The Cowboy College Deep in the Desert

1. A College in the Wilderness

In eastern California, over the Sierra Nevada, lies a high desert almost empty of people. The nearest town is a long drive away. And in this barren land hides one of the hardest to enter, and strangest, colleges in the world — Deep Springs College.

It admits only about two dozen students a year, all young people fresh out of high school; the course runs two years, and most graduates transfer on to the likes of Harvard or Yale. Tuition, room, and board are all free. But the price is this: you have to move into this desert, settle in, and study and farm at the same time.

At dawn you might milk the cows, feed the livestock, mend a stretch of fence the wind knocked down; in the morning you sit in the classroom, read Plato, read *The Federalist Papers*, argue with classmates over a philosophical proposition until you're red in the face; in the afternoon you might be back on the ranch, herding cattle, working the land, cooking. The students here are scholars, and cowboys, and cooks.

And this college has no president who calls the shots.

2. Three Pillars: Academics, Labor, Self-Governance

A century old, Deep Springs stands on three pillars: academics, labor, and self-governance.

Of the academics there's little need to say more — the rigor of the courses and the depth of the discussion are enough to seed the top universities.

The labor is real labor. This ranch runs on the students themselves; do it badly and the cattle go hungry, the land goes to waste, and feeding the whole college becomes a problem. Labor here isn't an experience; it's a responsibility.

Most astonishing is the self-governance. Who gets admitted, which courses are offered, which teachers are invited, how the money is spent, how a breach of rules is penalized — these weighty matters are mainly debated and decided by the students' own committees. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds bear responsibility for the survival of a real community. They aren't simulating management; they are really managing.

The founder, L. L. Nunn, established the college because he believed: for a person to become something, feeding the mind isn't enough — he has to learn to shoulder responsibility in labor, and to answer for the common good in self-governance.

3. What Convention It Breaks

The deepest crack in modern education is that it split "study" and "living" into two halves.

We have children learn a pile of abstract knowledge in the classroom, while shutting real life — farming, cooking, fixing things, running a collective — outside the school gate as "chores that get in the way of study." And so we cultivate a kind of person: full of book-learning yet never having carried a real thing through; good at exams yet ignorant of how a group of people gets a hard thing done.

Deep Springs insists on stitching the two halves back together.

Its conviction has roots in Dewey. In *Democracy and Education*, Dewey says again and again: education is not preparation for life — education is life itself. Knowledge that doesn't take root in real action and real community is dead. The reason the cowshed and the discussion seminar stand side by side at Deep Springs is exactly this: the "responsibility," "justice," "common good" you read about in the morning, you have to make good on that afternoon in the pasture and the committee.

And the classics it reads — Plato, Aristotle, the constitutional documents — aren't for antiquarian show. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum says in *Cultivating Humanity* that the aim of a liberal education is to raise people able to examine their own lives, to imagine their way into others' shoes, to be responsible citizens of the world. Mortimer Adler spent a life promoting "reading the great books" out of the same conviction: to read the classics is not to flaunt erudition, but to set the fundamental questions of "how a person should live" before a young person again.

Deep Springs sets those questions out — and won't let you answer them with your mouth alone. The fence is waiting that afternoon.

4. What It Means for a Child Who Hates School

Deep Springs doesn't admit children who hate school, but it casts an important beam of light.

What many children hate is not knowledge, but knowledge with nothing to attach to. What's all this for? What's it got to do with me? Memorize it, test it, and then what? When learning hangs in midair for years, touching nothing real, even the cleverest child comes to feel it's hollow, false, not worth the effort.

The answer Deep Springs gives: let learning land — on a real cow, a real fence, a real collective that really needs you to answer for it. When what you read in the morning has to be made good that afternoon, when your judgment truly affects how a group of people lives, knowledge gains weight at once — it's no longer to get past someone, but to get the thing in front of you right. A young person in such a situation can hardly hate learning anymore, because learning and living have become inseparable.

This too is why Archē takes children to the island, to grow again amid real labor, cooperation, and self-management. We don't believe a child can be kindled by knowledge suspended in air, unconnected to life. For a seed to sprout, you first have to let its roots dig into real soil.