Thinking Outside The Classroom

I found Zenobia Barlow’s thinking [“Thinking Outside the Classroom,” interview by Derrick Jensen, March 2002] still quite confined to the classroom. I say this having been a high-school English teacher who took his students out into the community and incorporated the natural world into his curriculum every day. I am no longer teaching within our formal educational system, however, and if Barlow really believed in learning outside the classroom, she wouldn’t be trying to reform our schools; she’d be calling for their closing.

No matter how many projects and programs we create, the classroom is still the focal point of our educational system, the place where we begin and end our school days. If we’re lucky enough to have innovative teachers, we spend some of those days on outdoor projects like the Edible Schoolyard. But even if all our teachers implemented such projects, our students would still be simulating our world within an educational setting. We have it backwards. The world should be the focal point. We should begin and end our days in our communities and our natural environment. Only after we’ve done this should we then meet in a classroom to discuss, share, and explain what we’ve witnessed and experienced.

Teachers should never have to plan projects that simulate life. Students should come to teachers with real-life experiences under their belts. I think we’d be amazed at the motivation and natural curiosity our youth would exhibit if they were allowed to have lives outside of school.