Wilderland

Wilderland, a learning community in Liberty, UT

04/15/2026

Our students love playing in the land. Digging, running, pulling things apart. But this spring, they started noticing something: their play was leaving marks.

Farmer Chris Argyle of Chris Argyle came to Wilderland to help them understand what those marks mean — and what it looks like to be a steward of the land you love.

04/10/2026

Reading was our most consistent area of growth, and the most evenly distributed. Unlike math or language arts, where the gap between full-time and part-time students was significant, reading growth was strong across both groups. We think we know why.

The research on reading enjoyment is fairly clear. PISA data studied across 38 countries found that enjoyment of reading was a meaningful predictor of academic outcomes in nearly every country. The Annie E. Casey Foundation found that students not reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma. Reading is not just a subject. It is the lever that lifts everything else.

Our philosophy fits in one sentence: we want children to love reading. Every decision follows from that: the freedom of book choice, the diverse library, the absence of comprehension tests and reading logs. We are not preparing students for a reading assessment. We are building a habit that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

The slides above walk through our full approach, including what families can try at home. That last part matters to us, and we say it explicitly to our parents: visit libraries regularly, keep a rotating stack of books at home, read aloud to your children above their current level. We believe this parent partnership is part of why reading was our most consistent result.

Some schools drill literary passages to prepare for reading assessments. We believe that if a child reads enough, and loves what they are reading, the scores take care of themselves.

2.7x the national growth rate. Across full-time and part-time students alike.

Turns out the most powerful reading intervention may be the simplest: letting them choose.

04/03/2026

Last fall, one of our students, Noelle, came to us with a proposal: she wanted to put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the school.

We said yes. But with one condition: no one could be forced to participate. If she wanted actors, she had to earn them.

This is something we teach at Wilderland that sounds simple but runs against the grain of how most group projects work: the same freedom you have to choose your own passion project extends to everyone around you. You cannot conscript an audience. You cannot draft a cast. If you want people to show up for your vision, you have to make your vision worth showing up for.

So Noelle got to work. She adapted her script. She made her characters more fun to play. She added battle scenes. She made Shakespeare irresistible to a group of elementary schoolers — which, if you know anything about Shakespeare, is no small feat.

Fourteen actors signed on.

What followed was the most extraordinary child production I have ever seen.

Completely child-directed, child-produced, child-performed. There is a particular kind of electricity in a room when children are trusted to lead — when the decisions are genuinely theirs, the stakes are genuinely real, and the outcome belongs entirely to them.

(Scenes have been omitted or shortened to respect the privacy of some students.)

04/01/2026

A group of our students found a tree they liked and moved in.

They packed soil into the branches to make landing pads, dragged logs over for benches, and designed a bucket-pulley system for hauling items.

Richard Louv, who coined the phrase “nature-deficit disorder,” wrote about breaking sticks, building tree forts, and digging holes as among the most essential experiences of childhood. He called it “destructive play” (a bit of a misnomer) and his point was that the child who builds something by hand in the natural world comes away knowing something about their own capability that is very hard to teach any other way.

What strikes me, watching all of this, is the social energy that drives it. Other students come and use it, and they have opinions. A younger child suggested the pulley after watching the frustration of hauling things up by hand. An older one showed them how to test a branch before trusting it with weight. Peter Gray, in Free to Learn, writes that children in mixed-age groups develop the kind of empathy and negotiation that same-age, adult-directed settings rarely produce, and I think you can see exactly why when you watch a group of kids argue over the best way to reinforce a platform.

This is the part that homeschooling, for all its real strengths, is hardest pressed to replicate. One family cannot generate the creative friction of children who are not siblings, who come from different homes and different ways of seeing the world, and who are all equally invested in building something together.

No adult planned the treehouse. We just gave them the land and got out of the way.

03/31/2026

Many of you know why I started Wilderland Academy. My son hated school.

Not his teachers — he loved them. He was bored. Deeply, persistently bored, in the way that only children who are years ahead of their peers can be bored. We tried everything: aides, an IEP, carefully chosen teachers, even skipping a grade. None of it worked. A lecture-based, one-size-fits-all classroom simply cannot hold a mind like his, and the system, for all its good intentions, was not built to try.

So we built something that was.

At Wilderland, every student is met precisely where they are — in their zone of proximal development, as the researchers call it. Years ahead? You are still challenged and stretched. Years behind? Your curriculum is built around that. The goal is never to sort children into categories. It is to find the exact edge of each child’s understanding and work from there.

For years, we resisted standardized testing. We had watched what happened to public education when teachers were made to teach to the test — the color draining out of learning, curiosity crowded out by compliance. We wanted no part of that.

But Alpha Schools challenged our thinking, and they were right. Refusing to test entirely was its own kind of mistake. How do you know where each learner actually is? How do you know whether your interventions are working? You guess. We needed data — not to rank children, but to serve them.

So we tested. Including, for the first time, our son.

I will admit I was nervous. Not about his scores. About whether our philosophy had actually worked for him — whether this school we built partly for him was, in the end, the right fit.

The answer was yes. He scored between the 97th and 99th percentile across all core subjects for his grade level. But that is not what moved me most.

What moved me was his growth. 9x the national rate in math. 14x in language arts. All this while telling us, on any given week, he’d rather be at Wilderland than go on vacation. He actually loves school.

He is the reason this school exists. He is now also the reason I believe in it.

03/27/2026

Some people might wonder, how is it possible for our students to spend almost 5 hours of a 7 hour school day not on academics, and still get such stellar academic results (2.9x growth)?

Maybe it’s not despite all the time spent on the fun and play and joy, but because?

Educators have been told for years that play — unstructured, lightly supervised play — is the brain’s “superfood,” but we might be one of the few schools in the world to take that seriously.

And you don’t have to take our word for it, just read what nine of our students have to say.

Address

3280 N Highway 162
Eden, UT
84310

Telephone

+18013329441

Website

https://wilderland.academy/

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