Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
(Huston 1952)
It is common in modern America for people to think that what is natural is good for us. Many people try to eat ‘natural’ food, use ‘natural’ products, and whenever possible get ‘back to nature.’ In the field of education, the question of whether and to what extent a natural approach is appropriate has been debated for over two hundred years, and continues today. For example, early childhood educators tend to stress the importance of teaching what is ‘developmentally appropriate’ to the child, even to the point of withholding formal work on basic skills such as letter and number practice. On the other hand, many parents fret over whether their child is learning enough, which accounts for the huge market in ‘kindergarten-readiness’ and other home-study materials, all of which involve attempting to push the child ahead, and betray a lack of faith in the ‘nature knows best approach.’ In my own field, language teaching, a number of – especially commercial – enterprises have made a name for themselves by claiming to have students learn a language ‘they way you learned your first language,’ a notion that has become discredited by psycholinguistic research. And throughout the whole educational enterprise, there is an attempt to align teaching and learning with ideas about the way people learn naturally, such as learning by doing or experiential education, or with theories about how individuals learn, such as multiple intelligences and neurolinguistic programming. By examining where ideas about nature in education came from and how they developed, we can better understand their manifestations in today’s educational world, and to form a clearer judgment about whether we should embrace a natural approach in education, or to ‘rise above’ nature in educational practice.
One of the earliest and most influential thinkers to address nature in education is Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), who, in his book Emile proposed a ‘negative education’ in which the teacher does as little as possible to corrupt the innocent child with teaching. Rousseau was a romantic who glorified nature, abhorred organized religion, believed that society corrupted man, and idealized the innocence of childhood. Education, for Rousseau, does for children what cultivation does for plants, and “his entire philosophy rests upon this comparison of plants and children.” (Postman 1995 p.174) This metaphor, explicitly propounded by Rousseau, continued in the thinking of later educational thinkers. Rousseau, though, was the one who took this idea to its greatest extreme in his prescription for teaching. In his view, educating the child involved “letting the original benign nature of the child “unfold.”” (Hillesheim and Merrill 1971 p. 24) This meant that the teacher should withdraw and as much as possible let the child learn for himself (Power 1970 p. 478) allowing the mind to be “left undisturbed till its faculties have developed.” (Rousseau 1762 p. 29) For Rousseau, this meant withholding vocabulary, books, and correction, among other things.
As a romantic, Rousseau was part of a movement that glorified nature as a phenomenon ‘out there.’ Much romantic poetry, painting, and music depicted the great outdoors, with its mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, powerful storms and bucolic scenes. Rousseau’s love of nature and antipathy toward civilization led him to recommend isolating the child from society and raising him in a rural environment in which he could learn by experience from nature. Rousseau’s examples of such experiential learning include the planting and cultivation of beans in a garden to teach a lesson about ownership, and having the child believe he is lost in a forest in order to discover from (bitter) experience how to find one’s way using the position of the sun.
If Rousseau’s recommendations seem extreme, we should remember that in the 18th century, man’s connection to nature was a Romantic idea and had little scientific basis. In later educational thinking, with the gradual development of psychological thinking, we see a shift from the external view of nature as teacher, toward an internalizing of nature (nature in man as opposed to man in nature), as well as a much more nuanced approach to nature’s and the human teacher’s respective roles than we find in Rousseau. In addition, Rousseau was not a teacher himself, and did not concern himself with the practicalities of his educational scheme. As Power states, “Rousseau was no schoolmaster and showed no interest in becoming one. He expounded theories; their application was left to others.” (Power 1970 p. 495) We should see his educational thinking as a source of ideas to be considered rather than as a teaching methodology to be implemented in its pure form.
Among those Rousseau influenced was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 – 1827), who became a source of educational advice and inspiration in his day, and was himself influential in American education. (Power 1970, p. 494) Having read Emile, Pestalozzi attempted to put Rousseau’s naturalistic principles into practice. He bought a farm in which he hoped to run a school, but, it failed, and he later stated that he had not been ready for the practical business of managing children’s education (Power 1970 p. 489) – testimony, perhaps, to the danger of relying on untested educational thinking such as Rousseau’s.
Nonetheless, as Reese (2005) reports, Pestalozzi wrote extensively about the power of nature, incorporating the elevation of the peasant woman and mother with nostalgia for the countryside. ( p.11) The farm incident and these writings suggest that Pestalozzi shared Rousseau’s passion for nature as external phenomenon, but it seems that as Pestalozzi became more experienced, his focus turned inward toward the mind of the child. As a teacher, he realized he could not leave the education of children to nature; he had to teach, and did, developing a methodology in which children engaged in oral repetition while engaged in other activities, as well as an approach to reading which emphasized the sounding out of combinations of syllables (Power 1970 p.491 - 2) By 1801, Pestalozzi could describe his wariness toward reliance on nature in education as follows:
Wherever you carelessly leave the earth to nature, it bears weeds and thistles.
Wherever you leave the education of your species to it, it goes not further than a
confused observation that is not adapted to your power of comprehension, nor to
that of your child, in the way that is needed for instruction. (Pestalozzi 1801 p. 44)
This was a clear rejection of Rousseau’s negative education. On the other hand, we see in Pestalozzi a concern with psychology and human development. He asserted that teaching should come at the correct stage of the child’s development, and not before:
Nature has enclosed man’s higher aptitudes as in a budding pearl; if you break
the shell before it opens on its own, you will find only a budding pearl. You
will have destroyed the treasure you should have preserved for your child.
(Pestalozzi 1951 p. 34)
Further, Pestalozzi attempted to align teaching with how he believed children learn naturally, through direct experience of objects to be analyzed according to their number, their form, and their name. (Power 1970 p. 492) He believed that reading should be subordinate to speaking, writing to drawing, the simple should precede the complex, and the familiar the unfamiliar. (Pestalozzi 1801 p. 39) In other words, though Pestalozzi shared Rousseau’s romantic captivation with external nature, he was first and foremost a teacher and observer of children, and we see in his thinking and practice an attempt to work with the child’s inner nature as opposed to merely trusting nature to do its work.
This idea was further developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel (1782 – 1852) inventor of the kindergarten, the name and concept of which continues the ‘child as plant’ metaphor introduced by Rousseau. Power sums up Froebel’s general educational philosophy as follows:
He believed that man grew much as plants and animals grow, with this
difference: Plants and animals develop according to a definite inner law
of their nature; man, being endowed with a mental nature, is able to shape
many of the elements of his own nature. (Power 1970 p. 513)
Like Pestalozzi, Froebel believed that there were distinct periods of development through which children passed, and that therefore “the method of instruction must be directed by the laws of development of the human mind as well as those of the subjects to be taught.” (Power 1970 p. 511) He strongly believed that children should come into contact with the world through play at the early stage, and that these ‘plays’ should proceed from simple to more complex: his plan was to conceive of, catalog, and prescribe the ‘plays’ which would best provide learning opportunities at each stage of development . Froebel shared the Romantics’ devotion to nature as teacher, making regular trips to the fields and forests with his pupils, though not allowing them free rein there, as Rousseau counseled (Power 1970 p. 514) Though his vision of nature was infused with the idea of a unity of man, nature, and God, to which people should be led through education, Froebel was a teacher, and his main influence lies in his practical ideas for the organization of learning through the kindergarten, an environment in which children could develop, learn and grow naturally. In Froebel we see a continuation of the move away from the Romantic ideal of nature as teacher, and an attempt at a more scientific approach to nature, arising from a growing recognition that education should be aligned with the child’s inner nature.
In the course of the 19th century, the work of two men was of key importance in fundamentally altering perceptions of the relationship between human beings and nature. Charles Darwin’s 1959 book On the Origin of Species provided a plausible mechanism – natural selection - by which evolution proceeds, erasing any line that humans had wished to draw between themselves and the rest of creation. William James’ book. Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, laid out in greater sophistication than ever before what was known about the workings of the human mind. As a result of this and other scientific work, the journey of nature from ‘out there’ to within was complete, nature was the object of scientific study, and on this basis John Dewey built his educational approach.
Dewey wanted to replace the formalistic, age-graded elementary school of the 19th century, and its rigid curriculum, with an approach that connected pupils back to life – not to nature, as with some of his predecessors, but to the life of society, or what he called “the social consciousness of the race.” (Dewey 1897 p. 233) For Dewey, external nature was an object of study among others, but had little role in the educational process itself, in stark contrast with Rousseau. Internal nature – that of the child – took precedence in Dewey’s thinking. “The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education,” he wrote, and therefore “education…must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits.” (ibid p. 234 – 235) Children follow a chronology of development, and their interests provide ‘leverage’ and ‘propulsion’ (Dewey 1902 p. 112) to be utilized by the observant and sympathetic teacher, who, far from simply leaving the children to learn and discover by themselves, brings the subject matter into alignment with the pupils’ interests. Teachers should not take subject matter in its raw form and attempt to insert it into their pupils’ minds; rather they should attempt to mediate the material, making it comprehensible and useable to the children at their stage of development. Dewey believed that the schools of his day were set up for pupils to be passive recipients of knowledge. Children, on the other hand, were active, and education needed to marshal this activity and “give it direction.” (Dewey 1915 p. 25) Thus Dewey’s approach focuses heavily on the psychological, ‘inner nature’ of the child. He was child-centered, but did not promote a ‘laissez-faire,’ do-nothing approach in the classroom which was associated with the worst excesses of the progressive, child-centered education movement, though he has been thus maligned by some who wish to see a return to a more ‘traditional’ educational approach.
I have done little justice to the complex and nuanced thinking of the educational philosophers I have discussed above, but I hope that I have shown that the question of nature in education has not been answered in a uniform way by those who have addressed it. A reliance purely on nature has never been found to be effective in education, and such an approach has not been advocated by anyone of influence except Rousseau – and even his writings are not consistent on this point. To characterize child-centered education as an approach which allows children to grow naturally while actively teaching them nothing would be to attack a straw man. Nevertheless, in pre-schools and kindergartens I have visited, I have noticed an element of ‘withholding’ until the child is deemed ready, accompanied by the view that it is the child him or herself who will make this readiness known. For example, in conversation with my child’s pre-school teacher, I asked about her approach to writing. She stated that writing is a voluntary activity in the school, and that it is always based on the child’s interests. She gave the example of my son building a structure out of blocks. If he child seemed ready, she would ask him to draw a picture of the structure, and then, if he was inclined, to label the picture. “It sounds a lot like Dewey,” I remarked. “I love Dewey,” she replied.
What I left unsaid in this conversation is that I spend an hour each weekend on letter, word, and number practice with my son. We rarely use objects; he completes worksheets and books that provide extensive drilling of the writing of letters, words, and numbers. For his part, he is enthusiastic (for now) about our ‘study time’ and is becoming proficient in the skills we have practiced. But it raises the question: is he doing well because he individually is developmentally ready for this practice, or am I causing him to ‘rise above’ his nature? More importantly, is there a place for imposing on children tasks which may seem to be slightly ahead of their developmental level, in order to ‘pull them up’ to the knowledge and skills we want them to master? If the latter, then what is our responsibility – to pull children up as early as possible in order to give them a good start in life, or to ‘let them be children’ and introduce these skills when they show the inclination?
The latter position concerns me. There is much evidence, for example, that starting to learn a second language early is advantageous, and that the ability to become fully proficient in a second language diminishes as a child grows older. Given that knowledge, should we wait until the child shows a ‘natural’ interest in learning another language (which could take a very long time, especially in a more culturally homogeneous environment), or do we put to use the knowledge provided by cognitive science and take the initiative to begin teaching the language without the child’s initial interest?
In his 1938 book, Experience and Education, John Dewey wrote:
The history of educational theory is marked by the opposition between the idea
that education is development from within and that it is formation from without;
that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of
overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired
under external pressure. (Dewey 1938 p. 248)
I see this potentially as a creative tension that could lead to innovative practices, and I read in Dewey not an attempt to impose unthinkingly the former view at the expense of the latter, but an effort to explore how to resolve the tension. He was not the easiest writer to make sense of, however, and his position is sometimes mischaracterized as being a representative of an extreme ‘development from within’ position. Unfortunately, questions like this can come to be seen as either-or positions, with theorists and practitioners dividing into camps that refuse to interact with each other. What I have tried to do in this essay is to demonstrate that influential thinkers who advocated a role for nature in education neither spoke with one voice, nor for the most part promoted a ‘hands-off’ approach in the classroom. It would perhaps help to move the debate forward in a constructive way if this were more widely understood.
References
Dewey, J. (1897). My Pedagogic Creed (extract), in Hildesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D., 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.
Dewey, J. (1902). The Child and the Curriculum, in The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum. New York, Dover, 2002.
Dewey, J. (1915). The School and Society, in The School and Society & Child & Curriculum New York, Dover, 2002.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education (extract), in Hildesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D., 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.
Hillesheim, J. W. and G. D. Merrill, Eds. (1971). Theory and Practice in the History of American Education. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.
Huston, J. (1952). The African Queen. USA.
Pestalozzi, J. H. (1801). How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (extract), in Hillesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D, 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.
Pestalozzi, J. H. (1951). The Education of Man. New York, Philosophical Library.
Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education. New York, Vintage Books.
Power, E. J. (1970). Main Currents in the History of Education. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Reese, W. J. (2005). America's Public Schools - from the common school to "No Child Left Behind". Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rousseau, J. J. (1762). Emile (extract) in Hillesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D. (Eds), 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.
