In preparing to view Where Do the Children Play (there is another showing at school this Wednesday night with a discussion), I was inspired to read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods (available in the Kathrine Dickerson Memorial Library once I return my copy). I recommend the book highly. Even as we live in a place where nature seems relatively easy to access, Louv's book helps us as islanders (and friends near the island in beautiful places) frame questions about stewardship, safety, freedom, and exploration. Louv encourages us to allow children to find secret spaces, to get dirty, to build and feel, to participate in nature and not just develop an abstract sense of nature. Our school is blessed with its berry bushes, large amount of fallen logs in the woods, and absence of irritants such as poison ivy or poison oak (and the nettle, if one were to call this healthful herb an irritant, tends not to grow on any of the paths on which the nursery children and I walk).
Louv's book and a thought to helping the transition to the Butterfly nursery class for your children next year or in a future year encourages me to offer the following: after each Dewdrop and Rosebud class for the rest of the session, I will walk with interested families to the teepee near our school (the site where Mother Earth met us during the Spring Festival). We'll probably leave at 11:10am or so (once everyone who wants to go has had a chance to get dressed for the outside). Stay as long or as little as you want. This is optional and not officially part of class, so if your child is exhausted and you need to leave (or if your child wants to stay on the swings at the Berry Patch playground), feel free to do so.
There are many potential benefits to this activity. Here are a few:
1) The clearing near the teepee is close to school (children can walk themselves at their own pace) so this will not be a forced march for the children (longer walks for parents have their place, too, but I have learned that young children can be quite satisfied with a shorter walk with more chances to explore, touch, smell, dig, and explore).
2) The clearing has lots of uneven terrain to explore. What we offer in playgrounds and curriculum such as gymnastics attempt to replicate the motor development activities humans have found in nature.
3) We begin our nursery day outside and walk every day to the teepee at about 9:05am or so (once all children have arrived). It will help the nursery next fall if a number of children know the way to the teepee. Without judging the way other teachers might do things, I find--through my reading, observations, meditations, and books like Louv's--that young children benefit much more from a nature walk if they can go at their own pace and are not forced to hold hands or hold onto a rope (if we were an urban school with traffic or other perils I would of course adapt and do things differently). In my nursery, I go towards the front, making sure children go the right direction while my assistant walks in the back with children who choose a slower pace (sometimes a much slower pace, but our method prevents this from causing tension or a power struggle).
In the video, Where do the Children Play, a professor, after talking about the manner in which mass media can inhibit child development, suggests that he could train children to be environmentalists using the mass media because it is such a powerful teacher. Louv (also appearing frequently in the video) would disagree; Louv worries, in fact, about some environmental organizations that do so much teaching of the mind but won't allow children to pick flowers, catch frogs, or build tree houses. Louv writes about John Muir chasing gulls with his homemade gun as a boy (Muir was apparently a bad shot); Louv worries that if we try too hard to train children to always leave nature in peace as young children (not that we should encourage children to violate hunting laws), they will grow up with the sense of nature as an abstraction and feel, as adults, no connection or need to preserve wild and natural spaces.
The professor in the media also suggests that children who do have a lot of media exposure have a richer vocabulary and know more about the world. Louv, again, laments that children know about the Amazon rainforest but nothing about flora and fauna near their home. I want to quote here Louv quoting D.H. Lawrence:
. . . Twenty-first century Western culture accepts the view that because of omnipresent technology we are awash in data. But in this information age, vital information is missing. Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the "transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it," as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a relatively obscure but extraordinary description of his own awakening to nature's sensory gift. Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the "know-it-all state of mind," that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder:
Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or Central Park. There is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it. We've done the globe and the globe is done.
This is quite true, superficially. On the superficies, horizontally, we've been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it. Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically. It's all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean and saying you know all about the sea . . . .
As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything. When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room. We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: "It's very much what you'd expect." We really know it all.
We are mistaken. The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization. Underneath is everything we don't know and are afraid of knowing.
Last Child in the Woods (57-58), Richard Louv
With warmth and light,
William Geoffrey Dolde
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