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This summer, Postmedia’s Tom Spears brings you the often offbeat science behind the season that calls us to go outdoors. It’s a series we call the Science of Summer. As the school year approaches, today’s column asks why we teach kids the natural world is hopeless.
Last spring I helped some Grade 5 students in Burlington with an environmental studies project and was not surprised at all to find their questions on the gloomy side.
One girl wanted to know about the importance of conserving our scarce water resources. A boy asked me what the government is doing to protect endangered beavers.
I gently suggested to the girl that Burlington, on Lake Ontario, has quite a lot of water and that when she uses water in her home, it mostly ends up back in the lake. I told the boy that beavers aren’t endangered (though I glossed over the fact that some levels of government trap them and blow up their dams.)
But as a longtime science and environment reporter I’ve learned what to expect from environmental lessons taught to children: The theme is that humans are eradicating nature, animals are dying, the water and air are polluted, and the wilderness is a frail, delicate shadow of its former self.
Which is the wrong approach entirely.
If we want the next generation to grow up protecting their environment, the first step is to show them that it’s worth saving. Let’s let them chase frogs, float sticks down the local creek, climb trees, get dirty, go to one of the many beaches or to Gatineau Park.
And they need to do it without being preached at. No one learns to enjoy nature while having to memorize ways in which humans are destroying it.
Ontario’s Grade 7 science curriculum typifies the rather joyless approach to understanding nature. Students must learn to:
“3.1 demonstrate an understanding of an ecosystem (e.g., a log, a pond, a forest) as a system of interactions between living organisms and their environment, (and)
3.2 identify biotic and abiotic elements in an ecosystem, and describe the interactions between them.”
They must also “describe ways in which human activities and technologies alter balances and interactions in the environment (e.g., clear-cutting a forest, overusing motorized water vehicles, managing wolf-killings in Yukon).” There’s more, but it’s no more exciting.
I decided the best person to ask about environmental education is a practising expert.
Jeremy Kerr teaches biology at the University of Ottawa, has a research chair and does a lot of field work. As an insect expert, he has noticed that years of paper exercises in elementary and high school haven’t taught his students much.
“One thing that seems clear is that not one student coming out of the Ontario school system between kindergarten and Grade 12 will ever have handled a living organism outside the classroom. Or approximately none,” he told me.
“I bet you none of them will have touched a pollinator. There is nothing better for people than to come into contact with, and interact with, these organisms in a natural environment. It’s not like they’re terribly risky animals to deal with. We’re talking about butterflies here. Sending people out with nets and looking at some real wildlife, and understanding that one can intervene to turn these things around is a very useful lesson.”
His own children “are a little sensitized” to butterflies, which happens in a family where Dad studies them, “and one of the most delightful things in the spring for them is when they find their first one. … They come home from school and there are mourning cloaks all over the place but no one else is looking at them. They spot these things in little woodlots in their corner of their little suburban school and they are just delighted.”
A mourning cloak is a lovely, colourful butterfly, and never mind the gloomy name. It’s a deep, velvety maroon.
“Finding those things is easy and it’s useful,” Kerr says. “It puts people in touch with something other than the abstract.”
And he addresses the “nature is dying” dogma:
“That relentlessness is quite unhelpful. It gives people the feeling of hopelessness, which is more or less exactly the wrong thing to do. And also it is just wrong. Most of these problems are eminently fixable.”
Kerr isn’t alone in this. I’ve often chatted with prominent scientists about their childhoods because I always wonder where people come from. David Schindler, a freshwater expert at the University of Alberta, grew up using a homemade raft to explore the pond behind his home. David Phillips, the weather guru, would spend all summer outdoors in the woods around Windsor, Ont.
It’s not the formal lessons that will make our kids love the outdoors. They have to go there.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Last spring I helped some Grade 5 students in Burlington with an environmental studies project and was not surprised at all to find their questions on the gloomy side.
One girl wanted to know about the importance of conserving our scarce water resources. A boy asked me what the government is doing to protect endangered beavers.
I gently suggested to the girl that Burlington, on Lake Ontario, has quite a lot of water and that when she uses water in her home, it mostly ends up back in the lake. I told the boy that beavers aren’t endangered (though I glossed over the fact that some levels of government trap them and blow up their dams.)
But as a longtime science and environment reporter I’ve learned what to expect from environmental lessons taught to children: The theme is that humans are eradicating nature, animals are dying, the water and air are polluted, and the wilderness is a frail, delicate shadow of its former self.
Which is the wrong approach entirely.
If we want the next generation to grow up protecting their environment, the first step is to show them that it’s worth saving. Let’s let them chase frogs, float sticks down the local creek, climb trees, get dirty, go to one of the many beaches or to Gatineau Park.
And they need to do it without being preached at. No one learns to enjoy nature while having to memorize ways in which humans are destroying it.
Ontario’s Grade 7 science curriculum typifies the rather joyless approach to understanding nature. Students must learn to:
“3.1 demonstrate an understanding of an ecosystem (e.g., a log, a pond, a forest) as a system of interactions between living organisms and their environment, (and)
3.2 identify biotic and abiotic elements in an ecosystem, and describe the interactions between them.”
They must also “describe ways in which human activities and technologies alter balances and interactions in the environment (e.g., clear-cutting a forest, overusing motorized water vehicles, managing wolf-killings in Yukon).” There’s more, but it’s no more exciting.
I decided the best person to ask about environmental education is a practising expert.
Jeremy Kerr teaches biology at the University of Ottawa, has a research chair and does a lot of field work. As an insect expert, he has noticed that years of paper exercises in elementary and high school haven’t taught his students much.
“One thing that seems clear is that not one student coming out of the Ontario school system between kindergarten and Grade 12 will ever have handled a living organism outside the classroom. Or approximately none,” he told me.
“I bet you none of them will have touched a pollinator. There is nothing better for people than to come into contact with, and interact with, these organisms in a natural environment. It’s not like they’re terribly risky animals to deal with. We’re talking about butterflies here. Sending people out with nets and looking at some real wildlife, and understanding that one can intervene to turn these things around is a very useful lesson.”
His own children “are a little sensitized” to butterflies, which happens in a family where Dad studies them, “and one of the most delightful things in the spring for them is when they find their first one. … They come home from school and there are mourning cloaks all over the place but no one else is looking at them. They spot these things in little woodlots in their corner of their little suburban school and they are just delighted.”
A mourning cloak is a lovely, colourful butterfly, and never mind the gloomy name. It’s a deep, velvety maroon.
“Finding those things is easy and it’s useful,” Kerr says. “It puts people in touch with something other than the abstract.”
And he addresses the “nature is dying” dogma:
“That relentlessness is quite unhelpful. It gives people the feeling of hopelessness, which is more or less exactly the wrong thing to do. And also it is just wrong. Most of these problems are eminently fixable.”
Kerr isn’t alone in this. I’ve often chatted with prominent scientists about their childhoods because I always wonder where people come from. David Schindler, a freshwater expert at the University of Alberta, grew up using a homemade raft to explore the pond behind his home. David Phillips, the weather guru, would spend all summer outdoors in the woods around Windsor, Ont.
It’s not the formal lessons that will make our kids love the outdoors. They have to go there.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
