Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (28 page)

Kennedy and one of his children descend to the bottom of the river and sit next to a favorite large rock, sheltered from the current. He will hold his child around the shoulders or waist (for the child’s security, and also to feel the child’s breathing) and the two of them will pass the mouthpiece back and forth. They sit down there, next to that rock, embraced by the underwater foliage that dances in the current, and watch the fish go by: the aggressive bass and whiskered catfish, tropical fish released from aquariums (angel fish, especially, and sometimes sea horses), and even an occasional native sturgeon—monstrous, prehistoric, and graceful. For Kennedy, watching the fish go by is a way to distance himself from the pressures that come with his name; it is also a metaphor for how we can experience nature with our children.

As part of my research for an earlier book, I went fishing with Kennedy. I took my sons along in a small boat off the California coastline. And as we fished, Kennedy told me of his earliest experiences as the family’s “nature child,” as he called himself, and how those experiences shaped his fathering. “I spent every afternoon in the woods when I was
growing up,” he said. “I loved finding salamanders, crayfish, frogs. My room was filled with aquariums,
filled
, from when I was six years old. And it still is today. I have a 350-gallon aquarium, and I have aquariums all over my house.” From the Hudson, he and his kids catch catfish, eel, bullheads, sturgeon, striped bass, perch, largemouth, bluefish, and trout—and bring them home live and keep them in their aquariums.

As we headed out to sea, Kennedy spoke passionately for the reconnection of children to nature. “We’re part of nature, and ultimately we’re predatory animals and we have a role in nature,” he said, “and if we separate ourselves from that, we’re separating ourselves from our history, from the things that tie us together. We don’t want to live in a world where there are no recreational fishermen, where we’ve lost touch with the seasons, the tides, the things that connect us—to ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and ultimately connect us to God.”

We shouldn’t be worshipping nature as God, he said, but nature is the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. “God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art,” but nowhere “with such texture and forcefulness in detail and grace and joy, as through creation,” he said. “And when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so that people can’t fish, or by making so many rules that people can’t get out on the water, it’s the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last 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.”

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
.

—V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH

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

—T
HOMAS
B
ERRY

T
HE 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.

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 collect 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.