http://https://www.ted.com/talks/birke_baehr_what_s_wrong_with_our_food_system?language=en

Birke Baehr was 11 years old when he delivered this TED talk. Notice how fantastic of a speaker he is. Notice how inspired he is and how much he inspires the audience. Notice his youthful humor alongside his mature wisdom. Is he a prodigy? Was he born with an uncanny ability to understand the world around him and concern himself with its massive problems? Perhaps. I would like to point out, however, that he is road schooled (in the video he says home-schooled, but his TED biography uses the more accurate term).

Birke has been traveling the country for the past 5 years visiting organic farms. He’s broadened his classroom to an entire nation and has become incredibly successful in his activism because of it. I also get the sense that he feels fulfilled by what he does. I thought of him and his unschooling/roadschooling a lot while reading “The Wilderness of Childhood”, “Outside Lies Magic”, and “There Was A Child Went Forth.” In the video, Birke immediately points out that he feels children in his generation are easily manipulated by cooperations via TV ads and public school. Maybe if we raised children with the principles highlighted in the two essays such as enhancing ones awareness of the world around them and abandoning structure and supervision, they would be less susceptible to the influences of advertisement. If society was more in tune with children’s impressionability, as is highlighted in the Whitman poem, would we still send kids out into the world with no tools to see past the veil of colorful advertisement? Even if it meant we could save our food system and prevent those children from developing health issues early on?

I do believe there is a strong correlation between Birke’s ability to see past the structure and marketing of our society and his schooling. By being roadschooled, Birke saw the farms of the country. He stepped in the mud shared by pigs. He breathed in the air full of pollution, in some areas, and totally void of it in others. He got to experience what real people are doing all over the world to try to fix our food system. What I’m saying, and what I think the authors of these three pieces would agree with, is that it doesn’t take a genius kid to understand the problems of the world and begin to work towards solving them. It takes the ability for that kid to go out into the world and experience it instead of seeing it on a screen.

I personally remember how much I hated the structure of public schooling. I felt that I had more to do with what interested me, but my time was taken up by a bunch of formalities and requirements. If I had been unschooled, what could I have done? Would I have accomplished more by now? Would I now be less jaded about society if I had been exposed to a more free kind of learning? Perhaps if I have children one day, I’ll school them on the road, in the world, with self-guided structure and spontaneity. Then maybe they wont have to be told that the food system is unsustainable, they’ll discover it for themselves.