Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.
Interpretation
Parents may discourage children's interest in farming due to negative perceptions, but farming can lead to remarkable experiences.
In this quote, Joel Salatin emphasizes the importance of recognizing the potential value and stories that can arise from farming. He argues that many parents dismiss their children's aspirations in this field based on outdated and negative stereotypes, such as poverty and isolation. Instead, Salatin advocates for a broader understanding of farming as a source of rich and meaningful narratives, encouraging parents to support their children's interests rather than suppressing them.
In practice
During a school career day, this quote could encourage students to pursue their passion for agriculture.
This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.
You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.
Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices.
Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?
Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.
I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.
Our higher education system is one of the things that makes America exceptional. There's no place else that has the assets we do when it comes to higher education. People from all over the world aspire to come here and study here. And that is a good thing.
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
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