Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

nature, the potential to meet human needs, and how all things are interlaced. A well-rounded education would mean learning the basics, to become part of a society that cherished nature while at the same time contributing to the well-being of mankind. Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?

Public education is enamored of, even mesmerized by, what might be called silicon faith: a myopic focus on high technology as salvation. In 2001, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization in College Park, Maryland, released “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood,” a report supported by more than eighty-five experts in neurology, psychiatry, and education, including Diane Ravitch, former U.S. assistant secretary of education; Marilyn Benoit, president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and primate researcher Jane Goodall. “Fool’s Gold” charged that thirty years of research on educational technology had produced just one clear link between computers and children’s learning. (On some standardized tests, “drill-and-practice programs appear to improve scores modestly—though not as much or as cheaply as one-on-one tutoring.”) The co-signers of the “Fool’s Gold” report went so far as to call for a moratorium on computer use in early childhood education, until the U.S. surgeon general can ascertain whether computers are hazardous to the health of young children. The public response was surprising. After “Fool’s Gold” was released, MSNBC conducted an online poll of subscribers, asking if they supported such a moratorium. Of three thousand people who answered, 51 percent agreed. And these were Internet users.

The problem with computers isn’t computers—they’re just tools; the problem is that overdependence on them displaces other sources of education, from the arts to nature. As we pour money and attention into educational electronics, we allow less fashionable but more effective tools to atrophy. Here’s one example: We know for a fact that the arts stimulate learning. A 1995 analysis by the College Board showed that students who studied the arts for more than four years scored forty-four points higher on the math portion and fifty-nine points higher on the verbal section of the SAT. Nonetheless, over the past decade, one-third of the nation’s public-school music programs were dropped. During the same period, annual spending on school technology tripled, to $6.2 billion. Between early 1999 and September 2001, educational technology attracted nearly $1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company. One software company now targets babies as young as one day old. Meanwhile, many public school districts continue to shortchange the arts. Even more districts fail to offer anything approaching experiential, environment-based, or place-based education. Some legislators suggest that the public must choose between classroom-based environmental education and experiential education beyond the classroom walls. That should be viewed as a false choice; both deserve more support. Proponents of an arts revival in schools offer a good model for action. In some districts, these proponents have successfully argued that the arts and music stimulate learning in math and science, and this reasoning has helped that cause. Similarly, an argument can now be made that nature education stimulates cognitive learning and creativity, and reduces attention deficit.

Nonetheless, the school district in my own county—the sixth-largest district in America—illustrates the more common lack of synchronicity. San Diego County, larger in size and population than some states, is an ecological and sociological microcosm of America. It is, in fact, a place with more endangered and threatened species than any other county in the continental United States. The United Nations declared it one of the Earth’s twenty-five “hot spots” of bio-diversity. Yet, as of this writing, not one of the forty-three school districts within this county offers a single elective course in local flora and fauna. A few volunteers, including docents from the local Natural History Museum, do what they can. Across the nation, such neglect is the norm.

The Death of Natural History

Though current waves of school reform are less than nature-friendly, individual teachers—with help from parents, natural history museum docents, and other volunteers—can do much to improve the situation without organized, official sanction. To be truly effective, however, we must go beyond the dedication of individual teachers and volunteers to question the assumptions and context of the gap between students and nature. We should do everything we can to encourage the incipient movement of what is sometimes called “experiential education.” We should also challenge some of the driving forces behind our current approach to nature, including a loss of respect for nature and the death of natural history in higher education.

A few years ago, I sat in the cluttered office of Robert Stebbins, professor emeritus at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He grew up ranging through California’s Santa Monica Mountains, where he learned to cup his hands around his mouth and “call in the owls.” For him, nature was still magical. For more than twenty years, Stebbins’s reference work, A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, which he wrote and illustrated, has remained the undisputed bible of herpetology, and inspired countless youngsters to chase snakes. To Stebbins, our relationship with nature has been undermined by a shift in values.

For a decade, he and his students drove to the California desert to record animal tracks in areas frequented by all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs. Stebbins discovered that 90 percent of invertebrate animal life—insects, spiders, and other arthropods—had been destroyed in the ATV-scarred desert areas. While I spoke with him, he dropped scores of slides into an old viewer. “Look,” he said. “Ten years of before-and-after photos.” Grooves and slashes, tracks that will remain for centuries. Desert crust ripped up by rubber treads, great clouds of dirt rising high into the atmosphere; a gunshot desert tortoise, with a single tire track cracking