Springhouse

Springhouse was founded in 2014 in the Blue Ridge mountains of Floyd County, Virginia, knowing that Education is the greatest opportunity we have to build culture of any kind. America’s current public educational system was created over a hundred years ago with the purpose of training factory workers. The system has changed very little since its creation and still serves a similar purpose of training individuals to succeed financially in our dominant culture. This culture has caused great harm to the Earth and left individuals to fend for themselves within an unjust system. 

If we want to live in a different world, we must use education to create a different kind of culture. At Springhouse, we’ve articulated a cultural design that we call Sourced Design. By practicing this design, we’ve created a culture in our school that values all Life and teaches people the skills to build life-giving culture throughout their lives. This is how we begin to slowly create transformative and lasting change. In addition to an accredited 5-year high school, Springhouse has a Cultural Design program for adults, a print shop where we publish small books, and print posters and cards, and a global network of Sourced Design practitioners. 

Our 5-year accredited high school program prepares teenagers (ages 13-18) to create a world in which all Life thrives. This is vitally important given the widespread social, ecological, and spiritual crises of our time. To prepare to build life-giving culture amidst great adversity, teenagers at Springhouse learn about themselves, study the problems we face in the world today, gain insight from inspiring cultural examples, and practice culture-building skills. These areas of study are the focus of our curriculum.

Our curriculum is radically different from what most of us are familiar with. Our goal is not for our alumni to succeed in the dominant culture, but rather to be able to navigate that culture in order to build something different. Everything we teach prepares teenagers to build life-giving culture when they leave, wherever they are. We know that leaving behind the familiar educational system can feel risky, and yet if we want to live in a different world, we need to live and educate in a radically different way.

Our educational model has three components: Community, Knowledge, and Practice.

Community:

We learn in a community, and we must take care of that community for it to remain healthy and life-giving. Some ways we strengthen our community are: 

• Practicing a shared set of values
• Dancing, singing, and playing games together
• Cleaning the school building and maintaining the grounds 
• Honoring growth through rites of passage and other rituals 

Knowledge: 

In order to build life-giving culture, our teenagers must:

• Get to know themselves through mentoring, personal practices such as dance, yoga, and meditation, and by exploring what it means to be a teenager 
• Learn about the problems that we see today, where they came from, and how these problems have spread throughout the world 
• Explore inspiring examples of thriving culture, wisdom traditions, and how Life works on Earth

Practice:

We need to practice creating and sustaining new ways of living. To prepare, teenagers will practice skills that are not generally valued by our current educational system, such as imagination, experimentation, and discipline. We do this through weekly apprenticeships with the Springhouse staff working on long-term projects.