This afternoon my daughter and I went to Briar Bush Nature Center in Abington, PA. The small, sweet nature center is tucked away in the middle of the suburbs and is a great place for young children to explore “the wild”. On this particular afternoon we ran into another family of “regulars”. These two little boys and their grandmother were busy “messing about” by the pond when we arrived (Czerniak, 2007). We hadn't been there for long before a big, bossy, Blue Jay appeared and landed on a branch near where the children were sitting. Without missing a beat and with much enthusiasm, my daughter's new friend flipped open the bird identification book he'd brought for just this occasion. As our two budding young naturalists, just four-years old, got down to business looking for their bird, I mulled over my mixed emotions.
Watching my daughter reminded me of my own childhood visits to Vermont where we frequently vacationed. My parents are true naturalists and saw to it that we could identify the different varieties and species of ferns, mushrooms, and berries that grew near the family cabin. My brother, sister, and I understood that these lessons were as important as they were fun. If we were to safely navigate our local surroundings we needed to know what was safe to eat and what was poisonous. It's not that we did that much foraging, but children do get curious. We needed to know what was what. I'll leave further discussion of raising independent children who have a healthy sense of self-preservation for another day and instead focus on a different concept gleaned from this experience: the importance of knowing the biology of one's surroundings. When I say knowing, I mean really knowing. As in being able to identify the plants and animals of one's region, by genus and species. In other words, children should be intimately familiar with the taxonomy of their worlds, however small they may be. This type of knowledge is not only practical in the immediate sense (don't eat that, it will make you sick), but also in the long-term (who will know, and save, the world's species if no one knows what they are?).
Richard Louv (2006) directly addresses this predicament in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (see chapters 11 and 12). According to Louv, natural history study is almost non-existent in our schools; “not one of the forty-three school districts within this county offers a single elective course in local flora and fauna” (2006, p. 137). For now, it seems any lessons in classification and identification my daughter may receive will have to come from me...and her friend with the bird book.
One further note: In the book and adapted film, Into the Wild, Alexander Supertramp (as he chooses to call himself), leaves conventional society to enter into the true wilderness. Like many young adults he is disenchanted with formulaic living and learning, but unlike many he actually leaves it all behind to find a new way, and to find himself. Unfortunately, he is terribly uninformed of the ways of the wild and, just as he finds his true self, he perishes. Alexander Supertramp, otherwise known as Christopher McCandless, starves to death in rural Alaska. Driven by intense hunger, he forages among local plants and, sadly, misidentifies a poisonous species for it's more edible cousin. As he struggles through his last moments of life he reads aloud,
"She was here in earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and call each thing by its right name."
-Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
As parents and teachers, let's be sure our children know and can name the elements of their world. After all,
“[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”
-Naturalist Robert Micheal Pyle
(quote located at the beginning of Chapter 12, Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv)
Think About It: Howard Gardner (2006), added naturalist intelligence to his theory of multiple intelligences. He notes that individuals with a tendency towards naturalist intelligence, “are keenly aware of how to distinguish the diverse plants, animals, mountains, or cloud configurations in their ecological niche” (p. 19). As educators, we are obligated to foster the development of these talents as much as any other.
Resources and References
Czerniak, C. & Krajcik, J. (2007). Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School: A Project- Based Approach, 3rd Ed. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Gardener, H. (2006). Multiple Intelligences, New Horizons. New York, USA: Perseus Books Group.
Krakauer, J. (1996). Into the Wild.
Louv, R. (2006). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Pasternak, B. Doctor Zhivago.
