School in and with Nature: The Educational Revolution of the 21st Century
Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon, ESF Humanities, Pédagogies series, February 2022
“To young Isabelle, who, in Jean Giraudoux’s play *Intermezzo* (1933), decided to hold class outdoors, the inspector explains pedantically that ‘the ceiling, in teaching, must be understood in such a way as to highlight the adult’s size in relation to the child.’ A teacher who embraces the outdoors admits that he is smaller than a tree, less robust than an ox, less agile than a bee; he thus sacrifices the best proof of his dignity.” Yet Corine Martel and Sylvain Wagnon show us precisely the opposite here: teaching in nature, bringing nature into the school, guiding students in their discovery of the outside world, putting them in a position to observe and describe it, to form hypotheses and experiment, and to understand the deep interconnectedness that unites humans and the planet—this is what gives today’s teachers an essential mission: to enable the next generation to secure a future for itself.”