Sterling College Inspires Environmental Leadership

What follows is a transcript from original publication in The Green Grapevine.

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The Green Grapevine #49

Sterling College Inspires

Environmental Leadership

by

Daniel Hecht

How many colleges require every student to own an axe? Vermonters can be proud of the answer.

This column is intended to report with reasonable objectivity on the environmental ideas, issues, enterprises, and technologies that shape our lives. But this week I can't pretend to be unbiased. I'm writing with unabashed enthusiasm about a Vermont treasure, Sterling College, up in Craftsbury Common.

It's probably America's smallest residential college, with only 100 students. It's no doubt the only one that requires students to own, and know how to safely use, an axe. It's a scattering of 14 white clapboard buildings just now emerging from eave-deep snow in a classic northern Vermont hamlet. It's a "work college," one of only seven federally-authorized such institutions in the U.S., where work is a required part of the curriculum for every student. Community service is every student's obligation and central to the school's mission.

In other words, it embodies the best Vermont values: hardihood, teamwork, community, rural living skills, self-sufficiency.

Sterling's four-year degree programs have anticipated several major trends, focusing on subjects that many educational institutions have only recently recognized the importance of: Conservation Ecology, Outdoor Education and Leadership, Sustainable Agriculture, and Circumpolar Studies.

Will Wootton, Sterling's president, confesses he's from Manhattan. And though he's been in Vermont for decades, including 19 years as an administrator at Marlboro College, he's relatively new at Sterling. Philosophically, though, he's well prepared for the role. Affable, ironic, he's candid about his enthusiasm for the college.

Asked what constitutes Sterling's most remarkable characteristic, he answers immediately: its sheer smallness. "The small institution's educational model is probably the best, especially for our kind of student," he says.

It's a theory of education based a foundation that's both moral and pragmatic. Students at Sterling receive an "experiential education" - learning by doing, a key element of the philosophy promulgated by John Dewey, the 19th century, Vermont-born logician, social theorist, and educator. Community service is part of this experience, as are field studies, internships, and outdoor expeditions.

Will went on one of those expeditions last year, into the mountains in far northern Vermont. Three nights in the wild, in the cold, without tents (the students had to build new shelters from available materials every night): "It was awful," he admits with a laugh.

The students loved it.

"But they were trained for it," Will explains. "I wasn't."

Who are these young people who want to work, raise their own food, sleep outside in winter?

"In 25 my years in education," Will says, "I have never seen a more physically and mentally healthy group of students, anywhere."

They enter with personal commitments to environment stewardship. Early on, they take the required "Bounder" course - formally SS105, Experiential Education -- which teaches skills like canoeing, navigation, lighting fires, and other winter camping skills.

They attend Sterling College to live their ideals and become better stewards of the natural world. Reflecting Dewey's ideas, Sterling encourages them to seek a balance between individual needs and those of society, personal good and the common good. Courses are rigorous, but focus on acquiring process skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving rather than simply the accumulation of data.

Work, and the work ethic, are so important that there's actually a Dean of Work; work programs pay students, who are graded on their performance. But actually helping an aged couple maintain their berry farm, mentoring in local schools, or serving at the Craftsbury Community Care Center is only part of the obligation.

"Just as important," Will says, "is to reflect on the work - what it feels like, what it means, how it affects the world." The college wants students to graduate as self-inspected, integrated human beings.

Sterling's Circumpolar Studies program is another of its distinctions. The latitudes near Earth's poles are powerfully affected by global warming; melting ice sheets, changing ocean conditions, and failing ecosystems are among the most evident indicators of climate change. Now partnered with the acclaimed Center for Northern studies, the program draws upon an impressively-credentialed faculty to provide graduates with the specialized knowledge that's increasingly needed to deal with polar-region environmental degradation.

The Sustainable Agriculture program provides education in another timely subject. Sterling's 100-acre campus includes gardens, greenhouses, solar- and wind-powered barns, fruit trees, and livestock that allow students to study environmentally-friendly farming practices and technologies. Sterling recently inaugurated a full summer semester to accommodate increasing student interest.

There's plenty of bad environmental news nowadays, and it's awfully easy to succumb to pessimism and cynicism. So if you're up Craftsbury Common way to visit the area's famous bike and ski touring centers, take a short detour to stroll through the campus, as I always do. While you're there, take look at the faces of the young people at Sterling College for a glimpse of a more hopeful future.

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.