Looking and Seeing
Each year academics at Oxford University ask first year Biology undergraduates to name any five species in each of five taxonomic groups (birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers) found wild in the British Isles. Let me repeat that: Biology students at Oxford need to name just five examples of British birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, this fascinating article gives us the answer. Only 56% of the students could name five species of birds, 54% five species of mammals, 25% five species of wildflowers, 24% five species of trees, and 13% five species of butterflies. These are astonishingly low percentages for science undergraduates at one of the best universities in the world.
Of course, these undergrads are not alone. Many people have written the increase in Nature-Deficit Disorder, as Richard Louv calls it, including Louv himself in the highly readable Last Child in the Woods.
So what can we do to buck the trend?
Louv himself makes various suggestions, but, for the moment, I want to look at the article I mentioned above in which the Oxford academics pointed out that “overall, parents and/or grandparents were highly significant positive influences on student total NHK [natural history knowledge] scores.”
By contrast, they “found no significant contribution of teachers, either in a formal … or informal … capacity towards the total NHK score of students. Indeed, in the former case, students who listed formal education as a source of knowledge did slightly worse than those who did not.”
Now, I wouldn’t want to push this point too far, but the importance of family and the relative unimportance of teachers is surely a striking fact.
Charlotte Mason would not have been surprised. Writing in her classic book, Home Education, over a hundred years ago, she argued that “in this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air.”
(It’s quite a thought that the late 19th century was a “time of extraordinary pressure.” I wonder what she would have made of the early 21st century?)
But Charlotte Mason did not stop there. This is what she wrote in response to an imagined objection: “I make a point, says a judicious mother, of sending my children out, weather permitting, for an hour in the winter, and two hours a day in the summer months. That is well; but it is not enough. In the first place, do not send them; if it is anyway possible, take them.”
Rachel Carson, writing over fifty years later, said much the same thing, arguing that a child’s sense of wonder requires “the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”
What Charlotte Mason and Rachel Carson both suggest, in other words, is that children need our time, not simply more lessons. Time to explore. Time to explore outdoors. Time to explore together.
Families can explore together in all sorts of different ways, of course, but I want to suggest that nature journalling can be a particularly effective way of rediscovering “the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” For a start, journalling slows us down. We begin to look and so we start to see. Presumably those Oxford undergraduates had all come across robins, thrushes, sparrows, wrens, magpies, foxes, rabbits etc, but somehow they hadn’t really seen them.
The importance of both looking and seeing was brought home to me recently when I spent some time in Kurt Jackson’s latest exhibition at Southampton Art Gallery. His paintings also gave me all sorts of ideas for how I might develop my own, my children’s, and my students’ journalling skills.
Take this picture, for instance:
What I love about this is the simplicity of the conception. There is so much to see even while waiting for a train and you don’t need an artist’s canvas on which to record your observations. A rail ticket will do just as well.
Here’s a similar idea revolving round a quite different central image:
In this case, Jackson hasn’t painted a great deal. What is often said about modern art is perhaps true here: I could do that! And so could my children. Perhaps not as well as Jackson, but we can certainly take inspiration from his picture.
Here’s something slightly different, this time focusing on the biodiversity of one stretch of coastline:
And here’s a close up of the labels you can see on the shoreline:
There is more to this seascape than initially meets the eye.
And, finally, here’s the picture I started with. We’ve all seen an oak but few of us have seen what Jackson saw or taken the time to record it:
So, where do we start? I would suggest right outside our front or back doors. Can we identify the plants growing in our gardens? Or along our streets? Or at our nearest railway stations? As Kurt Jackson has shown, there’s more than enough on our doorsteps to keep our families occupied for some time.
If you want to find out more about Kurt Jackson’s work, click here. Or, if you’d prefer to find out about more conventional nature journalling, I can heartily recommend Clare Walker Leslie’s Keeping a Nature Journal.