The closure of Sterling College in Vermont makes me sad. It was one of just a handful of “work colleges” in our country where students helped run the college. They grew much of their own food, learned how to build and repair their own buildings, cared for draft horses and sheep. It was always a small school, and never had much of an endowment to fall back on. Such places are fragile, but they can also be places where friendship and community can grow in good, rich soil.

I often dream of having such a place to teach, ideally one that would combine the skills and farm and forest of a work college; the intellectual breadth and practices of St John’s College’s “Great Books” program; a connection to a religious tradition that would offer meaningful rituals, shared texts to contemplate and debate, and a deep sense of calling and purpose; and a freedom to tinker and innovate in workshops and labs made by and for human hands.

In a way, this is what I try to create around me at my little Midwestern Lutheran college, where I teach “great books” classes, run some gardens where I can teach students beekeeping and urban agriculture, landscape design, ecology, logic, art, writing, the use of hand tools to make fences and signs and sheds and furniture, religious liturgies and traditions, and technical innovation. But that turns out to be a lot to teach, especially when I add in my field and travel courses and all the incursions and demands of bureaucracies everywhere.

And even here it’s only a handful of students who see the value in learning these things. Not surprisingly, most high school students hope to get the high-paying job they’ve heard about from parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and others who have shaped their view of what matters. When they pick up Plato or Kongzi, or a DeWalt power drill and some cedar boards, or a pair of binoculars and a field guide, or their sleeping bag and camp stove, and follow me to wherever class is leading, most of them wind up having fun.

But it’s not clear to them or to many others that sitting on a beach in Kachemak Bay and cooking fresh-caught salmon over a driftwood fire, or discussing the Melian Dialogue, or designing an outdoor classroom out of local stone, or learning about categorical syllogisms and their uses for legal debate and for coding—it’s not clear to them or to many others that any of this is worthwhile, or that it will lead to any good outcomes later in life.

These things all have a long tail.

Often students will comment on the life I have led. You’ve had such an interesting life, they say. We would like to have interesting lives, too. How can we do that?

I don’t have a simple path for them to follow (though I do have a way to begin to answer the question, and to keep answering it for a lifetime). But I do have an interesting one. And why should life not be interesting?

Much of what captivates them about my life is that I keep learning new things, meeting new people, going to new places. I have lived and worked around the world, and yet I doubt if I lived to Methuselah’s age that this place would run out of wonders to amaze me.

That wonder, that curiosity, and that delight in learning—these are things I hope to teach. And there isn’t a single course you can sign up for that teaches it as a fact to be memorized.

You just have to take the next step, do the next thing, continue to immerse yourself in wonder.

Not vague, airy wonder.

I mean wonder that happens when your hands are at work in shaping the cedar boards into a chair.

Wonder that happens when you see that Thucydides was indeed writing a ktema es aei, something relevant for all times, and not just his own.

Wonder that sneaks up on you when you pluck a raspberry from a cane you planted and tended for two years and, without anyone else handling it first, pop it into your mouth, and taste the sweetness of soil, sunlight, water, and patient, hard work.