Tim Rogers
Educating for the Future
Book Response 1
The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places
The book, The Geography of Childhood by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, takes you on a great journey back into your youth, where you flashback at your own memories of discovery in the great outdoors. Childhood is such an adventurous part of one’s life, you don’t understand the importance of what was learned through observing, discovering and imitating nature in the ever expanding world until you get to an age where you are able to reflect back on these experiences. Wild places increase curiosity and knowledge that we all need as children to better understand the world we live in.
Chapter One of this book really set the foundations of children’s need for wild places around the home, or for example during vacations in the mountains, and so on. I would agree with the author’s revelations about adults. They say that as adults we take in the whole picture versus a child’s smaller view of the things they encounter in the outdoors. A child can find a whole new world under a rock. Children often act out dramas creating areas in bushes, trees and other outdoor settings. When I was very young, my friends and I would build forts up in the hills back behind our homes in Central California. This was a place where we would discover frogs, snakes, and salamander and share our stories in our fort underneath a very old oak tree. These experiences led to questions for our parents and teachers about the environment in our local community and laid down the foundation for understanding of and respect for nature.
Author, Gary Paul Nabhan, looked to the Native American cultures place such importance on respect for one’s environment. But even in these societies that are so tied to the plants and animals that surround them there is a growing crisis for the future of environmental experiences for their children. The rich oral tradition, that include stories of plants, animals, treacherous water, and complex topography depends upon the stories and the original native language they are told in, to survive. These stories may include words that do not have an appropriate counterpart in the English language. Therefore they lose their significance in translation. “If a Native American language dies, there is no place on earth one can travel to learn it.” “As half of the two-hundred native languages in North America die, when their last elder speakers fall silent, thousand of Indian children will have forfeited the chance to speak of their plant and animal neighbors in ways filled with the nuances of feeling that characterized their forebears speech.” (p. 94)
In the third chapter, Gary Paul Nabhan stresses that there are not enough outdoor experiences of nature in schools. He says that before he left high school he could recall only three school sponsored field trips for nature study. In my own experience I can vividly remember our four daylong field trip to Camp Silverspur in the Sierra Nevada’s Gold Country. We learned how to pan for gold. To this day I still remember what poison oak looks like, probably because I touched it. This was the only field trip I took in school that was focused on and based in nature. I disagree with the authors take on this subject. Yes, schools should expose children to the natural environment but not everyone in school is as in tune with nature as the author is. With constraints such as budgets and standardized testing, teachers today find it harder and harder to take their classes on field trips. I feel that parents need to take some level of responsibility for their children’s environmental education. I am not suggesting that all parents have the time or money to take their children on vacation to nature destinations such as Yosemite or Yellowstone National Parks. Rather I would argue that parents need to take the time to take their kids to their local parks. I can see it being difficult for some adults to see that the time their children spend looking under rock is not time wasted. Parents have to let their kids explore nature on there own instead of letting them watch television or playing computer games all day. I do agree that schools need more outdoor education but parents can play a big role with children in grades K through 12.
The authors cite a poll where only 8% of adults consider the environment a major issue as opposed to 90% of children considering it a major one. What does this say about how children are being raised in today’s technological rat race? Where in their development from child to adult do they lose that sensibility that nature is important? We are losing valuable habitat through urbanization and technology takes away more time spent in the outdoors. Does the statistic change because they lose touch with nature? If children were given more consistent opportunities to experience nature as they mature into adults, would they be more likely to feel that the environment is a “major issue”?
What I have learned from authors Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble is the basic fact that we learn through our childhood stories. Whether it is a mind map of a family vacation or learning landmarks, these are important higher level thinking skills. Three-quarters of what I read in this book were not hard facts rooted in math or science. Rather the authors use actual events in their lives as both child and parent to illuminate and illustrate the points they are trying to make with this book. These are reflections of growing up loving nature and what we learn from it. While reading this book I realized how lucky I was to have grown up in an area so close to preserved “Open Space” where I could explore and understand nature. I think these early experiences helped to develop my adult respect for the environment.