Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Louv, Richard

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 education with direct experience, especially of nature. The definitions and nomenclature of this movement are tricky. In recent decades, the approach has gone by many names: community-oriented schooling, bioregional education, experiential education, and, most recently, place-based or environment-based education. By any name, environment-based education can surely be one of the antidotes to nature-deficit disorder. The basic idea is to use the surrounding community, including nature, as the preferred classroom.

  Real World Learning

  For more effective education reform, teachers should free kids from the classroom. That’s the message from Gerald Lieberman, director of the State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort to study environment-based education.

  “Since the ecosystems surrounding schools and their communities vary as dramatically as the nation’s landscape, the term ‘environment’ may mean different things at every school; it may be a river, a city park, or a garden carved out of an asphalt playground,” according to the Roundtable’s report, “Closing the Achievement Gap.” The report was issued in 2002, but has been largely ignored by the education establishment. The Roundtable worked with 150 schools in sixteen states for ten years, identifying model environment-based programs and examining how the students fared on standardized tests. The findings are stunning: environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.

  • In Florida, Taylor County High School teachers and students use the nearby Econfina River to team-teach math, science, language arts, biology, chemistry, and the economics of the county.

  • In San Bernardino, California, students at Kimbark Elementary School study botany and investigate microscopic organisms and aquatic insects in an on-campus pond and vegetable garden, and in a nearby greenhouse and a native plant arboretum.

  • In Glenwood Springs, Colorado, high school students planned and supervised the creation of an urban pocket park, and city planners asked them to help develop a pedestrian mall and park along the Colorado River.

  • At Huntingdon Area Middle School in Pennsylvania, students col
lect data at a stream near the school. Teacher Mike Simpson uses that data to teach fractions, percentages, and statistics, as well as to interpret charts and graphs. “I don’t have to worry about coming up with themes for application problems anymore. The students make their own,” says Simpson.

  David Sobel, who describes place-based education as a focus on “learning directly within the local community of a student,” did an independent review of such studies, including one by the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation, which reported findings similar to Lieberman’s. When it comes to reading skills, “the Holy Grail of education reform,” says Sobel, place-based or environment-based education should be considered “one of the knights in shining armor.” Students in these programs typically outperform their peers in traditional classrooms.

  For example, at Hotchkiss Elementary School in Dallas, passing rates of fourth-graders in an environment-based program surpassed by 13 percent those of students in an earlier, traditional class. The Texas Education Agency’s Division of Student Assessment called Hotchkiss’s gains “extremely significant” when compared to the statewide average gain of 1 percent during the same period. Achievements in math are similar. In Portland, Environmental Middle School teachers employ a curriculum using local rivers, mountains, and forests; among other activities, they plant native species and study the Willamette River. At that school, 96 percent of students meet or exceed state standards for math problem-solving—compared to only 65 percent of eighth-graders at comparable middle schools. Environment-based education can amplify more typical school reform efforts. In North Carolina, raising standards produced a 15 percent increase in the proportion of fourth-graders scoring at the “proficient” level in statewide math scores. But fourth-graders at an environment-based school in Asheville, North Carolina, did even better—with a 31 percent increase in the number of students performing at the proficient level.

  As an added bonus, the students in these programs demonstrate better attendance and behavior than students in traditional classrooms. Little Falls High School in Little Falls, Minnesota, reported that students in the environment-based program had 54 percent fewer suspensions than other ninth-graders. At Hotchkiss Elementary, teachers had once made 560 disciplinary referrals to the principal’s office in a single year. Two years later, as the environment-based program kicked into gear, the number dropped to 50.

  More recently, in 2005, the American Institutes for Research released a report on its study of 255 at-risk sixth-grade students from four elementary schools who attended three outdoor education programs over a period of several months. The study compared the impact on students who experienced the outdoor education program versus those in a control group who had not had the outdoor learning experience. Major findings, submitted to the California Department of Education, included: a 27 percent increase in measured mastery of science concepts; enhanced cooperation and conflict resolution skills; gains in self-esteem, problem-solving, motivation to learn, and classroom behavior. Elementary school teachers and outdoor school staff “repeatedly emphasized how outdoor science school provides a ‘fresh start’ for students,” according to the report.

  Sobel tells a charming story of a physics teacher at one school who was teaching mechanical principles “by involving students in the reconstruction of a neighborhood trail where they had to use pulleys, levers, and fulcrums to accomplish the task.” On what the school calls Senior Skip Day, when seniors are free to skip any classes they want, one of the students told the physics teacher, “I want you to know, Mr. Church, that I skipped all the rest of my classes today, but I just couldn’t miss this class. I’m too committed to what we’re doing to skip this.” With such indications that this kind of school reform works, why aren’t more school districts considering it? Why have so many districts cut outdoor experiential learning as well as classroom environmental education, or, when making funding decisions, pitted one against the other—when both are so clearly needed? These questions are unlikely to appear on any standardized test.

  For decades, Montessori and Waldorf schools have, in different ways, advocated experiential learning. In recent years, newer proponents of experiential or environment-based education established the Association for Experiential Education to support professional development, theoretical advancement, and evaluation of experiential education worldwide. The association now has approximately thirteen hundred members in over thirty countries. A handful of organizations have made the leap from words to action. Among the oldest and best known is Foxfire, headquartered in Mountain City, Georgia. Its Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning originated in a program intended to teach basic English skills to high school freshmen in rural Georgia. These classroom experiences led to the student-produced Foxfire Magazine and a series of books on Appalachian life and folkways. Now three decades old, Foxfire offers teacher and student programs focusing on culture more than nature—but nature permeates the work, which offers information on everything from snake lore to wild plant foods to bear hunting.

  Other active organizations include the venerable National Wildlife Federation and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York. Teachers at schools using the Peterson Institute’s curriculum attend summer training. Upon their return to the classrooms, Peterson-trained teachers lead their students in a study of the square kilometer surrounding their building.

  After a decade of publishing such writers as Gary Paul Nabhan and Robert Michael Pyle in Orion magazine, the Orion Society, a Massachusetts-headquartered nonprofit, “decided to help put some of these words into practice,” says environmental writer and frequent Orion contributor Will Nixon. Orion now gives nature education fellowships to teachers, including a summer workshop and grants to pay for field trips, sketchbooks, day packs, “or other items that schools with tight budgets can’t afford.”

  Nixon quotes one Orion fellowship recipient, Bonnie Dankert, an English teacher at Santa Cruz High School: “I used to take student groups on trips to the California deserts or the High Sierras. We read literature about these places and studied the flora and fauna. We had some wonderful experiences.” But, she confessed, she had never considered taking shorter excursions to the coastal mountains and Monterey Bay close to the school. She had assumed that her students knew and loved the area; she was wrong. Her students told her that they didn’t feel connected to the place in which they lived; on a field trip to a state forest close to the school, Dankert discovered that 90 percent of the class had never been there. “They knew about it, but they had never been up there, sitting under a redwood tree and imagining what the scene looked like one hundred years ago,” she told Nixon.

  Dankert dropped the road trips and began teaching more locally, at Monterey Bay. She emphasized local authors. For example, while reading John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, Dankert asked a local marine biologist to lead the students on a field trip to the tide pools in Monterey Bay, which Steinbeck had explored. In addition to helping the students learn about natural science, she led discussions about the meaning of “community”—because one of Steinbeck’s characters had described a tide pool as a metaphor for the community of life. And, wrote Nixon, the trip helped the class form its own community. “One kid had never taken off his baseball cap,” Dankert remembered. “His eyes were always in shadow. Afterwards, he took off his cap and started interacting.”

  Another Orion fellow, a teacher at the junior high school in Homer, Alaska, helped organize a program that allowed eighth-graders to finish regular classes three weeks early; during that time, students studied a nearby glacier, learning glaciology, marine biology, botany, and cultural history. “This isn’t memorizing information for a test,” the teacher told Nixon. “When you sit in silence in front of a glacier and see the glacial pond, the dirt of the glacial moraine, the succession of plants from the lichens to the climax forest, and you write and sketch what you see, you make a bond with that moment. This experience becomes part of you.”
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  James and the Giant Turnip

  An increasing number of parents and a few good schools are realizing the importance and the magic of providing hands-on, intimate contact between children and nature as a larger part of a child’s education. Some teachers come to interdisciplinary place-based education on their own, with no institutional support besides a sympathetic principal. Most current progress in education, in fact, comes from iconoclastic individuals, including the principals, teachers, parents, and community volunteers who chart their own courses. Committed individuals and service organizations can accomplish a great deal.

  One creative elementary school teacher, Jackie Grobarek, describes what she called her “butterfly theory” of teaching, based loosely on meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that very small inputs at the beginning of a system’s evolution are amplified through feedback and have major consequences throughout the system. (One interpreter popularized Lorenz’s theory by calling it the “butterfly effect,” wondering if the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.) Grobarek describes the kind of hands-on experience with a payoff not always immediately visible:

  Schools are nonlinear systems, and small inputs can lead to dramatically large consequences. Our students this summer have raised earthworms, plants, and caterpillars and released the emerged butterflies. Because the students’ “babies” needed food, they also learned that the worms would eat garbage, the plants would thrive on worm castings, and that the butterflies required specific plants to eat, and other plants on which to lay their eggs. Many of these things were identified on our school grounds and in our canyon. They realized that our canyon, which had become an unattractive nuisance and trash pit in the neighborhood, was actually a wonderful habitat. It is filled with wild fennel, which is the host as well as food plant for the giant swallowtail butterfly. We are now working as class teams, and this week alone have hauled almost four Dumpsters of trash out of the area. Will this improve their reading and math scores? Maybe, but I feel that this experience will change them in ways that tests may not be able to measure.