A school with no walls, no desks, and no cramming: Why outdoor lessons are gaining popularity in New Zealand

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Schools that have no walls, no bell rings and no exhausting discipline, where the director is not summoned to the director's office, where boring calculations and tasks are replaced by practical research, are gaining popularity in recent years, and even a pandemic cannot prevent this. The world is changing - so quickly that parents are forced to think about adjusting the educational program of their children, and a return to the origins, to nature, to an environment where one can hear and understand oneself, ceases to be something exotic and meets with more and more support. Green School in New Zealand is an example.

Nature is at the center of the school curriculum

This is approximately how the founders of the Green School in New Zealand, Michael and Rachel Perrett, who were teachers themselves with many years of experience, who managed to work, including in Japanese and Indonesian schools, reasoned. At the beginning of 2020, a new educational institution was opened, unlike the thousands and millions of schools that accept children around the world. Actually, there are no walls in the "Green School" as such - perhaps the very minimum.

Green School is located on the territory of a former dairy farm, on the western coast of the North Island at the foot of Mount Taranaki. The campus is surrounded by hills, the Oakura River flows very close. This is where the students gain knowledge, despite the fact that lawns are often used as classrooms and the vast New Zealand spaces as a gym. The school practices teaching in a natural environment, in nature.

No esotericism - traditional subjects are studied at school, perhaps with an emphasis on environmental topics. But the teaching itself is organized in a special way. In elementary school, mathematics can be taught in the garden where pumpkins grow - and children, not speculatively, but in reality, learn to count how many pumpkins will grow in five rows, if each has five plants. Different disciplines are not studied here in isolation from each other, they are intertwined, giving children the opportunity to get a completely unique experience.

Here they believe that the focus of learning should not be cramming, but the student himself and his communication with the environment and the people around him. Yet ecology is not just the science of nature, man, plants and animals, it is the study of their interaction with each other. Children learn to think creatively, take proactive actions, experience setbacks and adapt to real conditions; the organization of studies involves constant cooperation of students, independent distribution of tasks and responsibilities.

School life is governed by several fundamental principles, including empathy and concern for the feelings of others, honesty and ethics in your thoughts and actions, building strong relationships with the group, and striving to ensure that both the person and the environment remain clean for as long as possible.

New Zealand Green School pays special attention to building relationships with local tribes. Students learn their language. And the opening of the educational institution was accompanied by a greeting ceremony conducted by the Maori. And the very location of the future school was blessed by the elders."Knowledge Day" was marked by the admission of teachers, as well as students and their parents to the number of "tangata venua", that is, "people of the earth."

Balinese Green School Experience

The first "Green School" was opened in Bali, near the city of Ubud, in 2008. It was created by John and Cynthia Hardy, a couple from Canada. John became a successful jeweler, but he forever remembered his childhood fear of school - John had dyslexia, and standard teaching methods were hard for him. The educational institution has become a kingdom of bamboo buildings in the middle of the Indonesian jungle. The school, devoid of signs on the doors of the offices, and indeed the offices themselves, has become the personification of the movement towards an ecological way of existence, towards a clean planet.

Bali School is committed to saving resources and minimizing environmental impact. The choice of bamboo as a building material for buildings is explained by the fact that this plant holds the record for the growth rate, which means that the cutting down of what is necessary for construction will be quickly replenished by nature. Electricity is obtained from solar panels and energy from the nearby river. Even the food for the school comes from the local vegetable garden - the one where the students themselves and their mentors work.

The lessons themselves are built on the principles of minimum consumption and environmental friendliness, for example, crafts here can be created from old plastic bottles or ice cream sticks. And the main thing, of course, is nature. Not forgetting the indisputable benefits of such a lifestyle for growing organisms, the founders of the Balinese school, like schools in New Zealand, proclaim it as a way to know oneself, to learn to communicate with oneself and with others.

How do they study at the Green School

Life and study at the Green School are distinguished by such important dignity as emotional security. And besides, the school leaders are confident that through interaction with nature, the child gets the opportunity to show his abilities, to reveal his potential. The world around us - the one that is in the immediate vicinity of the Green School - becomes a kind of guide along this path.

But, of course, with all the attractiveness of this format of education, not every family is ready to send their child to this school. It's not just the cost - and, by the way, it is quite high, moreover, it often includes the cost of moving the child and his family to New Zealand. It's just that this return to nature, paradoxically, becomes too progressive for many parents.

There is a river in the immediate vicinity of the campus. But looking at the water, most parents will only feel anxiety, and the river itself will seem primarily a threat to children's safety. “In that case, our school is not for you,” says director Chris Edwards, a teacher with many years of experience, who, by the way, graduated from Oxford - perhaps the most classic of all possible universities.

Of course, child safety issues are carefully thought out, and for families that see them as a prerequisite for incredible learning and development opportunities for a child, school is happy to open the doors. As well as those who are calm about non-observance of school hygiene standards preached for centuries: dirty hands in the Green School are rather encouraged, because it is impossible not to get dirty when planting plants or caring for animals.

The 2020 pandemic, on the one hand, disrupted the usual course of things in the field of children's education and training, and on the other hand, it made it possible to think about new formats for organizing schools. Perhaps the values that Green School preaches in New Zealand will come to the fore in the near future. The third and fourth Green Network Schools are opening in South Africa and Mexico - and maybe this is just the beginning. Perhaps "green schools" are not just a return to the origins, but a transition to a new, higher level of development.

New Zealand is a country that generally knows how to surprise, recently even a hobbit village appeared in it.