“If you are planning for a year, plant rice; if you are planning for ten years, plant trees; if you are planning for a century, educate your children.”
Confucius
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in outdoor classrooms. This is a welcome opportunity to (re)design schools with outdoor learning spaces for health and well-being, while bearing in mind a necessary renewal of the educational curriculum to accommodate creative responses to climate breakdown and the ecological crisis.
Accepting Feedback
If we accept the feedback we are currently receiving, everything from the rapid rise in NCDs (Non-Communicable Diseases such as allergies and autoimmune diseases, diabetes, respiratory disorders, obesity and cancers), along with mental health issues, life-threatening zoonotic and vector-born diseases, and the effects of climate breakdown, it is clear we find ourselves in the midst of a significant ecological crisis, a systemic biosphere crisis that has a considerable impact on our socio-economic organisation and in general our ability to thrive. A transition is inevitable whether we guide our way through it, or it is thrust upon us: business-as-usual is not an option.
When we accept the feedback, we arrive at the inevitable question: what type of future do we want for our children?
We all want a sustainable future for our children, one that guarantees them the conditions necessary for health and well-being, livelihoods and prosperity in a socio-economic system based on life-affirmative values. We need a vision of that sustainable future and the skills and knowledge to design our way towards that vision.
Can we really achieve that in an outdoor classroom?
Responding Creatively to Change
The future will need a different breed of designers, engineers, architects and city planners, those who have grasped the need to restore ecological function, the need for urban ecology, green corridors, green roofs, stormwater gardens and constructed wetlands that restore and rehydrate the land while recycling waste water into nutrients and averting floods. We will need retrofitting and greening to combat urban heat islands and habitat loss. It requires a vision of a future for conviviality in neighbourhoods, among human inhabitants who know enough about where their food comes from to support a system of local food production in which nutrients, water and other resources are recycled in the region through a bioregional circular economy.
The future will need a different breed of economists and politicians, builders and technicians, managers and producers, teachers and health care workers, consumers fully aware that a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ lies between the ecological boundaries and socio-economic parity, the dynamics of Doughnut Economics. This conceptual tool, devised by (former Oxfam) economist Kate Raworth, helps us visualise the ways in which humans can meet their needs equitably in the 21st century within the biophysical means of the planet. It requires a range of simple, creative and systems thinking skills that can all be learned in outdoor classrooms, along with an understanding of ecological functioning. These can be easily integrated into the curriculum. (https://doughnuteconomics.org/)
Where better to find the material for a revitalised education than in the outdoor classroom, in a school garden? And how much better for teachers too, spending more time out of doors where there is material directly to hand. School gardens are places that function on all educational levels from kindergarten through to tertiary, vocational and adult education, integrating theory and practice into more cognitive disciplines, life skills and local ecological knowledge through project-based participatory learning.
School gardens are also reference points for academic subjects on the curriculum too. Plants are the masters of organic chemistry and in the garden we also find physics and mathematics, fibonacci sequences and hyperbolic geometry, geology, hydrology, climatology and geography, the life sciences and all the ecological principles: symbiosis, embeddedness, diversity, regeneration, all wrapped up in co-existence.
Integration or Separation
Perhaps, the current pandemic is a good opportunity, therefore, to review our educational paradigms altogether. Rather than merely tinkering to achieve sustainability in a challenging post-virus economy, we can grasp the potential for radical interventions in a system that poorly serves the requirements of the present age and disadvantages too many children in the process. As the late creativity consultant and educationist Sir Kenneth Robinson pointed out so eloquently:
“The current system of education was designed and conceived in a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution…there is also built into it a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U)
That is to say, our educational paradigms are underpinned by an outmoded intellectual model of the mind that prioritises academic achievements and is driven by economic imperatives that are no longer current. Class, race and gender prejudices are implicit to the model. As Robinson also pointed out, “schools are organised along the lines of a factory churning out children in batches along a conveyor belt of standardised testing”. This is the Western model that has been exported across the globe.
As parents and teachers, many of us have come to appreciate the concept of the ‘outdoor classroom’, the benefits to children of fresh air and free movement, especially at the time of viruses and restrictions. Across the world for several decades the school garden movement has been growing steadily, proving itself good for children in mind and body, developing their social skills, combating Nature Deficit Disorder and providing healthy meals. School gardens are places were children learn to sing and dance with nature, the ecoliteracy they will need to restore biodiversity to functioning ecosystems and grow food under conditions challenged by climate breakdown. What better way can there be to engage children directly with life and to do it safely.
Roots and Relationships
There are new paradigm shifts taking place in the sciences endorsing concepts we have ignored because we have tended to regard Nature as the enemy. The metaphors we commonly use pertain to battling and controlling Nature rather than living and working with it. But new discoveries in microbiology and mycology alone are revolutionising the way we perceive the natural world and our place in it. The new scientific perspective that establishes the connections between all living species through microbes and fungi can help us restore the Earth systems and cycles to tackle climate breakdown.
It can also help us understand the recipe for healthy and prosperous human communities too. As plants put down roots to establish essential relationships with fungi and bacteria in the soil, we can learn that putting down our own roots and building relationships in the local community makes sense. The outdoor classroom is the obvious place to get our young people engaged with this scientific revolution, as well as the metaphors it engenders. It is the place to start the reconnection to Nature that is so beneficial for well-being. It is the place where the careers, communities and livelihoods of the future will be forged.