Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Louv, Richard (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

Bible on Earth. It’s a cost that’s imprudent for us to impose upon ourselves, and we don’t have the right to impose it upon our children.”

A swell lifted the boat and the gulls followed us, and the city began to disappear behind us in a haze. “Our children ought to be out there on the water,” said Kennedy. “This is what connects us, this is what connects humanity, this is what we have in common. It’s not the Internet, it’s the oceans.”

PART V

THE JUNGLE BLACKBOARD

It is not the language of painters

but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . .

The feeling for the things themselves,

for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

—VINCENT VAN GOGH

16. Natural School Reform

Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.

—THOMAS BERRY

THE CONCEPT OF environment-based education—known by a number of names—is at least a century old. In The School and Society, John Dewey advocated immersing students in the local environment: “Experience [outside the school] has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it.” Far from radical, experiential education is at the very core of this older educational theory, an approach developed long before videotapes presented ring-necked snakes to the classroom. While environmental education focuses on how to live correctly in the world, experiential education teaches through the senses in the natural world.

Support for nature in education was given an added boost by Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University, who in 1983 developed the powerful theory of multiple intelligences. As described in an earlier chapter, Gardner proposed seven different intelligences in children and adults, including linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence. More recently, he added naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”) to his list.

Fueled by this theory, and others, a nascent movement for what might be called natural school reform grows steadily—and, though still relatively small, is long overdue.

In America, software companies hawk computer-learning programs to parents of two-year-olds. By the second grade, most American children have already spent years in preschool and have been introduced to the rigors of testing. Lora Cicalo—a well-educated, hard-driving professional—is appalled at the stress felt by her daughter and her classmates, as their elementary teacher prepares them for California’s STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) program. “The teacher must teach everything from how to properly fill in the answer bubbles (i.e., don’t put an X through them or make a mark outside the outline of the circle) to how to keep pace with the rest of the class in the timed test,” she said. “The kids worry about how they will look to the adults placing so much emphasis on this test. Remember, these children are only seven years old. Why are we putting all this pressure on them?” To improve schools, right? Maybe.

While Americans push kids to the competitive edge, Finland’s educational system is headed in exactly the opposite direction. In a 2003 review by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, Finland outscored thirty-one other countries, including the United States. Finland scored first in literacy and placed in the top five in math and science. The United States placed in the middle of the pack. “Finland’s recipe is both complex and unabashedly basic,” the New York Times reports. “Some of the ingredients can be exported (its flexibility in the classroom, for example) and some cannot (the nation’s small, homogenous population and the relative prosperity of most Finns, to name two).”

By the standards of some American educators and policymakers, Finland’s approach seems counterintuitive. Finnish students don’t enter any school until they are seven years old—practically senior citizens in America. Finland offers no special programs for the gifted student, and spends less per student on education than the United States. While requiring educators to meet national curriculum requirements, Finland gives them wide leeway in how they teach. And Finnish educators believe in the power of—get this—play. In the United States, meanwhile, the trend is toward dropping recess. But at a typical school in the Suutarila district of Helsinki, students “pad about in their socks. After every 45-minute lesson, they are let loose outside for 15 minutes so they can burn off steam,” according to the Times. Finland also encourages environment-based education and has moved a substantial amount of classroom experience into natural settings or the surrounding community. “The core of learning is not in the information . . . being pre-digested from the outside, but in the interaction between a child and the environment,” states Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. I’m sure American educators could teach Finland a thing or two about education. But what if we adopted at least two Finnish traits—greater social respect for teachers and an enthusiasm for environment-based education?

Lauren Scheehan, founder and faculty chair of the Swallowtail School in Hillsboro, Oregon, believes many people—including techies from deep in the Silicon Forest—are looking for more balance in both their own and their children’s lives.

“We believe computer skills should be postponed in the classroom until high school,” she says. “They can still use computers at home or play video games at their friends’ houses; that world isn’t closed to them.” But Swallowtail gives students a break from “the electronic impulses coming at them all the time, so their sensory abilities are more open to what’s happening naturally around them.” The point, Scheehan says, is to create “a moral foundation of freedom of choice, instead of being totally dependent on electronic media.” Several Intel employees send their children to the school. These parents value technology, says Scheehan, “but they understand that there are aspects of being a human that aren’t inside a computer.”

So far, Swallowtail is the exceptional school. But that could change. Bucking the status quo, an increasing number of educators are committed to an approach that infuses