School in and with nature. The educational revolution of the 21st century
Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon, ESF humanities, Pédagogies collection, February 2022
"To young Isabelle, who, in Jean Giraudoux's play Intermezzo (1933), decided to hold class outside, the inspector explains learnedly that "the ceiling, in teaching, must be understood in such a way as to highlight the size of the adult in relation to the child. A teacher who adopts the outdoors admits that he is smaller than a tree, less corpulent than an ox, less mobile than a bee; he thus sacrifices the best proof of his dignity." However, Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon show us precisely the opposite here: teaching in nature, bringing nature into the school, accompanying students in their discovery of the outside world, putting them in a position to observe and describe it, to make hypotheses and experiment, to understand the deep solidarity that unites humans and the planet, is to give today's teachers an essential mission: to enable the next generation to give their future a future.