Author Archives: Joan Jaeckel

The No Knucklerapping Doctrine: Ending Anti-Childhood Education

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Learned Lessons From a Generation of Education Reform: 

Another Brick in the Wall

  • We can’t keep on treating children like an open sewer. Throwing garbage theories (i.e. “Baby Einstein” and its outcomes-based education cousin) down their open minds. That trash winds up in the ocean of the collective human consciousness. There is a human equivalent of the floating island of trash in the ocean and it is the human catastrophe of undeveloped minds, social-emotional ignorance and unskilled hands resulting from ill-conceived education. If we do, it’s Game Over for the pre-K to 3rd grade set  … and a more human future for the collective whole.
  •  # 1: There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that depends on textbooks and tests from corporations whose profit depends on the sale of those tests and texts to the system.
  • We need to build a record of ways that the collusion of bad public education policy by the left and the right corrupts childhood neuro, social/emotional and physical development.
  • The root cause of environmental climate change is oil. The root cause of childhood neuro change is unkindness.
  • Naomi Klein (love her!) builds a dichotomy between privatization and publicization. She suggests that publicization is the only way to shared responsibility. Her example of why we need to publicisize the common good is wealthy people who can buy their way out of the collective bad, for example, by hiring a private company to “turn your hurricane disaster into a vacation retreat” in the Bahamas. The social threefolding model is different. The social three folding model suggests that there is a third way besides privatization and publicization.  Social threefolding suggest that the steward of the  collective good is civil society – a hybrid between the highest ideals of government and the highest ideals of socially responsible business.  Examples of civil society and the emergence of social threefolding making society more civil abound (see, for example, Ecology of Commerceauthor Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World).
  • We could establish a correlation between the words “renewable energy” as applied to physical resources of energy and the “renewable energy” resource of childhood for the world when children are allowed to be children in schools.
  • The bipartisan passage of No Child Left  Behind, (which got a running start through Lynne Cheney under Reagan in the 80′s) gets praise for being bipartisan. The worst thing for education is both conservatism and liberalism ganging up on defenseless children in schools. Conservatism wants education to get tough on children (Big Education-pushing NCLB under George Bush) and now to get tough on teachers (RttT under Barack Obama). Liberalism wants to protect teachers’ jobs against unfair labor conditions and to protect intellectual freedom. Since K-12 teachers have no intellectual freedom (i.e. cannot refuse to give tests to students without risking their jobs or disclose test materials without risking criminal charges for violating copyrights) what is liberalism protecting? Likewise, if conservatism promotes individual initiative, why promote rote learning in schools?
  • There is a role for collective social support for education. Education can’t just be all ad hoc and all about charity and goodwill for every school in a completely disconnected manner.  But, that doesn’t mean that education should be run by a centralized collective one-size-fits-all authority on the grounds that only one way of doing things is fair.  The metaphor for the collective movement for school-based management is a river freely flowing held in by banks that follow the natural contours of the landscape: autonomy, flexibility and accountability.
  • I have noticed that people who do not happen to have children right now or grandchildren right now saying, well I don’t have any children so education doesn’t interest me. How is that any different than saying I’m not interested in climate change because I’m old and I’m going to die in a few years?
  • The educational budget does not include the costs of incarceration, depression, unemployment, violence, war and wasted lives. Maybe we will need a lawsuit against the big testing and big text book industry for knowingly crimping the vibrant potential of childhood’s neural trees  for the sake of profit.
  • The 400-year-old dinosaur of the United States education model is at war with childhood.
  • Education officials make it very easy to talk about education. They talk about test scores, they talk about teacher accountability, they talk about access to text books, rather than talking about neuro-change.  Neuro-change is what happens to children’s minds (and, eventually humanity’s collective mind) when we expose children to toxic levels of premature cognitive overload, emotional pressure to compete and succeed in an atmosphere of no fun, and drugs when the child despairs over the overload, boredom, and pressure.

 

Hey, U.S. Dept of Education,

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I tuned in this morning to see what’s being said at the NBC News Education Nation Summit this week.  Immediately, I noticed a talk by Condoleeza Rice about education and national security – that a bad education system is a national security matter because a poorly educated nation will not be able to keep up with the demands of the military for minimally literate soldiers.  Added to the prevalent idea that we only educate to compete globally, Condie’s words were the final straw. Nothing personal. She expresses a widely held view.

What follows is an effort to describe what I think the problem is with entangling national security and global economic competition with the education system and a thought about what to do about it.

I’m involved with writing a charter petition.  The petition instructions ask us to answer a brilliant  question.  It asks us to describe “what does it mean to be an educated person in the 21st century?”.

The system is the message.

This is the message of our education system according to its web site:

“ED’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access … and [to achieve] the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” – The U.S. Department of Education, web site

This is not an inspiring message to send to kids.   The most important message an educational system should send  is … your existence as an individual self matters.  All other good things flow from that.

Ensuring equal access to all, adopting “high standards” and “believing that all students are capable of learning” is not enough.    If our problem is underachieving, meanness, and dropping out/not finishing college then we cannot solve this problem at the level it was created.  Department of Ed, you need to level up.

Students can sense they are being used and condescended to. They know when they are cajoled to “achieve”, “succeed”, “stay in school”, and “go to college” for some ulterior agenda.  These goals are motivated by economic and political reasons: “American competition in the global marketplace”, “a failing education system is a potential threat to national security”, or “[beating] other countries in college graduation rates”. Finland first served its students and its teachers and parents and THEN, as a result, they also looked good to the world. U.S. Dept. of Ed, your goals don’t land because they do not speak to the students at the existential level where young persons live – at the level of the intention of the individual self.

While all schools should be a perfect as possible in every way, of course, there are endless examples of people who succeeded in life who got bad grades in school (Einstein, Malcom Gladwell couldn’t get accepted into grad school), who dropped out of college (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg), who had miserable and abusive parents (John Lennon, Oprah), and who went to segregated schools (Martin Luther King).

U.S. Ed, your (unintended) message is: You, kid, as an individual self, don’t matter

The interest of the individual self is laundered right out of your, the U.S. Department of Education’s system, according to your mission statement. The logic is that the global competitive/national security good of the whole trumps the presumed ignorance and selfishness of the individual as soon as tax money is in play. Everyone must be modest and selfless so that the system can be outrageous and self-serving.  In effect, our educational system says to kids in school  “we are educating you for the sake of U.S. global economic competition and national security”.

I see that one could argue that if the state/taxpayers are paying for your education, kid, then we expect you to give back by making us economically competitive and/or at least learning enough in school so you can qualify to join the military and protect our national security.

The problem with this argument is that the system sends the message to the kids that ” you, as an individual self, don’t matter”.   Because you don’t matter as one person – you only matter as part of a mass – we have the right to enact on a daily and hourly basis the most extreme form of psychological and philosophical insult and minimalization against your individual self : In return for your “free” education, (1) we assume the right to limit what school your ignorant, selfish parents can send you to, (2) to evaluate your worth and that of your lazyass teacher based on copyright-protected testing instruments of the multi-billion “K-12 industry” which neither you, your parents or your teachers can ever see under penalty of law, and (3) to determine what you “should  know and be able to do” through national standards that ensure the multi-billion “K-12 industry” steady textbook sales as elected school boards “adopt” their products – shifting tax dollars into corporate pockets – so that teachers, who matter as little if not less than you, can teach to the standards using books whose dubious literary merit ensure kids will hate reading them and then be accused of not reading and, thus, creating more potential for profit.

So, here’s a proposal, U.S. Dept of Ed:

Whereas, the goals of the U.S. Department of Education constitute highly subjective beliefs about the purpose of the individual self of the student that do not comport with the individual self’s purpose for their own existence, (i.e. (1) Although we now live with global awareness, competition rules: the existential purpose of the individual self is to promote economic competition for one country over another, (2) a democratic, “public” education exclusively means ensuring equal access to a standardized one-size-fits-all curriculum, teaching methods, and assessments and (3) military readiness is a fundamental purpose of K-12 schooling.)

Whereas these beliefs – even though they do not mention “god” – are godlike in their power to determine how public resources are allocated. Belief in the above violates the principle of separation of church and state. The state, through these beliefs which are highly subjective, self-serving, and dictate what others should value, be, and do, is not acting as a state but as a church. A state provides equal opportunities for diverse views, ways of being, and multiple options options.

Therefore, since education, in contrast to the limiting mission statement above, is an existential necessity for the individual self, a right of the human species, and a civil responsibility, we need to think about a 21st Century Vision Statement for the U.S. Department of Education. It could go something like this:

PROPOSED 21st CENTURY VISION STATEMENT FOR THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

For the 21st Century the U.S. Department of Education has a vision of equal access to a differentiated system of education as an existential necessity for the individual self, a fundamental right of our species, and a shared civil responsibility.  The Department exists to support, serve, and protect schools and systems of schools offering programs that further the human individual self to grow in knowledge, social empathy and playfulness, and initiative and innovation.  Ed schools set for their students and the world an example of what it means when the human species cooperates, collaborates and learns together.

That’s it.  Mr. Duncan, your thoughts?

PS This stream of thought today was inspired by something William McDonough said at a DWELL show: ”What is the intention of our species?” – William McDonough/Cradle to Cradle and by thoughts shared with me about gene manipulation of Craig Holdredge and Steve Talbott/The Nature Institute http://www.natureinstitute.org/

Waiting for Neuroscientists! Write about the neurological toll high stakes testing takes on K-8 students in public schools

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Re this: Just read Wall Street Journal science writer Sue Shellenbarger’s  piece on “good” vs “bad” stress in Big Think.
My work is moving our educational system towards neuro-health and away from IQ-lowering pressure, competition and blame and shame. Have you had the thought, as I have, as has the research and advocacy group, Alliance for Childhood, that the unrelenting pressure to ‘perform’ on high stakes standardized tests by children under 14 kills off the very brain cells the testing strategy hopes to grow? Especially in the ‘underserved’ children we aim to ‘not leave behind’ who have less emotional resilience and adult support to begin with.  Instead of being a second chance in life, the K-8 school becomes a second chance to slam them for good for life. If any of this resonates with you, would you consider writing about it? I am writing a charter petition for a K-8 school in Northeast Los Angeles which will aim for Czicksentmihalyi’s “flow” zone for optimal engagement. We will do this by matching up the child’s developmental readiness to learn about a subject with the right amount of challenge. Neuroscientists need to do justice to this potentially education game-changing topic. Before we – the nation – can decide on a better way to measure the efficacy of educational practice, we need to pay attention to and stop ignoring what you neuroscientists know about the consequences on children’s minds of our current practices.

School endangers childhood: re-inventing “basic” education

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Saving Childhood: Basic Schools and the Future of Waldorf by Peter Guttenhoefer, PhD.

Dr. Peter Guttnhoefer has a global stragegic plan to protect the first 10 years of childhood as a development-safe zone.

 

Dr. Guttenhoefer’s strategic plan to ‘save childhood’ is a new “minimal school” plan. His is a “Basic School,” a model for a school of the future which combines three years of kindergarten and four grades, ending when the child is ten. 

Here’s the link to the pdf, “Saving Childhood: Memorandum for a Basic Pedagogy of Doing” by Dr. Peter Guttenhöfer, 2011; Plans in the works for Dr. Guttenhofer to present at the Global Social Lab.

User experience matters. Especially when you are seven.

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‘No Child’ Law Whittled Down by White House by Mokoto Rich

Good Morning, Mokoto

I write in the spirit of dialogue to ask you to consider reporting on education from the perspective of the child.

You are not the only education reporter whose analysis features the effect on politics over the effect our nations’ education policies have on the growing child.

As an example, you write: “While No Child Left Behind has been praised for forcing schools to become more accountable for the education of poor and minority children, it has been derided for what some regard as an obsessive focus on test results, which has led to some notorious cheating scandals.” I was shocked to read you downplay the effect of the testing on the children and, instead, focus on an inconsequential result of the testing obsession. The obsessive focus on test results is an obscene violation of the child’s developing self. The obsessive focus on test results arrests the child’s cognitive development, social-emotional development, and the development of a healthy sense of self-motivation. I urge you to familiarize yourself with the thinking of childhood-aware people like Linda Darling Hammond, Linda Lantieri, Daniel Goleman, Howard Gardner, Daniel Pink. Read “Born For Love” by Bruce Perry!

I do appreciate you including this: “Mr. Starr said he believed that education reform should focus on incentives to help teachers collaborate and help students learn skills that could not simply be measured by tests.”

In that vein, your report also overlooked the movement for “21st century learning”. These people focus on what the CHILD will need to function in the 21st century: higher order thinking, collaboration and innovation skills – a different consciousness that cannot even be measured by a test. 21st century learning requires rich input – core academics taught creatively AND the arts, experiences in nature, dance, etc. This is part of the holistic picture of education improvement in America.

I invite you to speculate on the idea that education reporting must focus on the customer. The user experience of the child is what matters.

Thank you for your invitation to comment.
Warmly,
Joan Jaeckel

Waiting for … Handwriting

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As my ‘Waldorf’-educated kids  wrote and drew their way through year after year of handwritten and hand-illustrated ‘main lesson books’ in their 12 years of this schooling, we often wondered when the research supporting the value of all this effort would arrive on the main stage.

Enter:

“How Handwriting Makes You Smarter/How Handwriting Trains the Brain: Forming Letters is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas” by Gwendolyn Bounds, WSJ, Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Chris Lehman says, “This Isn’t An Education Debate” , and he’s right.  Debating charters, uniforms, test scores or any structural factor is meaningless unless and until we first understand how a child actually learns to think critically, to construct emotional resilience and to make new things that work.

Education as shared common good: In Praise of Elinor Ostrom

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Does public education have to morph into more of a distributed rather than centralized system in order to become truly representative of the “public”? I have always thought so. But, how to make the case without seeming to overlook those who will be elbowed out? Recently, to my delight, my faith in the unconditional wisdom of everyone was scientifically and economically validated when  Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel for her “new science of governance for a new age” by applying  the “practical economics” (“A Nobel for Practical Economics” of voluntary associations and communal ownership to protecting the shared common good. I apply her logic to education.

No. Ms. Ostrom doesn’t mention education per se. But, given that an exuberant, well-loved, and healthy childhood is a common good that deserves shared protection, allow me to make the leap from the governance of our shared natural resources like fisheries and grazing grounds to the governance of our shared human capital like teachers, parents and students.

Ms. Ostrom’s research finds that natural resources and the common good are best protected by local, knowledgeable, voluntary associations with rules designed by enlightened locals to fit a “local ecology”.  Distant, publicly regulated entities or privately owned for-profit markets do NOT protect the shared common good better than local enlightened and invested associations. Ms. Ostrom’s work lays to rest “the tragedy of the commons”, the long-held justification for distant authorities to regulate locals for the sake of the common good because, so the theory goes, locals can’t be trusted to protect the common good due to greed, politics and ignorance. Hmm.

The opposite turns out to be true.  Locals actually are BEST at protecting the common good because local knowledge leads to rules that make sense and work for local conditions.

The solutions proposed by the WSJ education task-force assume the opposite of Elinor Ostrom’s conclusions. The CEO’s of the WSJ education task-force assume that the social and moral responsibility for the public education system rests solely with government and business. No teacher, parent or student is on the task-force.  The only references to teachers, parents and students are as distant, problem-persons to be “rewarded”, “denied”, “removed”, “educated about consequences”, and “mobilized”. The overriding belief of the moderator and the task-force appears to be that government and business are wiser, more responsible and more innovative and productive than the single teacher, parent or student.

This is not true. Government and business are NOT wiser, more moral and more entrepreneurial that the single individual teacher, parent or student. The single individual is at least as, if not more so, wise, moral and entrepreneurial than government-regulated authorities and privately-owned markets. Systems, in modern times, have to be designed around trusting the individual, not to make the individual dependent on a system.

Looking through the lens of Ms. Ostrom’s research that small & local is wisest, more moral and more protective and entreprneurial, we see that the WSJ moderator and task-force solutions assume “the tragedy of the commons”. Our current education system thinking assumes that the single, individual teacher, parent or student are lazy unless prodded with “high expectations” and matching rewards and punishments made up by distant authorities.

Applying Ms. Ostrom’s research, I invite the WSJ task-force to consider five alternative recommentations.

An Educated I N D I V I D U A L: The Top Five Alternative Recommendations

1. INDIVIDUALIZING EDUCATION IS OUR TOP PRIORITY. Given that 25 years of standardized. “outcomes-based” education has given the nation and business “alot of subprime … human capital”, “dismal graduation rates”, “teachers bailing out of the profession”, “parents frantic”, “student performance [that] pales next to competition abroad”, and “business [that] can’t find the talent it needs in the work force that our education system produces” let us stop and think about policies to support small, local enlightened associations of teachers, parents and students instead doubling down on more of this obviously failing strategy. If what’s working are small, “pockets of excellence” then let us create a system that encourages a network of many small pockets of excellence.

2. LOCAL COUNCILS OF ENLIGHTENED INDIVIDUALS. Invest resources in cultivating local wisdom, social responsibility and entrepreneurship.  The charter movement is a perfect example.  One law allowed for many flowers to bloom and then it began self-organzing.  The only hold-up is distant regulators creating bottle necks and stalling improvisation. When Districts start to support schools, rather than schools propping up Districts, change will be here.

3. CREATE EFFECTIVE SCHOOLS OF EDUCATION.  Invest in the input and you have to invest less in crying over the output. Schools of education need to tie research into children’s cognitive, emotional and physical development into how to teach and what to teach and when to teach it.  Working with the child, rather than against the child, will prove to be the magic bullet. Schools of education ought to connect with schools to create feedback loop of ongoing learning and experimentation between teacher education and teacher classroom experience.

4. TRANSFER OWNERSHIP OF EDUCATION FROM GOVERNMENT AND BUSINESS TO SCHOOLS OF EDUCATION & WORLD-CLASS CORPS OF TEACHING PROFESSIONALS. As long as distant authorities treat teachers, parents and students as threats to the shared intellectual commons, this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Business has demonstrated these last 25 years or so that flattening the governance and trusting in the brilliance of the individual makes the business smarter and faster and more fun.  And it makes the trusted person actually brighter! Instead of going backward and dreaming up more layers of regulation, let business ring the bell for a local, distributed network of entrepreneurial and self-organizing networks of teachers, parents and students linked up with universities.  Then we will be a collective, national “learning organization”.

5. INITIATIVE TO TELL THE EXTENDED PRE-NATAL – HIGH SCHOOL STORY OF ENLIGHTENED PARENTING. Get IDEO to think of a way to do this. Youtube, social networking, neighborhood meet-ups – Make “Parent For America” part of the “Teach for America” agenda — brainstorm, brainstorm … Get IDEO together with Po Bronson’ Nurture Shock, Waldorf early-childhood educators, others. Make if fascinating and entertaining like Annie Leonard’s “Story of Stuff”.

If government and business continues to make and recomment policies that empower distant authorities over empowering individual persons, we will not only not evolve as a social organism, we will go backwards. Witness this summer’s eruption of mental and emotionally-challenged town-hall meetings. From this point forward, we evolve one enlightened person at a time.  We get enlightened by being personally responsible, not just being “held accountable” with carrots and sticks by external and distant authorities.  The days of distant authorities getting between the wisdom of the local parent, child and teacher unit is over.

25 years of Big Standardization, Big Education Industry, Big Union Outcomes-Based Education, RIP.
25 years of Small, Local Personal Responsibility-Based Education, Hello.

J O A N . J A E C K E L and E R I C . U T N E Calling for the Transformation of Education Through Developmentally-Intelligent Design THE 4 TRENDS

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Guest Editorial Reprinted from GREEN MONEY JOURNAL winter08/09

In this issue we’re making the case that, society-wide, things are getting better because of four positive education macro-trends:
  • Holism
  • Inner Growth
  • Civil Society, and
  • The Learning Organization

Even our highly industrialized and regimented educational system which standardizes, alienates and instills helplessness in students, is being transformed into one that instead protects and nurtures children’s growing minds.

In our view, we’re not just at a crisis point; we’re at a threshold of opportunity.
There’s no one to blame, no good old days to go back to, nothing to fix or save. Why would we want to fix or save a Model T? The old educational paradigm was revolutionary in its time and today, not so much.
The 15 Inspired Educational Transformers in this special issue of GreenMoney Journal describe the first steps to a new, civilized educational paradigm-a shift away from systematically making children feel that there is something wrong with them towards a culture of developmentally intelligent learning.
We question the outdated industrial-age framing of education as a commodity-pretending that minds are empty vessels to be filled and measured, rather than fires to be ignited (see articles by Arthur Zajonc and Betty Staley).
The paradigm is shifting. New, flexible, self-organizing approaches to learning run less on rigidity and more on plasticity (like our “neuroplastic” brains say Linda Lantieri and Jane Healy). These new approaches can be recognized and evaluated without invoking “rigor” (as in “knuckle crunching,” “tough,” and “mortis”) Deborah Meier and Ingrid O’Brien suggest. Plasticizing experiences like the arts (Gayle Davis), nature (Richard Louv) and working with animals (William Crain) train our minds to think clearly and flexibly, while seeing with wondering eyes and compassionate hearts.
We noticed that the four positive education macro-trends correspond to the four positive cultural macro-trends which account for the Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) sector: being Green, socially responsible business, investment and philanthropy, meditation and contemplation (with neuro-scientifically proven benefits!), and conscientious individuals as a new sector, “the cultural sector” or “civil society.” The conscientious educator takes the social change lead (see articles by Ron Miller and Ocean Robbins).
A civilized educational system moves public education and private education to the next level of cooperation. We can cultivate people who weave originality, community, and service into civilization’s fabric from generation to generation, as Joan Almon so movingly describes. Like cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, generation-to-generation education doesn’t end with graduation. The developmentally intelligent educator is a cultural healer who first, does no harm, (see article by Deborah Meier), wastes no lives, and returns bright, loving and enterprising “nutrients” into the social soil. Let us step up with confidence and be like Betty Staley, Sonja Williams and Elizabeth Goodenough!
We gratefully acknowledge over a decade of support for whole childhood from Susan Kendall Newman/Paul Newman-Newman’s Own with gratitude.
Finally we thank you, Cliff and the GreenMoney Journal team for opening your pages and treasured readers to these views.
As the election is over and nation-building begins in America, please forward this issue to everyone you know and start a conversation!
Here at GreenMoney.com you will find an expanded online version of the special education issue including an exclusive article by Ocean Robbins, founder of Youth For Environmental Sanity (YES!).
- Joan Jaeckel and Eric Utne, Guest Editors
Joan Jaeckel is a thought-change activist for social transformation through intelligent human design. Email: joan.jaeckel@gmail.com and website: http://www.whole.org
Eric Utne founded the Utne Reader and is an educational innovator and social entrepreneur. Website: http://www.earthcouncils.org 
Dedication: 
This issue is dedicated to the Ten Civil Societarians who are exemplary friends of Childhood and Youth:
  1. Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone
  2. Van Jones, author of Green For All: Building a Green Collar Economy
  3. Dave Eggers, 826 Valencia
  4. Rachael Kessler, PassageWays Institute
  5. David Orr, Center for EcoLiteracy
  6. Deborah Solomon, Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE)
  7. Wayne Jennings, The International Association for Learning Alternatives
  8. Steve Bonchek, Harmony Education Center
  9. Craig Kielberger, O Ambassadors
  10. Sir Ken Robinson‘s TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

R I C H A R D . L O U V The Coming Wave of Natural Education Reform

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Reprinted from GREEN MONEY JOURNAL winter/08/09

Many of us are no longer willing to allow the growth of what, in Last Child in the Woods, I dubbed “nature-deficit disorder” – the psychological, physical and cognitive costs of human alienation from nature. During the past couple years, as I’ve spoken on this issue in the United States and other countries, I’ve been moved by the number of college students who come up to tell me that they’ve decided to change their career choice, that they’re now committed to bringing nature to the lives children (and adults) – including in education.
Environmental educators and others have worked for decades to reintroduce children to nature. But in recent years, too many school districts have turned inward, building windowless schools, banishing live animals from classrooms, and even dropping recess and field trips. But we are beginning to see progress. There have been a number of recent successes in the United States and elsewhere that may point to a cultural shift, reflecting a rapidly expanding grassroots children and nature movement – which has changed the tone of the public conversation. 
The nonprofit Children & Nature Network ( http://www.cnaturenet.org ), for which I now serve as chairman, has tracked and encouraged more than fifty regional campaigns that are helping reintroduce children to nature. These campaigns, often focused on children’s health, will offer added power to a nascent, overdue movement for what might be called natural school reform. Bucking the status quo, an increasing number of educators are committed to an approach that infuses education with direct experience, especially in nature – one that redefines the classroom. 
On September 18, the U.S. House of Representatives took a step in that direction, by voting to approve the No Child Left Inside Act of 2008. Approved by a bi-partisan vote of 293 to 109, the bill would require K-12 school systems to build environmental literacy, strengthen teacher training and provide federal grants to help schools pay for outdoor education. In coming months and years (whether or not the Senate version of the bill is approved) educators will be encouraged to return nature to the classroom – but the key to success will be if sufficient support comes to educators who take students beyond the classroom, into the rich environments of nearby nature: parks, farms, the woods and creeks and canyons adjacent to schools. 
This approach to education is not new, and the definitions and nomenclature of this educational 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. The basic idea is to use the surrounding community, including nature, as the preferred classroom. When it comes to reading skills, “the Holy Grail of education reform,” says researcher and educator David 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. Sponsored by many state departments of education, a 1998 study documented the enhanced school achievement of youth who experience school curricula in which the environment is the principal organizer. 
More recently, factoring out other variables, studies of students in California and nationwide showed that schools that used outdoor classrooms and other forms of nature-based experiential education were associated with significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math. One recent study found that students in outdoor science programs improved their science testing scores by 27 percent. 
A nature-balanced life reduces many barriers to education, including stress and attention deficit. Researchers at the University of Illinois have shown that the greener a child’s everyday environment, the more manageable their symptoms of attention-deficit disorder. Teachers could also benefit from natural education reform. Canadian researchers found that teachers expressed renewed enthusiasm for teaching when they had time outdoors. In an era of increased teacher burnout, the impact of green schools and outdoor education on teachers should not be underestimated. 
One exciting development is the increasing popularity of nature preschools, where children learn to track wildlife even as they learn to read. Design approaches are central to the movement. “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity,” says Robin Moore, an international authority on natural school design, who heads the Natural Learning Initiative. New schools must be designed with nature in mind, and old schools can be refitted with playscapes that incorporate nature into the central design principle. Another approach is the use of nature preserves by environment-based schools, or the inclusion of established farms and ranches as part of these “new schoolyards.” Norway’s departments of Education and Agriculture support partnerships between educators and farmers to revamp school curriculum and to provide more direct outdoor experience and participation in practical tasks. 
Ultimately, K-12 education cannot be transformed without reforming higher education – which sets many of the standards and expectations for primary and secondary education. In higher education, greater public knowledge about the generational nature gap should educate policy-makers to require universities to teach the fundamentals of natural history, which have been displaced in recent decades, especially at research universities, by a patent-or-perish emphasis on microbiology and genetic engineering. Higher education can also more consciously engage students as researchers on topics involving the relationship between children and nature, and the opportunities that will emerge as nature takes a more central role in people’s lives. 
In coming decades, environmental challenges will require fundamental changes in our lives and institutions, including the reintroduction of nature to the classroom and the young to the natural world. 
Article by Richard Louv, Writer 

Richard Louv is chairman of the Children & Nature Network and the author of seven books, including his most recent, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin). He is the recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal, and has served as an adviser to the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award program, is a member of the Citistates Group, appears often on national radio and television programs, and speaks frequently in the United States and overseas. 
Useful links for this article include: 

o The Children & Nature network: http://www.childrenandnature.org 
o Related research and studies: http://www.childrenandnature.org/research/Intro 
o New York Times article: Why are Schools Designed Like Prisons? http://www.childrenandnature.org/news/detail/why_are_schools_designed_like_priso… 

E L I Z A B E T H . G O O D E N O U G H Secret Spaces of Childhood and the Pedagogy of Place

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Reprinted from GREEN MONEY JOURNAL winter08/09

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
If you drive around cities and suburbs in the U.S., you will notice that children no longer play much outside. As you observe streets devoid of children, your first assumption may be that they are at school or at parks competing in team sports. Gradually it dawns on you that as more green space is paved over, as inner cities are further neglected, as fear of strangers intensifies, children are relegated to worlds without sidewalks or main streets connecting them to a wider community of neighbors. At this point you ask, “Where do the children play?” 
In the last 30 years the range of independent mobility for North American 12-year-olds has shriveled from one mile to 550 yards. Children have less privacy, yet paradoxically, more access to media. Current statistics indicate more hours are spent watching screens than attending school. Should we worry that growing up minimally engaged with plants and animals might prove dangerous to nature itself? 
The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre’s report on the well being of children indicated that of 21 wealthy nations in 2007, the United States was rated at the bottom of the list and came in last or next to last on three of six criteria–health and safety, behaviors and risks, and family and peer relationships. These statistics suggest that childhood itself is increasingly under fire as a worldwide demographic, cultural invention, and 
social institution. Grim as the figures are, they only hint at the reality of growing up in a society disrupted by violence, driven by competition, and divorced from nature. As Brian Sutton-Smith, play specialist, has put it, “the opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” 
How educators use and create spaces for children determines how the next generation experiences reality. Yet, in a world of high stakes testing, we may be losing not just recess but also those psychic locales where imagination and confidence can grow. That’s why we need collaborative pedagogies to look at where children and adults learn most enjoyably. Certainly practices of self-discovery where learning and play meld deserve to be treated with as much care by educators and families as the cultivation of literacy and mastery of math. Yet we know little, it seems, about the vitality recreation draws from sites of natural beauty. 
Starting as a question about how the young process their own ecology, Secret Spaces of Childhood developed in 1998 at the University of Michigan as an investigation of cultural memory. Campus-community partnerships, coordinated by Residential College students, grew from our study of children’s literature. Curious about the power of fantasies like “Crusoe’s Island” or the “Secret Garden” to shape our core identities, I wondered how children’s stories change over time, and how images like Hogwarts or Tarbeach fashion feelings within society. 
A two-day conference enabled a thousand children to celebrate Nichols Arboretum with performances and story telling. At the Residential College, architects, children’s authors, educators, storytellers, and artists discussed issues of environmental justice and the need to preserve sanctuaries for free play. Walls displayed illustrations from children’s books. Participants shared a sense of having been profoundly shaped by hideouts of their own making. Even the sole public zone in the exhibition, Gerald McDermott’s charcoal drawing of a medieval winding stone staircase at the Detroit Institute of Arts, conjured a “pathway to the infinite”: “We all have secret spaces…where we separate ourselves from the rest of the world, and incubate. We imagine ourselves into existence.” 
Recently The Poetry of Everyday Life has provided me tools to plan and even document community-engaged scholarship, observing how and where children make their own structures, whether in shelter building, collage, poetry, or drawing. Seminar participants seek to understand the role of children’s voices in public and city life; to develop teaching, collaboration and leadership skills in school settings; to experience poetry as an imaginative response to local geography such as the Huron River watershed. Partnering with local children and their teachers, we embark on field trips, journal, write poems and make art about place-making, organize a poetry reading, and mount an exhibition at the Ann Arbor Public Library. 
Some explore the role of forts; others photograph and map schoolyards, theme parks, and designated “kid spaces” as these reflect class backgrounds and assumptions about the nature and needs of elementary school children. Or they examine and compare specialized curricula related to local organizations like Retired Police Horse Adoption, The Greening of Detroit, and Hands On Museum. Some document contested land use or a problem that prevents playing in the neighborhood (application of pesticide, recent crime, lack of access). 
The project produced mini-documentaries about children’s “places of special meaning” and how “ordinary” spaces often inspire stories. It filmed children’s author Christopher Paul Curtis (The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963) in his hometown Flint speaking with schoolchildren about their experiences of play and place. Such sharing can help us look around and find common ground with others. Some of these children helped inspire Where Do the Children Play? airing on American Public Television through 2010 (http://www.michigantelevision.org/childrenplay ). As William Cronon puts it, “To protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads.” 
Article by Elizabeth Goodenough, Scholar and Activist in Children’s Studies 
Dr. Elizabeth Goodenough of the University of Michigan helped produce “Where Do the Children Play?” a project that encompasses an award-winning PBS documentary written and directed by award-winning filmmakers Christopher Cook and Mark Harris for Michigan Television, a three-volume anthology, and an outreach campaign to promote outdoor play via community conversations throughout the U.S. Located at the Ginsberg Center in Ann Arbor, WDCP? builds partnerships with organizations such as the Alliance for Childhood, the National Wildlife Federation, and Children & Nature Network. In addition to A Place for Play: A Companion Volume to WDCP?, Goodenough’s books include Infant Tongues (1994), Secret Spaces of Childhood (2003), and Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (2008).