The Future of Education Is Agrarian, Regenerative, and Deeply Human

A Reflective Essay by Lucian Toma

The Photograph That Carries the Whole Story

I could have chosen so many different photographs to begin this essay.

I could have chosen a picture of my adult students graduating from one of our permaculture courses, holding their certificates after long, beautiful, life-changing days learning together. Or I could have chosen a picture of those same students during the course itself: standing in the garden, learning how to read the land, building compost piles, planting fruit trees, milking goats, making salads and pizzas from farm ingredients, walking through food forests, studying water, soil, animals, fungi, trees, and the deep intelligence of living systems.

All of those images would have told part of the story. But the picture I keep coming back to is much simpler. It is a picture of children in our nature and ecological farm based homeschool co-op harvesting mushrooms from our mushroom logs.

There is something in that image that feels more foundational to me than almost anything else I could say. These children are not just doing an activity. They are not just learning about mushrooms. They are touching a living system. They are harvesting food from wood inoculated with fungi. They are seeing decomposition, cooperation, patience, moisture, shade, time, and nourishment come together in one moment. They are learning, with their hands and eyes and bodies, that the world is alive, generous, mysterious, and understandable.

They are learning it all with their parents and other loving adults, and more importantly, they are learning it early.

Reintroduced to the World They Belong To

For more than a decade now, I have believed that the earlier people are brought into real relationship with nature, the better and more integrated their lives can become. I do not mean nature as a vague idea, or as a pretty background, or as something we visit once in a while when we need a break from the real world. I mean nature as the real world. I mean the living systems that give us food, clean water, clean air, biodiversity, beauty, medicine, materials for shelter, joy, inspiration, contemplation, and so much of what makes a human life whole.

When a child learns how food grows, how soil is built, how water moves, how fungi transform wood into nourishment, how animals participate in fertility, how flowers become color, how insects pollinate, how birds move seeds, how trees feed communities of life above and below the ground, that child is not only receiving information - that child is being reintroduced to the world they belong to.

What I have seen, again and again, is that this kind of education does not feel like novelty.
IT FEELS LIKE REUNION.

Where I Learned to See the Reunion

The first time I truly saw this was 12 or 13 years ago at The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano. That place was one of my great launching pads. I am still deeply grateful for the years I spent there, for the workshops I was able to teach, for the permaculture courses I was able to help facilitate and teach, and for the people who trusted me before I fully understood what was being awakened in me.

I am especially grateful to Evan Marks, who trusted me and mentored me in such a beautiful way. There was something almost effortless in his leadership, something like the idea of "wu wei", or action without force - effortless action. He did not have to push too hard. He seemed to understand that if I reconnected with the way I had grown up, if I remembered the land-based wisdom of my childhood, I would be able to help others reconnect too. I had been raised with so much of this knowledge around me, especially through my grandmother, but I had to return to it with new eyes. Evan helped create the conditions for that return. (Thank you Evan, if you are reading this!)

Most of my teaching then was with adults, but The Ecology Center also had children’s programs, and that is where another beautiful teacher entered the story. Dr. Meg, who now runs The Human Nature Center in Santa Barbara, was leading those programs at the time. She would bring me into tours and activities with children, inviting me to help them engage the garden, the farm, the compost, the plants, the animals, and the stories embedded in all of it. She, too, had a way of teaching and training that was gentle but powerful, another kind of effortless action. She knew how to create a space where children could encounter nature directly, and where those of us helping could learn how to guide without over-controlling.

It was there that I began to recognize something I have never forgotten. When adults and children encountered living systems in this way, their response was not simply the excitement of learning something new. It was not just the spark of novelty, the thrill of hearing an interesting fact, or the entertainment of a hands-on activity. It was way deeper than that:

It was like watching a child see their mother after being away from her all day. The smile. The relief. The movement toward her. The embrace. The body remembering safety. The heart recognizing home 

That is what it felt like. People were not just learning about nature. They were returning to their mother.

And over the years, I began to notice something else. The people who came once were often moved. They had a beautiful experience. They learned something. They felt something. But the people who returned again and again, the children who kept coming back, the adults who kept studying, practicing, building, planting, composting, harvesting, cooking, designing, and asking better questions — those people seemed to reconnect at a much deeper level.

Repeated relationship matters. A field trip can open a door. A workshop can plant a seed. But a rhythm of return changes a life.

I have seen this in adults who went on to change the way they lived, the way they ate, the way they designed their homes and landscapes, the way they raised their children, and even the careers they chose. I have seen it in children I met more than a decade ago who are now out in the world carrying something beautiful from those early encounters. It is hard to measure this kind of impact in the usual ways, but it is very real. When people are repeatedly brought into contact with living systems, and when they are invited to participate with reverence and skill, something forms in them.

This is one of the great reasons I believe the future of education must be agrarian, regenerative, deeply practical, and deeply human.

Bringing This Work Home to Missouri

When we moved to Missouri and began building our life at Sun and Bloom Farms, this same pattern continued. Early on, we began facilitating nature-based and regenerative farming sessions for a homeschool group that was already established locally. Many of the families were driving from the Jefferson City area, and they were already oriented toward nature-based education, so the connection felt very natural.

They saw what we were doing here. They saw the farm, the gardens, the animals, the food, the trees, the soil, the way we were trying to live. And they trusted the space. Not just in the basic sense of physical safety, though that matters deeply, but in the health sense too. They knew we were growing beyond organic, without chemicals, and that their children could touch the soil, harvest plants, smell flowers, interact with animals, and be on the land without being exposed to the kinds of things many parents rightly worry about. They also knew that we were teachers, that Anna Maria and I cared deeply about children, about education, about the earth, and about the future these children are inheriting.

Natural Dyeing: Where Color Comes From

One of the activities we offered was natural dyeing. On the surface, natural dyeing could look like a craft. A sweet seasonal project. Something beautiful for children to do with flowers, onion skins, fruits, pits, leaves, and pieces of cloth brought from home. And it is that. It is beautiful. It is tactile. It is memorable. But it is also so much more. (Thank you Kristin Morrison for opening that door for us long ago!)

When children learn natural dyeing, they begin to understand that color does not simply come from a store. Color is not just an artificial product that appears on a shelf with no story, no plant, no place, no people, no history behind it. Color comes from the living world. It comes from roots, bark, petals, fruits, minerals, insects, soil, seasons, cultures, and long human relationships with place.

Anna Maria brought such beauty to this teaching, weaving together histories from her Greek and Italian ancestry, stories of people and plants and cloth and household life. And as I watched the children dye handkerchiefs and T-shirts with natural materials, I was taken back to my own grandmother in Romania.

My grandmother made natural dyes for everything. She made natural paints and washes for the outside of the house and different ones for the inside. They had different textures, smells, purposes, and qualities. She made dyes for blankets and fibers and household needs. She carried an entire body of knowledge that did not live in a notebook. She did not need to check a recipe or read instructions. She knew because she had done it all her life. It lived in her hands, in her nose, in her eyes, in her memory, in her relationship with materials.

Watching children on our farm learn these things was like reliving my past in the present. And it reminded me that this kind of education is not just about preserving old skills for nostalgia’s sake. It is about restoring a relationship between people, place, beauty, and responsibility. If we want natural color, we must protect and grow the plants that give us color. If we want medicine, we must protect medicinal plants and the ecosystems they live in. If we want food, we must care for soil. If we want clean water, we must care for watersheds. If we want beauty, we must participate in the conditions that allow beauty to flourish.

Why Parents Matter in This Kind of Learning

In that setting of the homeschool activities we were facilitating for that local homeschool group, where our own children were also involved, the format was that the parents were present the entire time. These gatherings were not quick drop-off activities. They often lasted four hours, and sometimes five or even six, depending on the day and the activity. There was always a hands-on learning activity, but there was also food. We ate together. We made food together. The learning was held inside a larger rhythm of relationship, work, nourishment, and community.

That was the format we continued to follow with our nonprofit, Bloom Homeschool Co-op. The children were not simply dropped into an isolated lesson and then sent home with a finished product. The parents were present. They watched. They helped. They learned. They remembered things from their own lives. They had new things to talk about with their children. They could repeat the activity later, at home, in another season, with another plant, at another age. The lesson could grow as the child grew.

A five-year-old can learn that flowers make color. An eight-year-old can begin to learn about plant parts, heat, fibers, mordants, and history. A twelve-year-old can begin to understand chemistry, culture, trade, ecology, and land stewardship. A teenager can begin to ask deeper questions about clothing systems, pollution, beauty, economy, and what kind of world we are building.

The same activity can return year after year, each time with another layer of meaning. That is how wisdom forms. Not by rushing from one disconnected subject to another, but by returning to living realities with deeper attention.

Compost, Soil, and the Universe Under Our Feet

Another example of this learning is compost. So many children are taught to think of soil as dirt, as something beneath us, something messy, something to wash off quickly before going inside. But soil is one of the great living foundations of our lives. It is where food begins. It is where plants find their nourishment. It is where water is held, carbon is cycled, organisms live, roots communicate, and the visible world is supported by the invisible one.

When we made compost with the children, we were not merely showing them how to pile up organic materials. We were teaching them that compost is a collaboration with a natural process already happening everywhere. Leaves fall in a forest. Animals leave manure. Plants die. Fungi and bacteria and insects and worms and countless organisms begin the work of transformation. Nutrients cycle. Life feeds life.

In composting, humans are not inventing decomposition. We are creating conditions for decomposition to happen well and quickly. We are gathering materials, balancing carbon and nitrogen, adding moisture, creating structure, allowing oxygen to move, and then stepping back enough for life to do what life does.

We do not make compost alone. We create the right conditions, and the microorganisms do the composting. That is a profound lesson for children. Honestly, it is a profound lesson for adults too.

The children helped build the pile. Then they came back and felt the heat of it. They could see that something was happening. The pile was alive with activity. A week later it was hot, breaking down, transforming. Later, they could see the material becoming something else entirely. What had been scraps and leaves and manure and bedding was becoming dark, rich, beautiful compost that could feed the garden beds.

Anna Maria taught them about the soil food web, and the children began making connections between the life below the soil and the life above it. They understood that there is a web of relationship underground, and there is a food web above ground too: insects, birds, animals, plants, fungi, seeds, predators, prey, grazers, pollinators, decomposers, and everything participating in the larger pattern.

Then we looked through a microscope.

The children were amazed. Some of them seemed to feel as if they were looking through a telescope into the universe. And in a way, they were. They were looking into a universe that had been beneath their feet the entire time.

It struck me deeply. So much of our culture looks upward, wondering where life might be in the universe, while children can look down and discover whole worlds of life in a teaspoon of soil or compost. There is mystery under our feet. There is intelligence under our feet. There is life feeding life under our feet. And once a child sees that, soil is never just dirt again.

Everything Can Be Taught in a Garden

This is why I love Evan’s phrase from The Ecology Center: everything can be taught in a garden. It is true. Biology can be taught in a garden. Chemistry can be taught in a garden. Math can be taught in a garden. Literature, history, nutrition, ecology, art, engineering, economics, ethics, and spirituality can all be taught in a garden. A garden is not a break from education. A garden is one of the most complete classrooms we have.

And when that garden is part of a farm, and when that farm is part of a community, and when parents and children and teachers and elders are involved together, the learning becomes even more powerful. It becomes not just information transfer, but community formation. Skills are built. Relationships are strengthened. Families share meaningful experiences. Children see adults learning. Adults see children discovering. The community becomes more resilient because knowledge is no longer locked away in a textbook or held by one expert. It is practiced, repeated, embodied, and shared.

This is the model we have been moving toward through our work at Sun and Bloom Farms and now through Anna Maria's non-profit, The Bloom Homeschool Co-op. Different formats have emerged over the years, but the heart has remained the same: nature, farm, community, children, parents, practical skill, living systems, and repeated relationship.

Different Models, Same Living Heart

And I want to be clear that this does not have to look exactly one way.

Some people may hear this and think, “Well, not every family can be part of a parent-child farm co-op every week.” That is true. Not every parent has the same schedule, capacity, location, or season of life. But the deeper question is not whether every model looks exactly the same. The deeper question is whether we can begin designing educational environments around the realities of life.

At The Ecology Center, for example, many programs involve children being dropped off into the care of a trained, loving, capable team. The parents may not be present for the whole experience, but the children are still surrounded by multiple adults who care deeply about them, about the earth, and about the quality of the learning environment. That matters. It is not one isolated teacher carrying the whole burden alone. It is a team. It is a culture. It is a place. It is land-based, relational, practical, and alive.

These are two different models, but they point toward the same possibility. What would happen if more communities began to value this kind of education enough to design life around it? What would happen if parent-involved learning, land-based learning, and team-supported children’s programs were not rare exceptions, but normal parts of a healthy society?

The benefit would not only be for the children. It would be for the parents too. Isn’t this part of the point of being a parent — to share life with our children, to learn beside them, to enjoy them, to pass on what we know, and to discover what we still need to learn? And isn’t part of the gift of being a child the chance to spend meaningful time with our parents, to learn from them, to be with them, to feel their presence inside the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life?

If enough people experience this, I believe our communities will begin to move toward it. We will begin to want it. We will begin to value it. And then we can design the rest of society around making these relationships and rhythms possible: work schedules, schools, farms, community spaces, nonprofit programs, local economies, and the whole living structure around family and education.

What Is Happening Now, and Why It Needs to Change

I do not want to speak harshly about teachers working inside the traditional educational system. Many teachers are heroic. Many are doing their best inside systems they did not design. But I do believe we have placed an impossible burden on them. We have often asked one person in one room to carry the intellectual, emotional, social, and practical development of many children, while separating those children from land, food, craft, weather, animals, gardens, parents, elders, and the direct practice of life.

That is not a failure of teachers. It is a failure of design.

Human beings do not learn only by listening, looking, memorizing, writing, and taking tests. We have bodies. We have hands. We have noses. We have skin. We have balance, movement, emotion, intuition, pattern recognition, and imagination. We learn by touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, building, sweating, failing, trying again, laughing, wondering, harvesting, cooking, sharing, and caring for something real.

Learning is much more dynamic than sitting in a room and receiving information. And I truly believe the world would be transformed if more people were educated in nature, farm and project based environments like the ones I described in this essay.

Not Everyone Will Become a Farmer, But Everyone Needs the Living World

Not because everyone would become a farmer. Not because every child needs to become a natural dyer, compost maker, cheesemaker, bread baker, gardener, forester, or permaculture designer as a profession. That is not the point.

The point is that all of us live because the living world is generous.

Even the people who go on to become architects, engineers, software designers, builders, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, or creators of advanced technologies would benefit from being deeply connected to how nature works. In fact, I believe the more technological the future becomes, the more important this reconnection will be.

Technology will still exist. Machines will still exist. Computing systems will still exist. We will continue designing tools meant to make life easier, healthier, safer, and more beautiful. But imagine if the people designing those systems had been formed by gardens, forests, rivers, animals, fungi, soil, pollinators, and living relationships. 

Imagine if the architects of the future understood how nature builds strength with beauty, how ecosystems use waste as food, how diversity creates resilience, how edges create abundance, how cooperation and competition both have their place, how energy is captured and cycled, how life creates conditions for more life.

A Technological Future Still Needs Nature’s Wisdom

The future Janine Benyus points toward in *Biomimicry* is exactly this kind of future: one where human design is increasingly inspired by nature’s genius. Our buildings, schools, transportation systems, technologies, materials, farms, economies, and communities can all learn from the living world.

And how beautiful that is. How beautiful that we get to observe all these living beings and learn from them.

Butterflies and bees pollinate flowers, and in doing so help make food for countless species, including us. Birds eat insects, manage pests, move seeds, and carry nutrients from one place to another. Grazing animals, when participating in healthy patterns, can help manage plant growth, cycle fertility through manure, stimulate grasses, and contribute to the stability of soils, slopes, and waterways. Fungi break down what has died and help feed what is alive. Trees cool the air, hold soil, feed soil life, shelter birds, breathe with us, and call water into relationship with land.

So many living beings participate in stewarding this planet simply by living their lives. Maybe they do it unknowingly. Maybe they do it unconsciously. Or maybe they understand in ways we do not yet understand. Either way, what a blessing they are. And what a blessing that we can observe them.

What a blessing that we are here, on this beautiful and special planet, with the ability to notice, to learn, to love, and to become more intentional. We have the opportunity not only to receive life from this place, but to participate in its healing. We can become conscious stewards. We can design with humility. We can farm, build, teach, cook, parent, engineer, heal, and create in ways that honor both people and the living world.

The Reconnection Is Worth Pursuing

This is why this kind of education matters so much. It is not just about children having nice outdoor experiences. It is not just about mushrooms, compost, dye plants, goats, chickens, gardens, or field trips. It is about helping human beings remember where they are, what they are part of, and how they might live in a way that gives back.

It is about the child running back into the arms of the mother.

That image has stayed with me as I have written this. I have cried thinking about it. I have thought about my own mother, whom I have not seen in person in so many years, and how much I look forward to that embrace. I have thought about the ache of distance, and the beauty of return. I have thought about my own path, and the strange acceptance that has come with it: accepting my fate, accepting my work, accepting that for whatever reason, I have felt called to share this.

The reconnection is worth pursuing. Whether you have children or not, whether you grew up close to nature or far from it, whether you already know this feeling or have only sensed that something is missing, the invitation remains.

Come and learn. Come and remember. Come and see how this applies to your life. There are many ways to be involved in this work. For some families, it may look like joining a co-op where children and parents learn together. For others, it may look like finding a place like The Ecology Center, where children can be held by a team of loving, capable, nature-connected educators. For some, it may mean starting a garden at home, composting for the first time, planting fruit trees, learning the names of birds, making natural dyes, baking bread, keeping animals, or simply paying attention to the life already around them.

An Invitation to Go Deeper

For those who want to learn how to design these kinds of places, these kinds of learning environments, and even this kind of life,  our permaculture courses can help. If you want to understand more deeply how nature works, how humans can work with it, and how families and communities can design spaces that are more beautiful, resilient, nourishing, and alive, this course is one of the clearest invitations we know how to offer.

Our permaculture course is a 10-day immersion into how nature works and how we can work with it. It is not just a class. It is a community experience. We learn together, eat together, observe together, design together, and practice seeing the world through the lens of living systems. Before the course, participants receive a book we created to help prepare them for the journey, a book that will also soon be available to people beyond the course itself.

During the course, we study patterns, soil, water, plants, animals, food, shelter, energy, community, design, and the ethics of permaculture: earth care, people care, and fair share — or returning the surplus. We learn how to design places that honor nature and honor human needs at the same time. We learn how to build resilience not only in landscapes, but in families and communities. And perhaps most importantly, we learn practices and ways of thinking that can be repeated long after the course is over.

Because the point is not simply to have one powerful experience. The point is to begin thinking like a permaculture designer. The point is to learn how to create life-giving places. The point is to participate in the healing of the world, starting wherever we are.

Returning to the First Image

When I look at that photograph I took today, May 28th 2026, of the children harvesting mushrooms, I see more than children learning about fungi. I see a possible future. I see education returning to the living world. I see children learning with their hands, hearts, minds, and families. I see parents and teachers and communities remembering that life is not divided into disconnected subjects. I see the beginning of a world where our schools, farms, homes, technologies, and communities are designed with nature, not against it.

And I see children smiling as they return to the mother they may not have even known they were missing. May we be brave enough to build that kind of education. May we be humble enough to learn from the living world. May we be wise enough to return. May we teach our children not only how to succeed in the world as it is, but how to help create the world as it could be.

Ways to Learn and Support This Work

If something in this stirred something new in you, and you want to learn how to design places like the ones described in this article, you can learn more about our permaculture courses here:
https://www.sunandbloomfarms.com/inpersonpdc.html

And if your heart is especially moved by the children’s side of this story, we also welcome support for Bloom Homeschool Co-op. Our classroom space was recently damaged by hail, and gifts toward that repair help us continue creating this kind of nature-based, farm-based, family-supported education for children in our community: 
https://gofund.me/c135078f3 

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