forms: EcoGather, The University of the Forest, The Peasantry School, Black Mountains College, the Post Apocalypse School of Teeside, the New School of the Anthropocene, A School Called Home… And of course my own Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time. To name but a handful.

Containers all seeking to carry forward that fire that so often graced Schumacher College with its presence — the fire, really, that was all that mattered about Schumacher College, or any college — even as the buildings and endowments fall away.

It will endure, sure enough.

But for now, thank you, dear place, for hosting such inspiration. You changed me.

3rd September update — Today I heard that Schumacher College’s luminescent resident ecologist Stephan Harding has also departed our animate Earth; our Gaia.  Or is to return his atoms to her closer embrace.

Ah, Stephan, dear soul. I still remember our first walk together through the forest, and sensing something I hadn’t felt before — that here was a man whose love for such places ran even deeper than mine.

And his revealing to me the diminishment in myself, through never having known what my love for woodland — such a precious piece of my heart — could be, simply because the great English forests were long gone by the time I was born…

What a man, and what a legacy he leaves: