Ben Hewitt > Quotes

“What if the point were not to know as much as possible but to feel as much as possible?”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“We've created a system that demands almost no engagement with our food; we've wrung all the responsibility and sweat equity from the process. It's not that we're getting something for nothing - after all, we do pay for our food, and we suffer the consequences of dining from the industrial trough. But charging a package of center-cut pork chops to your Visa is a hell of a lot different than facing down the source of those chops with a .22 in one hand and a well-honed knife in the other.”
― Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

“We are all interconnected and interdependent, and because of this, we are all only as rich as we enrich those around us. I”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“Many parents aren’t all that accustomed to being patient and present for their kids anymore, if only because they’re simply not given the opportunity to be patient and present. Jobs get in the way. School gets in the way. After-school activities get in the way. As I have learned—as I am still learning—patience and presence are muscles that must be developed and exercised regularly.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“When we carry a safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to slip through our fingers.”
― Ben Hewitt

“My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“(On producer/consumer relationship in subsistence farming) This is the sort of interconnectedness that once defined every outpost across our emerging nation. But outposts grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and cities grew into metropolises, necessitating a push into resource bases far beyond these population centers. Even as this occurred, the conveniences of modern life--electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile--took hold, further eroding any sense of shared responsibility for the community's survival. From the standpoint of our most basic needs, we became islands unto ourselves, despite the ever-increasing population density.”
― Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

“Of all the things I want for them, connection to this place and a sense of knowing how they fit into this world usurps all others. I want this for them more than happiness, because I think mere happiness is a shallow elucidation of the human experience, and by itself is not a particularly sturdy emotional foundation upon which to build a fulfilling life. I want this for them more than success, at least insofar as our culture has come to define success as being a product of money and power and recognition. I want this for them more than physical vitality, because I believe that good health--and not just health of body, but also of emotion and spirit--is only possibly when one feels connected to and secure in their place.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“I wonder if we have it all backward. And I wonder how the world might be if we viewed the very reason for our existence as being not about control and security but about surrender. Not to our fears and insecurities but to our sense of what is possible, to the belief that we all have the ability to shape the world as we imagine it, and that our actions reflect this imagined world until it becomes not imagined, but real.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“The cheap-food boom has been seductively comfortable for us all. Let's face it: Farming is damn hard work, typically done for damnable pay. By relinquishing this burden, by handing the reins to the corporations, we relieved ourselves of a lot of backaches, sunburns, and financial strains. We struck a deal: The agribusinesses got a guaranteed chunk of our income and our full faith in their ability to keep us sustained. In return, we got to pursue lifestyles that don't revolve around soil and toil and that allow us a measure of leisure time unprecedented in human history.”
― Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

“the business of being a child in this country is rapidly disappearing into an abyss that consists not only of programs and tests but also of extracurricular activities.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“sustainable," like "green" and "organic," is an easily corruptible concept that, not surprisingly, has been willfully corrupted by people who would very much like to sell you a hybrid SUV or an Energy Star-rated flat-screen TV with no money down and zero percent interest for 60 months. There is very little about agriculture that is truly sustainable. At its core, agriculture is a human manipulation of a natural process. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable? Probably so. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable and able to feed 7 billion people? Almost certainly not.”
― Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

“I dropped out of high school to pursue a self-designed study program in excessively loud heavy metal music and extreme partying. - From his blog”
― Ben Hewitt

“Like all of us, children just want to be needed. It’s our job to make sure they actually are.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“If there is value in the standardized, performance-based curriculums utilized by the vast majority of schools, that value is realized primarily by the institutions themselves and by the economic and social structures that are fed by standardized learning.”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“colloquialism for the affliction that strikes a certain”
― Ben Hewitt, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World

“Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent(and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I've learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children.”
― Ben Hewitt