Social media is mostly garbage. My own feed is crammed with doomsday predictions and ads for scammy diets. But every once in a while, between the hashtags and the hysteria, a jewel presents itself.
Like Cole Summers.
I never met Cole Summers in real life. But I was completely floored by what I learned about him—and from him—online.
At first, to be honest, I worried this kid was just too good to be true.
Here’s what I mean: When he was six, Cole—whose family owns a farm in Beryl, Utah—started taking on the repair and maintenance for his family’s vehicles. Both of his parents are disabled: his father is a wheelchair-bound veteran; his mother is partially blind.
He started his first business, breeding and selling rabbits, at age seven. At nine, he started paying his own taxes. By ten, he had bought and was running a 350-acre farmstead where he raised goats and turkeys. For his eleventh birthday he bought himself a tractor.
Also: he transplanted trees; he wrote a feature-length film; he bought a run down house and renovated it himself. Oh, and he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, but also found a lot to admire in Warren Buffett. During his free time, he watched YouTube videos of Buffett and other business people talking about their achievements. He had never been to a movie theater.
I wasn’t the only one who thought it was unbelievable.
Cole posted a video two months ago on Twitter. The blonde boy stood in front of his own property addressing the camera. “Not everybody thinks I am me, so here I am! I really am a 14 year-old homeschooler,” he said. “I really do spend all my time trying to work toward changing the business model of desert farming to quickly stop aquifer depletion while keeping thousands of acres from being turned into dust bowl farmlands.” Here’s how the video ended: “I am who I say I am.”
I reached out to Cole to see if he wanted to write a piece for Common Sense. He delivered a few weeks ago; it was sitting in my inbox waiting to be edited.
I could never have imagined that the next time I would hear from Cole, it would be his dad DMing me on Twitter telling me that his son had died. The 14 year-old—whose real name was Kevin Cooper; he wrote under a pseudonym—drowned last Saturday in the Newcastle Reservoir in Utah while kayaking with his older brother.
Cole had plans. He was excited to get his driver’s license. He had his eye set on six properties made up of almost 7,000 acres in the Great Basin where he lived. He was passionate about the environment, water conservation, and reducing gas emissions. He wanted to buy thousands of acres of farmland to help avoid an environmental supply chain disaster.
He knew he would take care of his autistic brother who is three years older than him. He wrote in his book: “I want to raise my own kids here one day. I want my kids to enjoy watching the wild rabbits, deer, and pronghorn that live here. I want them to look forward to seeing bald eagles migrate in and live here every winter, just like I do.”
In his short life, Cole managed to cultivate two qualities that are rare even among most adults. He was at home in the real, physical world and he took great pleasure in it. And: he was completely unafraid to try.
You can buy Cole’s autobiography, “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t: An Ambitious Homeschooler’s Journey,” here. And you can help his family get through this unimaginable tragedy by donating to them here.
I’m really proud to publish this piece about his philosophy on unschooling and entrepreneurship below.
Share this one with your children. And if you appreciate pieces like this please become a subscriber today. — BW
Whenever I tell someone that I’m homeschooled, I can tell they’re imagining me sitting by myself, with a pile of books, studying the same stuff as public school kids do. Sometimes they assume that my parents homeschool me so that I could study religion all day and nothing else. And everyone assumes that I have no social life.
None of these things are true.
I’m part of a side movement within the homeschool movement called unschooling. I have been since I was six. Unschooling is simple: the kid chooses what to learn, when to learn it, and at what pace. For some kids like me, it provides a level of freedom that many adults don’t even enjoy. When I took control of my education, my parents only had one rule. I had to do at least some of my learning by reading. Everything else was up to me.
Unschooling is different for every kid because every kid is different. Embracing that difference is what unschooling is all about. Sometimes I get asked what my typical days look like, but I don't have those. Besides the morning stuff—like brushing my teeth and exercising—every day is different. Some days I’m working on a big project. Some days I’m studying something that interests me. Some days I’m running errands. You don’t have a “normal day” when you run a farm.
I started homeschooling because my parents are both disabled, and them being homebound enabled us to try it. I started unschooling specifically because I started watching videos of Warren Buffett on YouTube at my father’s suggestion after I asked him, “Daddy, how do people get rich?” I was fascinated by Mr. Buffet’s teachings about how he uses the process of elimination in his decision-making. I guess I was an odd six-year-old. At that time, my parents were trying to copy public school curricula. I asked if I could make studying people like Buffett my school instead, and they said yes.
That’s how I spent my first grade year. I learned about business, but I focused on decision-making processes. The “how to think” that everyone talks about. My parents weren't and aren’t my homeschool teachers. I learned about having a “circle of competence” from Buffett, first principles from Elon Musk, opportunity cost from Mark Cuban, and the practice of trying to prove myself wrong from Ray Dalio. My parents mainly help me find the best people to study from. They learn alongside me because they weren’t taught these things in school or from their own parents.
Studying business leaders made me want to start my own business, and a farm seemed obvious given where I live. Even though the farm was small, my dad had the idea to treat it like I was doing a tech startup. This wasn’t about ambition. Treating my tiny farm like a startup allowed me to learn about business and what it takes to run a real company. Running the farm as a corporation motivated me, and led to me buying and flipping a house when I was ten and, eventually, expanding my farm to a 350-acre ranch.
I wasn’t able to do everything I’ve done just because I’m homeschooled, but because my parents let me try. Unless there is a legal limit barring me from what I want to do, I’m always allowed to try. And I’ve learned that there are a lot of so-called legal limits that aren’t true. People have told me kids can’t own property, but I bought a house and a ranch. People have told me kids can’t own vehicles, but I earned a classic pickup on a trade when I was eight, and had zero problem getting the title in my name.
Throughout my middle school years, which started at the same time as the pandemic, I studied environmental science in my area. I learned about the geologic and geographic features of where I live, and how the oceans and mountains impact our rainfall, and about the future environmental plans the local government had made to deal with aquifer depletion. My lesson about aquifer depletion started the hard way. My family’s water well went dry, forcing us to haul water from a neighbor’s house for nine months while we struggled to afford a new well.
This experience set my mind on combating aquifer depletion—basically, water scarcity—which is what I’m spending my high school years doing. I read the official plan to deal with aquifer depletion in my area, and it makes it worse. By the time I’m old enough to raise my own kids here, average families may not be able to afford access to water. But when I read the plan, I noticed it left a legal opening for a more creative and less destructive option. And that’s my plan now, to make a less destructive option become a reality. If I wanted to go to public school, I could, but I have to do this on the schedule of the official plan, so there’s no time for that.
When I read articles about other teens struggling with anxiety because of all the stresses they believe only politicians can solve, like climate change, it makes me sad for them. I have friends in public school and every one of them is more capable than I am at something. I’ve heard adults tell them that they can’t do something because they’re “just a kid.” I’ve watched them want to try something and be told no “because I said so.” And there’s always the “kids these days” insult.
It isn’t that my generation isn’t capable. We just need the freedom, encouragement, and empowerment to show what we can do.
In another life I sat on a school board for several years - oddly enough in the very county where I had been a grade-school and high-school pupil.
It was the most demoralizing experience of my life. I'd always wondered what was the secret sauce that had allowed a pretty good school system to decay so severely in such a short amount of time, and the answer was surprising: the entire system had been transformed from an enterprise dedicated to the instruction of children to one whose entire operation was for the benefit of the adults.
A great many of the career educators of my youth were still in the system and I sought their counsel. Most telling was an assistant superintendent, Mr. H. "When you were a student here sixteen years ago, our entire administration consisted of four people: the superintendent, assistant superintendent, secretary, and truant officer. We rented space in the May Office Building in town. Now we have just moved nearly one-hundred employees into our own building, which cost over $5 million dollars to build at taxpayer expense. Of those hundred employees, at least half are engaged in making sure we are in "compliance" with federal, state, and county regulations. Another quarter are "supervisors," whose job is to make work for those under them, and of course it all dribbles down to the poor teachers. Our first-grade teachers, instead of teaching during the day and enjoying their families at night are producing lesson plans, which must be written, and which nobody ever reads. Lesson plans for first-graders. And by the way, when you were a student, this county had nearly thirty-thousand other students like you; now that the mines have shut down and people moved away, all this infrastructure goes to educate about nine-thousand students - about a third of the old total."
My grade school had one janitor. Now there were three. One principal. Now a principal and an assistant principal, a nurse, and a "guidance counselor." For eight-year olds. Right. The bus run in the "holler" where I lived had comprised one run in the morning and one after school - with the bus filled to the gills. Now three nearly-empty buses morning and evening, "so the big kids can be separated from the little kids." Yeah.
The greatest eye-opener was how the Board itself had been, like Gulliver, tied down by a thousand threads, each designed to maintain the system's stability. Grievances or problems had been handled previously by individual action; problem solved. Now any employee who got his/her panties in a twist invoked the "grievance" system, tying the system in knots - specifically the school board itself. That was us. We spent 80-90% of our time in grievance adjudication, and if the employee didn't like the outcome, they simply went over our heads, lawyer in tow. A local newspaperman phrased it perfectly: the school system is a giant school bus carrying a plethora of passengers: the students, the parents, the teachers' union, the service employees and their union, and of course the lawyers for all the above. The bus driver has an accelerator and brake. Everyone else has at his seat a giant brake pedal. Should anyone get annoyed, he simply stands on his brake with both feet and the system grinds to a halt. We were reduced to figureheads only; we could make NO substantive changes because whoever's ox was gored would immediately tie us up in a "grievance." We were reduced to lobbying the public to raise its own taxes so we could build new schools with our names on bronze plaques at the door. I became the first Board member in history to actively lobby in the local newspaper against a school bond. I wasn't popular in the Board office. When the head of the teachers' union railed in a public meeting that the buildings were too old to use for teaching, I simply asked her how old were the buildings at Oxford?
I can tell you from reading reports - and from personal experience - the products of this Government School System are for the most part innocent of the most basic facts needed for a successful life.
Tweaks, adjustments, "reforms," et al are not going to make our students in any way competitive in the global arena. Sometimes revolution is needed, and I believe this is the perfect example. The only way to "reform" the education system is with Universal School Choice. It will cause the Democrats and their union masters to shriek like broke-dick dogs, but the very best reform for any system is pure competition.
His biography should be added to the required reading list for middle schoolers. We need more kids like him. What a tragedy that he passed.