XXI National Parks the School of Nature
Why not each year send thousands of school-children through the National Parks? Mother Nature is the teacher of teachers, these Parks the greatest of schools and playgrounds. No other school is likely so to inspire children, so to give them vision and fire their imagination. Surely the children ought to have this extraordinary opportunity.
The percentage of children aroused and started to greatness by schools of prison-like policy is small indeed. The proper place for at least a part of every child’s schooling is the great outdoors. In our great National Parks we have an unrivaled outdoor school that is always open; in it is a library, a museum, a zoölogical garden, and a type of the wilderness frontier. In this school-children are brought into contact with actual things, and become personally acquainted with useful facts, instead of merely reading about them. No better surroundings can be devised for developing common sense.
Learning under such conditions is delightful, yet it is discipline—a discipline that develops, not mere drudgery that discourages. Education cannot be separated from enjoyment. “Let us live for our children,” said Froebel, the early exponent of the school of Nature. It is doubtful if we could do more for our young folk, for the nation, and for humanity than to have ample National Parks and opportunities for the children to enjoy them.
If each boy or girl—or any traveler—were to follow a particular line of nature-study during vacations, and give most of his time to one species of tree, flower, bird, or to the characteristic scenic feature of the region visited, each would return with a new and pleasant resource, and would have something definite and worth while to report to his friends.
One of the greatest inheritances of each individual is imagination. The child instinctively believes in fairies. Unfortunately, the imagination too often is stifled and extinguished in childhood. It is imagination that “bodies forth the forms of things unknown,” and makes all objects interesting. It lights the path of education and throws changing color and romance over every act and scene in life. It gives a magic spell to existence. This matchless torch may be set blazing by a visit to the wonderland of a National Park where wilderness is king—where the fairies live.
Often, the chief incentive that starts a child toward the acquiring of an education is interest in this fairyland of Nature. Interest is the highroad to education. Interest the mind and it will grow like a garden. The National Parks have, through this fact, an educational value which entitles them to be ranked among the strongest potential forces of our pedagogical system.
I have never known any one who had enjoyed the pleasure that comes from even a little knowledge of natural history to sink into the empty-headed pastime of trying to see crude forms in Nature’s story-book. Usually, an individual given to this, when on an outing, is a bore to his companions. I simply cannot understand how people find pleasure in trying to discover animal forms, or various zoölogical figures, in the geological formations of the mountains, while the beholders are in the midst of a thousand objects of real interest. Such an exercise may be called humbug imagination.
Playing in the outdoors—especially when there is intimate association with birds and flowers, trees and waterfalls, mountains and storms—is one of the best ways of training the senses. The study of geology and glaciology, of the manners and customs of the beaver and the bear, gives physical and mental and spiritual development of the best possible kind. The outdoors gives originality and individuality, and develops that master quality called the creative faculty, with which usually are found associated courage and wholesome self-reliance.
Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, says:—
The best part of all human knowledge has come by exact and studied observation made through the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The most important part of education has always been the training of the senses through which that best part of knowledge comes. This training has two precious results in the individual besides the faculty of accurate observation—one the acquisition of some sort of skill, the other the habit of careful reflection and measured reasoning which results in precise statement and record.
The pioneer men and women, and the children of pioneers, had few books, but they were wide-awake people and made excellent neighbors. Scores of great men and women with character as well as intelligence have known little of books, but they had the ability to think—they had individuality. They had courage and kindness.
Mother Nature is ever ready to train the growing child. By using our wonderful National Parks for schools, we may give the boys and girls of to-day even better nature training than the pioneers received from their environment. Huxley says, “Knowledge gained at second hand from books or hearsay is infinitely inferior in quality to knowledge gained at first hand by direct observation and experience with Nature.”
Many of the noblest pages of history were made by grand men and women whom Nature inspired. A poet says that all grand and heroic deeds were conceived in the open air. A nation composed of park-using people is prepared for the emergencies of war and also for the finer achievements of peace. Park life will keep the nation young.
Some of our thoughtful people are saying, “Better playgrounds without schools than schools without playgrounds.” The Parks used as a part of the school system should develop, enrich, and equip with happy, helpful material the growing mind of man.
In “The Training of the Human Plant,” Luther Burbank says:—
Any form of education which leaves one less able to meet every-day emergencies and occurrences is unbalanced and vicious, and will lead any people to destruction.
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, waterbugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome.
A fragrant beehive or a plump, healthy hornet’s nest in good running order often become object lessons of some importance. The inhabitants can give the child pointed lessons in punctuation, as well as caution and some of the limitations as well as the grand possibilities of life; and by even a brief experience with a good patch of healthy nettles, the same lesson will be still further impressed upon them. And thus by each new experience with homely natural objects the child learns self-respect and also to respect the objects and forces which must be met.
The wild gardens of Nature are the best kindergartens. The child who breathes the pure air among the pines, and plays among the birds and flowers, has the greatest of advantages. The child stirred with ideal hopes to-day will create nobly to-morrow. Children from Nature’s Book and School stand highest in the examinations of life and carry life’s richest treasures: health, individuality, sincerity, wholesome self-reliance, and efficiency. Touched with nature, they are natural and, like Tiny Tim, they love everybody. Nature wins the heart of childhood. Children playing and dreaming in outdoor fairylands make one of the sweetest, dearest stories lived or learned on Nature’s loving breast.
One of the best lessons gained from the wholesome atmosphere of the Parks is the duty of preserving natural beauties. We need Parks to prevent the extermination of our friends the wild flowers. A few years ago the following simple appeal for the wild flowers was written for me by Maud Gardner Odel:—
What will you with our bodies,
Rude Ravishers of flowers,
Despoiler of our loveliness
To please your idle hours?
The life you pluck so gayly
Will perish in a day;
The form you praise so lightly,
Turn swiftly to decay;
But leave us on our hillside
With wind and bird and bee,
Insure us our inheritance
Of immortality,—
Your sons shall know our fragrance,
Your daughters feel our charm.
Oh, Friend of Future Ages,
Do not the Wild Flowers harm!
Columbine,
Gentian,
Iris, and Others.
Photographs made in National Parks could be used in homes, schools, hotels, etc.; they might well displace many of the pictures now in use. These photographs should embrace the grander scenes and the lovelier landscapes. Among the subjects handled would be the Big Trees, Yellowstone Falls, Yosemite Falls, the Grand Cañon, wild flowers and glaciers on Mount Rainier, the lakes in Glacier National Park, timber-line in the Rocky Mountain National Park, Crater Lake, and the ruins in the Mesa Verde. Among the animals pictured would be the grizzly bear, the mountain sheep, the mountain goat, the antelope, and the beaver; among the birds, the water-ouzel, the solitaire, the cañon wren, the eagle, the hummingbird, and the ptarmigan.
We need to know our country. Purposeful travel is educational. Our National Parks should stimulate travel, and a trip to them is an educational advantage to any one making it. One can hardly be especially interested in any single feature of these Parks without also becoming acquainted with others.
Each year every city should honor itself by sending a number of individuals to study one or more of these Parks. Each school should send its brightest pupil; chambers of commerce might send representatives; women’s clubs, D.A.R. organizations, and even the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. might well be represented in such a delegation. This custom would give us nation-wide knowledge and sympathy.
It appears impossible to exaggerate the importance of knowing our wilderness lands—the frontier of yesterday.
During all the years—the long centuries between cave and cottage—our good ancestors ever traveled among Nature’s inspiring pictured scenes. With interest and with awe they watched the silent movements of the clouds across the sky; they heard with speechless wonder the mysterious echo that lived and mimicked in the viewless air; they puzzled over the strange, invisible wind that shook the excited trees and whispered in the rustling grass. They saw the wondrous sunrise; the light of day; the darkness; the fireflies in the forest; the lonely, changing moon. They heard the echoing crash of thunder. Lightning,—the branched golden river in the cloud mountains of the sky,—the clouds themselves, and the silken rainbow, were woven into beautiful myths. Thus, through changing seasons and the passing years, these splendid facts and fancies in Mother Nature’s school fired the imagination with poetic wonder-tales and built the brain for our restless, triumphant race. The pathway to the Heroic Age lies out with Nature.