There’s still wonder out there. Let’s share it.
It started, as so many wonderful things do, with a mistake. We hadn’t booked the school trip in time. My year partner and I tried other museums and attractions for our classes of nine and 10-year-olds, everything we could think of, but nothing was available, everything was fully booked; we’d left it too late.
What could we do? Our school insisted that we take one school trip per term.
“We could just take them to the woods,” I suggested, uncertainly.
“Woods? What woods?” asked my colleague.
She had a point. Our school was in an area of inner London not known for its access to nature. The school playground was almost entirely concrete. Sometimes I’d see a boy or a girl using a pencil to gently dig at the single square foot of dusty soil at the base of one of the playground’s few trees, searching for bugs. Usually, they didn’t encounter much. On one occasion, they were very excited to find a single woodlouse.
At home, many of the children were similarly nature-starved. Only a few of them had access to any private outdoor space and most of those had to contend with a backyard that was paved over or covered in artificial grass.
There were exceptions, of course: children whose parents made sure they knew about common wildlife and holidayed in places where they were exposed to the natural world; and children who had taken it upon themselves to learn more about the life all around them. But these were the anomalies. The majority of the children had very little knowledge of even the most basic wildlife.
If, for example, a winged insect happened to fly into the classroom, most children in my class described it as a ‘bee’ and treated it with terror. Bluebottles, wasps, craneflies, hoverflies, beetles and even, on one occasion, a moth, were all ‘bees’.
It wasn’t just my inner-city class that didn’t know their nature. According to a 2019 survey, half of British children can’t identify stinging nettles, brambles or bluebells and one in four don’t know what a robin looks like.
This surprised me when I first started teaching in primary schools in England. I don’t remember a lot about my own education at this younger age, but I do remember a lot of ‘nature study’. We would go out to a park and just observe what we could. Sometimes we would bring back a pinecone or an interesting-looking rock and put it on the ‘nature table’. We would admire each other’s discoveries, as though we were miniature Victorian explorers just returned from a jungle expedition.
We were given projects where we had to collect and identify leaves and press them into scrapbooks. I remember proudly keeping my scrapbook of carefully preserved grasses for years afterwards.
When I started teaching, some 25 years later, there were no nature tables, no leaf projects and no nature study. Instead, there was a relentless, unremitting and highly pressured focus on teaching lots of maths and English to a ridiculously high level.
The natural world and its wonders were ignored; there wasn’t time for it and where would we find it anyway?
There’s already almost a fifth less wildlife in the UK than there was when I was born in the 1970s and 41% of British species are in decline. The nature that we are both a part of and entirely dependent upon is crashing at a catastrophic rate yet we are choosing not to even show our young children its wonders before it disappears.
But as we desperately tried to think of somewhere to take the children for their school trip, my colleague suddenly remembered, there was a nearby woodland. About half an hour’s walk away, sandwiched between some of the arterial roads that spider across South London, was Tooting Graveney Common. The wooded bit wasn’t large — perhaps the size of three or four football fields — but it was at least a sliver of woodland we could visit and an ancient one at that.
Commons, incidentally, are a precious relic of England’s medieval history. Back in 1245, (in an area, as it happens, just a mile south of our school) the landed barons signed a deal with King Henry III called the Statutes of Merton. This allowed them to claim more of England’s land for themselves, with the condition they set aside a little of it (the worst bits) for the commoners to use to try and to scrape a living.
These areas were called commons and they used to be much bigger than they are today. In South London, for example, vast tracts of land would have joined the areas of what is now called Clapham Common, Wandsworth Common, Tooting Commons and Mitcham Common into one huge common, where peasants were allowed to graze their livestock, dig up turf and gather branches of gorse and twigs for firewood but also where they could celebrate annual festivals and where their children could run free and play.
By the 18th century, even letting the peasants live on these poor bits of land was seen by Britain’s wealthy landowners as far too generous and they set about changing the law to grab more of it for themselves. That’s partly why half of England is still owned by just one per cent of its population.
The commoners did their best to resist the enclosures, as this period of institutionalised theft was known, and sometimes they won the odd small victory. In 1794 there was a riot when the Duke of Bedford tried to enclose the land of Tooting Commons so he could sell the furze (or gorse) bushes that grew naturally there.
The rioters must have been successful because, unlike most of the rest of the commons in the country, Tooting Commons, comprising Tooting Bec and Tooting Graveney, was spared and later (thanks to the Metropolitan Board of Works) preserved for everyone.
So it was to Tooting Graveney Common that we decided to take our class for their trip. We headed out with no real learning objective in mind other than to enjoy ourselves and just appreciate the space. There was no curriculum guidance, scheme of work or lesson plans for this sort of activity so we just made up what we thought would be interesting and fun.
As teachers, we were concerned the children might be bored, there might not be enough to keep them occupied or they might mess around too much in the woods. At least, we thought, if it all goes wrong we can just walk back home.
We needn’t have worried. As we stepped into the woodlands, the noise of traffic subsided just enough for the welcoming calls of robins and blackbirds to replace it. And then the wonder began.
The huge canopy of oaks, ash and beech trees twisted and towered above us. Some of these trees had been saplings when the riots to save this place had started; now they and their offspring stood as proud survivors, peering out at the rush of urbanisation surrounding them.
Their leaves were just on the turn, so between them produced a natural swatch of every hue from lime to burnt umber. The shade and protection of their branches obscured the city and muffled its hum while the sweet smell of the earth, and the acorns and beech nuts crunching beneath our feet, filled our lungs and lifted our spirits.
We divided into four groups, each with an adult to supervise and each exploring in a different direction. The children soon got the hang of identifying the different trees by gathering their leaves from the forest floor. Many of them appeared surprised that trees came in so many different varieties and that each tree supported an individual ecosystem of its own.
They loved feeling the soft, damp carpet of moss growing on their trunks and examining the lichen eeking out a living from the thin air on their branches. They photographed and drew the bizarre, almost alien-looking bracket fungus that emerged from the sides of the trees and the toadstools that sprouted out of the leaf litter.
Because we hadn’t set a learning objective or stipulated a particular task; just allowed the children to observe and take in the woodland in whichever way they preferred, everyone got something out of it. Some drew, some photographed, some collected, some took bark rubbings and some just enjoyed feeling the crunch of the leaves in their hands and the varied textures of the bark. All of them found it wonderful in the most literal sense of that word. They were filled with wonder. It was almost bursting out of them. We could see it in their eyes and hear it in the excitement of their voices as they enthusiastically described what they had seen and heard.
This wasn’t the Serengeti, we hadn’t just dived into a coral reef or fought our way through a tropical rainforest. It was just our local patch of trees. But despite being so close to where they lived, most of the children had never explored these woods before. Many of them appreciated for the first time that oak and birch trees were magnificent, real, living things and not just blocks in Minecraft.
I had always enjoyed this sort of space. I’d been hooked as a kid on nature by the writings of the naturalist Gerald Durrell and had gone on to study Ecology at university. But I was surprised at how quickly all the children got it too: this precious sense of wonder at the natural world. When, at the end of the school year, I asked my class which part of the year they’d enjoyed the most, they all recalled the day we went to the woods.
The wonder of just being able to experience nature, to absorb and explore it at your own pace hadn’t left them, even many months later. As a teacher, this felt so right, so true. While we may be told that the purpose of school — and for that matter parenting — is to prepare children for the workplace, equip them with skills and knowledge; and shape them into responsible citizens, it’s also, surely, more than that.
Isn’t our job also to pass on the wonder? To examine our incredible universe and, now and then, say, “Hey, take a look at this. Isn’t it wonderful?”
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