Nicolette Sowder home-schools her two daughters and two nieces at her family farm near Cedar Springs, Mich.Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
By Nicolette Sowder
Ms. Sowder is the creator of Wildschooling.
Throughout
the first five years of my older daughter’s life, I watched her dance
through the clover, climb trees, puddle jump and play her way through
the day. As she stood on the threshold to kindergarten, I pictured her
stuck inside at a desk, cut off from her relationship to the wild, and
my stomach sank. I believe that school is for nurturing children’s
innate talents and helping them figure out where those gifts,
necessarily diverse, fit in the whole. The school system, by contrast,
tends to produce a monoculture. Despite the heroic efforts of many
thoughtful, caring teachers, public school mostly prepares children to
be obedient workers and fails millions of students who don’t fit the
mold.
So I developed a method called
Wildschooling, a form of home-schooling that celebrates an
interconnected, relational view of nature, which I now practice with my
two daughters and two nieces on our farm near Cedar Springs, Mich. We’re
hardly the first people to approach education this way; numerous
earth-centered cultures, such as the Anishinabe of our region, and
Richard Louv, the author of “Last Child in the Woods,” are just a few important influences.
Wildschooling looks different for each family. If you browse the Facebook group I started six years ago, 90,000 members strong now, there are single parents
and city dwellers practicing it all over the world. And while it’s a
privilege to undertake any form of home-schooling, Wildschooling does
not require a rural setting or big backyard. As long as you’ve got a
tree on your block or a community garden nearby, you can Wildschool.
Magnolia Sowder plays on hay bales during a day of Wildschooling.Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
From left, Serafina Blanco-Bond, Magnolia Sowder and Vivienne Blanco-Bond.Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
For
us, a typical day begins by going outside and getting some sunshine on
our faces. Then we orient ourselves to where we are in the moon cycle
and the solar calendar. This helps us stay anchored and know where we
are in the big picture. While most children are going back to school
right now, we’ve been in session since the winter solstice. As the days
grow longer, so does our knowledge. Once we pass the summer solstice and
the light begins to fade, we start reviewing our lessons.
Sometimes,
people assume that Wildschooling means there are no lessons or that it
means letting your children run aimlessly through the woods. My girls do
plenty of running around — usually after lunch for about two hours —
but in the mornings, we do a standard math curriculum and practice our
music. Right now we are learning to sing and to play piano and violin.
Violin is taught by a fellow home-schooler who is 13.
After
math and music, we do our farm chores, like gathering eggs and
harvesting the never-ending supply of zucchini from the garden. We
recently had to build a new chicken coop, which became a lesson on how
to use graph paper to draft something to scale. Once you start
approaching learning this way, you realize life is the curriculum. If we
need to write a letter to someone, for example, we’ll learn how to
write a letter. If the frogs are singing, we’ll learn about frogs.
Exploring a swamp on the Sowder property at a gathering with other nearby home-schooled children.Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
When
children start Wildschooling, I’ve noticed that their sense of
themselves transforms. They begin to see themselves as the individuals
they are — radically themselves and essential to the whole. They see
that nature is lopsided, that nature has specialties. It’s a very
different situation from sitting in a classroom and comparing yourself
with other humans.
And while it may seem unusual, at first, to design school around nature, research
attests to the benefits: Nature-based learning leads to academic,
cognitive, psychological and social gains, even when factors like class
are controlled for. Interestingly, the mechanism at play is not entirely
understood, although some researchers have postulated that
nature-relatedness, or connection to nature, may be a basic human need.
At the same time, we’re only just beginning to understand the downsides of traditional schooling. This year, a major study
following nearly 3,000 low-income children in Tennessee found that
students who had gone to pre-K scored worse in third grade than those
who had not. By the end of sixth grade, as NPR reported,
the students who had gone to pre-K “had lower test scores, were more
likely to be in special education and were more likely to get into
trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions.”
Wildschooling does not require a rural setting or big backyard.Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
How
can this be? According to Dale Farran, one of the lead researchers,
children in formal pre-K, who may be required to line up to go to the
bathroom or walk silently through the halls, are possibly developing an
“allergic reaction” to control, which could explain the discipline
problems seen later in life. By contrast, Dr. Farran noted, wealthier
families tend to pick play-based preschool programs that emphasize
creativity, movement and nature.
In a
healthy society, all children should have access to this kind of
education. When I watch how active my kids are, my heart hurts to think
of how little they would be able to move if they were in school. Or how
quiet they would have to be. My 10-year-old daughter, in particular,
loves to sing. She sings in the morning, she sings in the afternoon, she
sings at night. She loves to memorize songs and is even beginning to
write them. It’s spontaneous; it makes her who she is. If she were in
school, she would have to consciously repress this part of herself.
Back
when my husband and I bought our farm, we thought we were going to heal
the land by applying the principles of regenerative agriculture. But
every time my children get upset and we walk out to their favorite tree
to calm down, I realize the land is healing us more than we are healing
it. My girls can learn math, and they can learn violin. But nothing will
ever matter more than their being able to take responsibility for their
lives and feeling as if they are part of something bigger than
themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment