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Discovering a gigantic (and partially slug-eaten) mushroom here in Canada.
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My first outdoor art class was rather an accident. I was working
with a group of kids from the American School in Wassenaar, the
Netherlands, and decided we'd make a mural to revitalize the wall of
a local underpass that at the time was covered with white supremacist
graffiti. Taking the kids outside to paint the mural they'd designed
was just the obvious next step in the process, and it required the
city to drop off a ladder and high-vis barricades to keep us safe from passing
cyclists. The city obliged, and we cloistered ourselves up against
the wall and painted that mural.
But really we had to stand back quite frequently to look at the
job we were doing, which meant stepping out of the barricaded area,
across the busy bike-path, and onto the unkempt grassy area beside
the overpass. That's where we took breaks, where we sat in the long
grass and weeds and chatted, ate our snacks, pondered the mural, and
generally did the work of assimilating all the learning that comes
with designing and then painting a large mural in a public
location--and confronting racism as a group of culturally displaced
children. There, in the grass, we found little beetles climbing up
the blades; we dropped breadcrumbs by accident and wondered about the
safety of picking them up to eat them. We watched all the cyclists
zooming by between us and the mural, and we soaked up the sunshine on
our faces. We talked about neo-nazis, flowers, bicycles, the various
countries we came from, different species of flies, the American
School, flies stuck in paint, and languages of racist graffiti. I was
nineteen, and really had no idea what I was doing with these kids, as
a teacher, but the act of teaching taught me.
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Scrubbing algae, tire-dust and graffiti in preparation for painting.
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It took me quite a few years, more art classes taught for
practical reasons outside, and parenting my own two kids into an
unschooling paradigm before I realized the importance of that time
spent sitting on grass in Wassenaar. I didn't originally take my
classes outside because I knew it was the best place to learn. I took
them because it was a place to let off steam; a place to find
interesting textures for rubbings, collages, and still-life
arrangements, or just the place we had to be to make the big art.
Back in those early days I didn’t realize we were doing so much
more than art. I took my own kids out just to escape the monotony of
our living room, and the boring routine of meals, diapers, nursing,
and play time. We did meals, diapers, nursing and play time in the
forest, and let me tell you—that was not boring! And it wasn't long
before I realized that we didn't actually need anything other than a
snack and a spare diaper to go into the woods—that what we were
doing there was so much more than just home in the forest: it was
everything. Very soon, books, toys, and the stroller were
irrelevant, and sticks, mud, water and plants became my kids'
playthings. And playthings are learning tools. It wasn’t long after
this that I started taking all my art classes outside for at least
half our time together, and realized what I’d been missing, all
along: connection.
The ecosystem that surrounds our curated homes is vast and complex
and interconnected. It’s the seeming chaos that we tried to tame
with our cities, boxes, and rules, but in actuality it’s the
perfectly-tuned balance of millions of organisms, ideas and functions
that we have not yet nearly achieved with our human-made system.
Every concept humans dream up has roots in our basic understanding of
the world and its natural systems.
Human-Designed Environment vs. Wilderness
The confines of a classroom or home are the curated attempt at a
kind of intellectual ecosystem by a species that has become
accustomed to putting things in boxes: to looking so hard at one
object that we forgot to see the context it exists in. We put
everything in boxes. We hang alphabet posters on the wall, keep fish
or hamsters in a tank on a shelf for observation, and keep a stack of
books, papers, or laptops for recording our observations. In this, we
teach ourselves to exclude. We teach ourselves not to consider the
wider context of whatever we’re seeing, because we’re afraid it’s
too much for our small minds to fathom.
But our minds want to fathom! Our minds need to expand; to
take time to sit and observe and wonder; to take subconscious note of
all the millions of things that happen in the wilderness, from the
slope of a leaning tree to the plants growing on top of it, to the
smell of the soil, the mechanics of wings, jaws and elytra to the
taste of sap. Our minds draw the connections between these millions
of things long before we could ever articulate them.
One of the greatest tragedies of the current education system is
our need for documentation and evaluation of learning. Students and
teachers spend so much time documenting, testing, and evaluating that
there’s no time left for sitting out in the wilderness, just
assimilating. I can understand that, given the centralized nature of
our system, the people at the top want to be sure every child is
receiving the same instruction and meeting the same standards. But
this is old. We’re progressing beyond the industrial society this
system was designed for, where humans are needed to follow directions
and work in factories. We’re on the edge of a new enlightenment,
where the work we do with our minds is valued as much or more than
our ability to assemble products. We don’t need the
over-simplified, over documented fact-sheets of the industrial age,
that break reality into such small pieces that it’s meaningless in
the big picture. Our minds need a rich environment full of wonder,
intrigue, and uncertainty to grow. The wilderness offers that.
Boxes vs. the Big Picture
As unschoolers at home, my kids were welcome to play and explore
whatever interested them, free from the school system. But the fear I
developed growing up in that school system led me to buy them a
series of workbooks designed for their grade-levels. At some point my
son was working on the science section (the only section he was
willing to look at), and became furious. “This is a stupid book!”
he declared. “They don’t know anything!” He was talking about
the page that claimed killer whales eat other whales. He knew they
ate salmon—at least those whales inhabiting our area at the time.
And he knew that other killer whales ate seals and sea lions, but he
didn’t care because they weren’t anywhere near us. I tried to
explain that transient killer whales might, in fact, eat smaller
whales, so maybe the book wasn’t wholly wrong. But both of us were
dismayed at the description of something we knew to be a very complex
system, as something so simplified as to be incorrect.
Humans are forever trying to make things simpler to understand
them. It’s definitely simpler and less risky to put something in a
box for observation than it is to go get to know it in its natural
environment. If you put a killer whale in a big box with a smaller
whale, I bet it would eventually eat it. But then you wouldn’t know
anything about either species at all.
Boxes are more predictable, and we like predictable. The trouble
is that the world and everything in it is not that simple. So in
boxing everything; in teaching our kids “the simple facts” of,
say, anatomy, combustion engines, or long division, we ignore the
greater context of not only how these things fit into the vast
ecology that we’re a part of, but why they matter. That’s why
it’s OK to forget them when the test is finished and we move on to
the next subject. They were never important in the big picture
because we never saw the big picture: The ecosystem of everything.
The thing is, though, that that ecosystem is the context of our
lives. We didn’t come from nature thousands of years ago and then
progress beyond it with industry and technology, we are
nature. We are the ecosystem, and our minds, unbeknownst to
us, are naturally evolved to live in, observe, and understand it.
Everything we are is the same basic particles that comprise a killer
whale, a turtle; a beetle, or a piece of sandwich fallen into the
weeds and digested by microbes, on the side of the bike path in
Wassenaar. Everything we have built came from nature. Not just the
raw materials, harvested unseen behind a slim screen of trees by the
highway, but also our ingenuity. It comes from nature. It comes from
people walking through the wilderness getting to know it; people
living for thousands of years in their own ecosystem, learning and
understanding the ecology of that place until they know how to heal
themselves with specific plants, actions, and technologies. Humans
learned medicine from the wilderness, and then learned to make it
into pills. I learned about my own body’s anatomy by butchering
rabbits with my family, as a child. Humans learned engineering from
stacking, digging, and weaving pieces of wilderness to make homes and
all other manner of ingenuity—like birds build nests and bears
prepare dens for winter. Children build forts and mats; crowns and
shoes and gardens in the wilderness. And this play is where they
learn the core skills they need to become engineers, physicians,
caregivers, fashion designers, mathematicians, and politicians.
That’s a lot of things to become! And you know it’s just my
random little list. It looks like hyperbole but it’s really a gross
understatement. I can’t think of a single career that wouldn’t be
ideally begun in the wilderness. Why? Because our minds are capable
of more than we know, and more than we can articulate. In sitting,
playing, or living in the wilderness we give our minds space to
learn. That’s why we learn better, there.
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Natural play in the forest.
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The Whole Picture: Interconnection
Getting to know our own ecosystems isn’t quantifiable. It’s
not really so much about seeing or learning more as it is
about seeing the interconnection of all things. What was missing from
that infamous killer whale page in my son’s workbook was indeed
just a lot of information, but more importantly it was the connection
between all that information. Salmon is to killer whales what smaller
fish are to salmon. And our local residents prefer chinook salmon.
But where do they find them? And how do they interact or share
territory with the transient (now Biggs) killer whales, who eat
pinnipeds, dolphins and minke whales? What do minke whales eat? Who
eats their poop? Oh yeah—whale poop is the fertilizer of the seas.
Like rabbit, horse, and chicken manure on my garden. Like deer poop
in the forest, and the leaves and berries that went into it, feed the
ferns, trees, and the grasses that later were picked for the robin’s
nest; the corvid that later stole the robin’s scrawny babies to
eat; the blue eggshells that fell to the ground to be gnawed by
insects and harvested for calcium. The picture goes on and on
forever. It’s not just big; it’s whole. Try to put that on
a spreadsheet and send it to the ministry for documentation of
learning.
Really. I’ve tried. As an unschooling parent still enrolling my
kids in a DL program in order to access community resources and group
activities, I had to quantify my kids’ learning on paper once every
term. I learned very fast that what my children were learning was
absolutely unquantifiable; that an “education” in our province
constitutes a list of checked boxes, but that what my children
understood of the world was much more important. School-going kids
also understand far more than is noted on their reports; more than
they are seen knowing, by a system inclined to look at them mostly
for the purpose of checking boxes. They understand the social
connectivity of their class and school, of their families and the
landscape of the places they are given to explore. If we want our
children to know more about the world, we simply have to give them
more places to explore. And if we want them to really become
comfortable and fluent in complexity, we have to give them plenty of
time exploring in the wilderness.
Exploring: Curated Experience vs. Free Play
Exploring doesn’t mean hiking along a trail. I mean, it might,
if that’s where interest led you. But it might mean going
off-trail, crawling into the underbrush, or sitting down to dissect a
pile of bear poop. It might mean sitting smelling the wind, and maybe
it’s autumn, and the wind carries a musky smell that turns out to
be a very large rutting deer watching you from afar. He saw you first
because he’s accustomed to this wilderness and used to noticing the
changes. You’re the change in his wilderness, and now you’re a
part of it. And you discovered something you didn’t expect when you
sat down to smell the wind.
When kids play in the wild without direction they probably learn
more than they would if the play was curated. Most times school kids
are taken outside to play, the play is directed by a teacher. Maybe
we play capture the flag; maybe we sit and read our books or go on a
scavenger hunt. These aren’t harmful activities, but in the
expectation of specific activity, they don’t leave much room for
exploration. We learn to see outdoor spaces as locations for
performing human-designed activities, as opposed to ecosystems to be
a part of. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Take a group of kids into the woods with no expectations, supplies
or instruction, and leave them to play. They will use their previous
experiences, their broad complex understanding of the world, and
their inquisitive minds to take stock of the situation and adapt.
They’ll explore their surroundings. They’ll use whatever objects
they find around (clothing, sticks, leaves, water) to act out and
explore their ideas. It’s a lot like documentation, but freed from
the constraints of ministry check-boxes and expected reporting
methods, it will look like play. It is play. And it’s
essential for learning. Just like in playing, a crow learns where the
robins are nesting and where he might find his next meal. He learns
how to slide in snow and dig for grubs. Play is essential for
learning. In playing with kids in the forest, I learned the best
things I know about teaching.
The wilderness provides the best playground for our imaginations,
because it’s complex enough to house all our ideas. It
provides the best place for learning, because, when we give ourselves
time to just be there, we can
discover and come to understand—intrinsically—the roots of
everything. Without
constraints on space, complexity, or imagination, we really can be
wholly educated. We can become
everything we want to be.
