Top Crop : Farm School, an Alternative Learning Center for Children at UC Irvine, Cultivates Thinkers

Walking sticks in hand, one group of children set off on a recent morning to explore the impact of the previous night’s rainfall on the hills behind their cottage classrooms. They came back covered by mud and thoroughly knowledgeable about erosion.

Another cluster of children got real-life lessons in arithmetic and civic and environmental responsibility as they sorted and counted a month’s worth of bottles, soda cans and cat food tins, then calculated how much money each bag would net them at the neighborhood recycling center.

Meanwhile, two 10-year-olds drafted petitions to send to President Bush opposing armed conflict in the Persian Gulf as chickens pecked for food near the porch outside. For each signer, the children had a paper cup with a peace symbol scrawled at the bottom.

It was a typical day at the Farm School, UC Irvine’s experimental learning center, which for two decades has provided an alternative to public elementary schools for the children of faculty and graduate students, the community and even top Orange County corporate leaders.

Started as a counterculture education laboratory by free-thinking UCI academics in 1969, its supporters hail it as “one of the ‘60s experiments that worked.”

It emphasizes individual instruction and the development of critical thinking skills and seeks to foster a lifelong joy of learning as well as to develop humane, globally conscious citizens. There are no report cards, and students, who can attend through the equivalent of sixth grade, are grouped only as “Littles,” “Bigs” and “Uppers.”

“I wouldn’t trade it for any other school in the world,” said Safi Qureshey, an Irvine computer company president who pulled his son, Uns, out of a public school several years ago when he discovered that rigid classroom rules and schedules were frustrating the boy. Both Uns, now 11, and his brother, Zeshan, 9, are longtime Farm School students.

Situated at the edge of a growing University of California campus, Farm School students often get a chance to question top scholars about current issues and world events. The school, as its name suggests, also offers opportunities to learn firsthand about raising animals, how wild creatures forage for food, and how nature’s forces work on the rolling coastal hills behind them.

For decades, Farm School students have been valuable subjects for university students who plan careers in teaching or psychology, with the school serving as a laboratory to explore teaching methods.

Yet the Farm School, one of the few remaining alternative schools in Orange County, remains one of the best kept secrets in Orange County education, mainly because it cannot accommodate more than 55 students in the three renovated farmhand cottages that once formed the heart of the old Irvine Ranch.

Now, as the experimental school moves into its third decade, the future of this brainchild of Michael Butler, UCI’s powerful dean of undergraduate studies, is unclear. It has not been included in the university’s long-term plan. And there is as yet no one on the horizon poised to take over the reins from Butler, who has been director for 19 years.

Tuition has gone up to $470 a child--about mid-range for the Irvine-Newport Beach-Fountain Valley area--mainly to improve pay and benefits for Farm School’s six teachers, who make far less than their counterparts in Orange County public schools. Some scholarships are given.

For Lissa Forehan, a UCI graduate student with two sons at Farm School, and Bajis M. Dodin, a professor at UC Riverside’s graduate school of management with two children at the school, it is a once-in-a-lifetime investment.

“It’s tough, but education has always been a real priority,” said Forehan, 32, who is seeking a doctoral degree in psychology and has a part-time job at the university. “I’m willing to do without a lot of material things.”

Said Dodin, a Palestinian from Jordan: “I don’t look at it from the money point of view. . . . It’s more important to start on the right foot with a strong educational background. That gives them greater momentum later on in life.”

It all started with a group of social science professors who were dissatisfied with the caliber of students taking their university courses in the late 1960s. It’s not that the students weren’t smart, Butler says. But many of them lacked intellectual curiosity.

“I was teaching statistics, and some students just naturally engaged in the systematic exploration of the mathematics involved,” Butler said. “For the rest, math simply fell out of the sky. . . . (It) was arbitrary, mysterious, incoherent and dull--a set of recipes someone else discovered.”

Butler, anthropology professor Nick Colby and others decided to design an alternative program in which “students would learn to be smarter, to think better, and to be more humane,” Butler said.

Farm School was launched with four students and a half-time teacher in a ramshackle cottage that had once been a farmhand’s home on the old Irvine Ranch. At first, the students were mainly children of UCI faculty or graduate students. “But it was always our intention to be more open, and we were very soon,” Butler said.

A key to the curriculum is class size. For example, there are only about half a dozen “Bigs”--children from about 8 to 10 years of age. (Farm School instructors are careful not to knock public schools or their teachers, who have the daunting task of educating 30 or more children in a classroom.)

Within the groupings, children work individually or in pairs with teachers in math, reading, science, geography, art and other traditional subjects.

The way these subjects are taught is hardly traditional. There is no math text, only a set of instructions and suggested exercises to get across fundamental concepts with blocks, coins, compasses--virtually any tactile learning tool. Children learn at their own pace, and by the time they are “Uppers”--ages 11 to 12--the pace is pretty fast.

But children who aren’t ready to learn are not pushed. In the end, the desire to learn like their friends and classmates seems to win out.

“My younger son is very intelligent but he wants to do his own thing,” Qureshey said. “For a long time, he would not learn his alphabet. Then he needed to get some information for a class project. He asked his friend who could read. . . . The friend said ‘in books.’

“It was just like a switch that was turned on. He decided to learn the alphabet so he could learn how to read. . . . If it was a conventional school, he would have been punished.”

A key measure of mastery in a subject is if a child can teach it to other children. That, in turn, fosters friendships and loyalties that go beyond age, ethnic background or economic status.

Even the youngest children are challenged to question and to think, not taught what to think, said head teacher Karen Minns, a published poet and writer who has taught at the school for eight years.

“We want them to know the world is not black and white most of the time . . . that there is another side to things, and that everything has a bias.”

Added longtime Farm School administrator Agnes Mason: “We say, ‘Don’t take our word for it. It could be a lot of baloney.’ ”

Last year, one group’s assignment was to feel--not just read--Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” at home. Parents were asked to provide a picnic lunch and drink, but not to interrupt their child’s reading. The aim, they were told, was to let the child experience the Old Man’s solitude, his hunger and thirst, and to feel his endurance strained as he battles the sea.

The core of the teaching technique is to build on what the children themselves are interested in.

Farm School students don’t get grades and transcripts they can bring with them to a new school. About the only yardstick is a standardized test given at all California schools. Butler said the Farm School children consistently score at or above grade level on those tests.

The proof may be the welcome Farm School graduates are given at area junior high schools.

“Some of our most prepared students come from the Farm School,” said Mike Buettell, a counselor at Rancho San Joaquin Intermediate School, where many of the Irvine area graduates enter seventh grade. “I wish we had more of them.”