On Dr. Suzukis point about outdoor play, has anyone heard of the Forest method of childhood education? It was developed in Norway, but it is slowly spreading to North America. The Forest method is where children are brought out into the Forest by the instructor, and given practical challenges to solve. They do this in everything except the most extreme weather conditions. The children are given only minimal supervision, and encouraged to think things out independently. They learn to count by collecting pinecones, stones, twigs and so forth, they learn shapes in much the same way. Instead of competing with each other for academic marks, they learn to act cooperatively as a team. Challenges include such things as building a shelter, rope bridges and so on. What Norwegian researchers found is that this closes the learning gap between boys and girls in the early years (Grades 1-5). Boys are much more prone at that age to do things like daydreaming, fiddling, etc. out of boredom. Boys at that age are (perhaps culturally) inclined to think of the world of work and play as an outdoor, vigorous physical activity. The toys they choose, the stories they enjoy, all portray males as being involved in physically active outdoors environments, and often working in cooperation rather than competition with others. As children, boys often dream of being construction workers, fire fighters, Police and so on, yet they are forced to sit still and do sedentary clerical work. Girls at this age, having been culturally adapted through their toys, stories, and gender roles to think of their female role as taking place indoors. (mothers, housewives, and so on.) This is why they are thought to be high academic achievers early on, they adapt easier to the Grade school environment than boys. The Forest method is also fun and beneficial for young girls too, particularly in non-academic ways such as developing personal confidence and social and leadership skills. The fact that we think of school as something that takes place indoors, while seated in an artificial, autocratic environment, and learning means performing memorization and rote tasks, may be part of the problem of our society today. There is a disconnect between CEOs and heads of state, and the natural world they exist in, primarily because they have come to see success in terms of artificial things such as numbers (i.e. academic high marks), status and so on. These people have enough money that they can insulate themselves in their own private artificial worlds, travelling from mansion to airport in a luxury car. Things like poisoning a river doesnt matter to them, because it doesnt affect them personally. The natural world does not exist to them, except as a resource to exploit. In their minds, if a river is poisoned they can simply purchase bottled water that as far as they know comes from the factory. Bacon comes from the supermarket, and so on. If we want to interest the next generation in the natural environment, perhaps we should start by taking them out of the schools and into the fields and forests. Encourage cooperation instead of competition. Let every day be a field day. Nelson Mandela said that Education was the most powerful tool in transforming society. We know that a radical change is desperately needed. This generation, particularly the baby boomers, is doomed. We need to start thinking of the next generation, and how we can make a cognitive leap into a radically different world.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:05:38 +0000
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