ABSTRACT
Rousseau’s status and reputation as the prophet of natural education has almost biblical proportions, as the quote above from Fuchs implies. In this chapter, as in the previous one, I trace the continuities and dispersals of Rousseau’s natural ‘gospel of education’. But this time my focus is upon the ways in which his prophetic philosophies have filtered through to subsequent generations of natural pedagogies, and shaped the history of mainstream and alternative branches of early childhood education. I look at the ways in which, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, educationalists have variously reiterated the relationship between Nature’s Child and Nature as Teacher to ensure that young children learn how to become better (smarter, healthier, wiser, emotionally stronger and more spiritually developed) humans. Starting with Fröebel’s evolving early nineteenth-century kindergarten design, the chapter spans three centuries of early childhood education. It considers the impact of modern science upon the delivery of Rousseau’s ‘method of Nature’, and concludes by looking at the ways in which Rousseau’s ideas still have currency within the contemporary outdoor or nature early childhood education movement. Formal education’s engagement with Rousseau’s ‘vision’ of ‘the education of Nature’ has been very uneven. While his urgings to match learning against the child’s innate stage of natural development have been universally embraced, his ambiguous notion of ‘the method of Nature’ has had a more tempered and
checkered uptake within mainstream education. Not surprisingly, Rousseau’s radical negative education thesis (on the need to shield young children from ‘the Education of Man’) has found a very small following amongst modern educators. Those that do advocate for children to be educated directly in and by nature, as opposed to about nature, are positioned well outside of the mainstream. While tracing the trajectory of nature-based education from Rousseau to the present, I consider how and why the different aspects of his ‘gospel’ of natural education have been variously adopted, appropriated, avoided and ignored. Quite recently, a ‘back to nature’ movement has given a boost to those who advocate education in nature and by ‘the method of Nature’. This has been precipitated by the release of Richard Louv’s (2008) book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Louv’s arguments, and the ways in which they have been taken up by nature-education proponents, offer a new twist to the relationship between Rousseau’s Nature’s Child and Nature as Teacher. I reflect upon the ways in which rearticulations of Romantic nature traditions alongside scientific discourse have reinvigorated a movement to return children to nature, both without and within early childhood education, and how they have also injected new life into Rousseau’s thesis of negative education. My guiding mantra in this chapter, once again, is Steve Hinchcliffe’s (2007) observation that how we think about nature determines what it does. This time, my interest is focused upon how different perceptions of nature produce different applications of natural early childhood education. As a starting point, I look at the pedagogical implications of Rousseau’s own ever-Romantic but also layered understandings of nature. From this baseline, I then consider how such Romantic philosophical understandings of nature have been rearticulated and/or superseded within education, along with the increasingly hegemonic status of modern science. Science has become the major player in interpreting and representing nature in the secular arena of modern western education. The intersection of Rousseau’s Romantic nature philosophies and western science’s empirical and pragmatic relationship to nature has produced a very interesting tension. This tension between Romantic and scientific iterations of nature, and their relative authority, runs throughout all the natural early childhood education approaches that I study, as well as through Louv’s warnings about the endangered status of Nature’s Child in Last Child in the Woods. In concluding this chapter, I reflect upon how this tension between Romantic and scientific iterations of natural education is deployed to secure the seduction of Nature as Teacher.
