The Fairhaven Program offers education without digital technology. No computers, tablets, phones, or smart boards. No Wikipedia or AI generated papers. We just use paper and pencil, Great Books, and time outside. And we are the best program for future startup founders.
Proper education deepens our ability to attend to things, and we attend to things by learning the arts of reading, writing, drawing, and conversation. During our class time together our whole focus is on a curriculum of ancient Greek, mathematics, literature, history, and science that is designed to cultivate attention and lifelong learning. Teenagers need more education and less schooling. We meet only two days per week to give students the time to sail, plant gardens, code web applications, translate Dante, sew quilts, build cob ovens, start businesses, train Brazilian jiu jitsu, and climb mountains.
This kind of education is now available for high schoolers in Bellingham. Email info@fairhavenprogram.org to schedule a tour and conversation, or fill out the contact form below.
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Paul Graham, founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator, gave a talk this year called How to Start Google about what teenagers need to do now if they want to found a successful startup in the future. He argues you need three things: “You need to be good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you’re going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with.” In other words: build things, think, and make friends.
When he says “be good at some kind of technology,” he doesn’t mean study Computer Science at a university or attend a coding and robotics camp. He means do projects and build things: “If you’re wondering what counts as technology, it includes practically everything you could describe using the words “make” or “build.” So welding would count, or making clothes, or making videos. Whatever you’re most interested in. The critical distinction is whether you’re producing or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing them? That’s the cutoff.”
Smart, ambitious teenagers ought to be outside creating things, not to be stuck in classrooms all week. (Or stuck staring at phones or video games.) They need time to roam and think and tinker. To start projects and build stuff. To develop a sense of agency. To discover and create the sorts of things that can only be discovered or created when you’re left to your own devices and allowed to be bored. To grapple with what’s tangible and real.
Simon Sarris calls agency “the most precious resource”: “Agency is precious because the lucidities that purposeful work and responsibility bring are the real education. The secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place. We must be sure that people learn this and never forget the order: learning is naturally the consequence of doing.”
Some of that doing is part of our curriculum. Every student in the Program completes a year-long independent project. But the most interesting things happen when a student realizes he is an actor in the world who can shape the trajectory of his life without assignment or permission.
Back to Paul Graham’s advice: “Don’t feel like your projects have to be serious. They can be as frivolous as you like, so long as you’re building things you’re excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out building games. They and their friends like to play games. So they build the kind of things they and their friends want. And that’s exactly what you should be doing at 15 if you want to start a startup one day.” Build, don’t consume. Create things you’re excited about. And make friends with others who are building and creating.
Let us attend
Phones, tablets, and computers have eroded students’ attention spans and left them unhappy and anxious. Proper education is done face to face with real books and real materials.
Learning ancient Greek is hard, and it forces you to develop the discipline and habits that make it possible to learn anything. Solving math problems and writing essays and letters with paper and pencil—instead of WolframAlpha and ChatGPT—build the habits of attention and thinking foundational to intellectual life.
Every worthwhile life path requires attention. So even digital pursuits like programming are best begun with developing habits of attention away from digital distractions.
Drawing on the treasures of the past to build the future
The point of reading and studying literature is that you will have a body of great things in your mind that will be a resource for you for the rest of your life. The Fairhaven Program provides students with a wealth of such resources. Great books serve as an initiation into “the company of the past, the great community of human experience.”
That body of great things is a comfort and resource no matter what you do in your life. If you start a family or startup or regenerative farm, write a novel or make discoveries in geometry and combinatorics, that body of great things is there to draw from and imitate. One of the paradoxes of economic and artistic life is that “innovation and imitation are not only compatible but almost inseparable.” Real innovation requires that we imitate the best of the past and not our peers and rivals, and we discover the best of the past through Great Books.