BYU-Idaho Online Learning
Video Transcript
[This transcript is currently a work in progress.]
You know, I remember my mother would say, come home when the sun comes down, and I wouldn't see a parent until I came home, and we don't live in a time like that anymore. When I was a kid and just spent a lot of time poking around the mud flats and things like that. And when I was a chat, I used to play outside and dirty. We used to make mud pies. Now, children don't want to make blood pies, you know, they don't make mud pies. Right now for that kind of stuff. We have a lot of organized plays. We have a lot of sterilized rooms. We have a lot of controlled activity. I was always outside running around when I was a little kids. No, I was always in the was running in rivers around my neighborhood in the county and stuff like that. Compared to now the kids just play video games. So it's like trapped and they're confined in their homes. Children in a space of a generation or two have had a profound change in their experiential contact with the natural world. Children today spend on average over 44 hours a week in front of a monitor, one sort or another television screen or a computer monitor and less than 40 minutes outside. I mean, children just don't go out in nature. Sorry, I've been working with preschoolers for over 30 years. And over the course of that time, I've seen that Health has declined, physical health has declined, and mental health seems to be declining as well. By that, I mean, besides the obvious increases of asthma and obesity and intention. We also have bullying and aggression, and these things just tend to be mitigated with extensive outdoor time. Let's move down the trail. Are you ready? March Thank you. It's kind of like an invisible school. The kids don't notice that they're earning at this, you know, meteoric pace, they don't understand that they're doing anything but playing and exploring and investigating, and, you know, they feel like the characters and the stories that they make up while they're out there. They feel like pirates are explorers or fairy princesses, you know, gathering their treasures. They've eradicated recess and play time because they feel like children need more math. They need more reading. They need more of these because they feel like the test scores are so low that children need more of that time. But in the process, the scores are not getting much higher, and the kids are still not going outside, but on the other hand, you have obesity just climbing in the schools now. We're offering to teachers simple experiences. That they're not really knowledgeable about environmental issues. They're not science teachers. They can still feel okay about taking their children outdoors into the schoolyard and knowing that whatever they do, even if they just allow the children to sort of quietly engage with the natural world, that that's enough. Some people will say, Well, you're just doing that or it's so simple. It's not actually that's deep. We took our first group camping, and these kids are so tough, you know, they live in the city. So I got dark, and you start hearing all the crickets and the sounds, and you could just see them all, like, huddled up in the tent, like, I don't want to go out there. What is out there? I got you. I so used to being in this, you know, I'm like, This is nothing like your neighborhood. Your neighborhoods much more dangerous. Many of our students when they go home in the afternoons, they don't go out. The parents keep them inside because of safety reasons. Board it up abandoned houses. Lots of drug activity. There's heavy gang influence in their neighborhood, Liquor stores all over the place, corner stores with unhealthy food, litter in the gutters. We come to this park a lot and we are about teaching and educating, but I don't think you can have a real appreciation for nature unless you're out and you're in it and you're interacting in it, and you have the freedom to do what you want to do to go and explore and be one with it. Place to go. Willie's in second grade. He goes to our local public school. He's learning a lot about science, but he's learning that all through books, through reading. I don't think that's the way to learn about nature to read about it, but I think the way to learn about it is to be in it. The teaching environment, school environment is one that emphasizes formal at abstract indoor learning. That's you know, one form of learning. It's narrow, it leaves out a lot, and it's exhausting. Parents are like, Well, you know, I want my child to get lots of information, and I want to know they have information. Sounds to me all you're doing is playing in the woods. Actually, that's true. That is exactly what we're doing. We're playing in the woods. But don't worry about the information. It'll come along for the ride. Connection is so much more powerful that the information just follows it. You know, in our best of intentions to protect our children from everything, we maybe have protected them too much. Would it be better to keep our kids totally apart from snakes and spiders and storms and, you know, in rushing waters? Well, yeah, maybe, but maybe not. Risk is really important for young people. If you don't have healthy risks, they're going to be unhealthy risk because we're seeing this all over the place. They've been working with kids for 25 years. All the kids thrive on taking risks. They just love the feeling the feeling in your stomach, regardless of their temperament. I had never done something like this, and I wanted to try it out and see that I could do something of this magnitude. I feel like what better to do than submerse myself in the wilderness. For six months. It was, like, a really big thing for me to just go ahead and take this leap. I just knew that I had to do it. So this is a six months experience, and this is a 608 mile journey by ski and canoe. We started with students who might have never skied before. We started with students who might have never came before. We started with students who never seen snow before. We definitely had to learn how to work together with speed and efficiency on the winter trail. That's where it really came together. We realized, wow, we have an hour we're cold, we're hungry, get the firewood, set up the tent, get the bows, and we just learn this rhythm. Now, we feel confident in ourselves, what we're able to do by ourselves and we can survive in the wilderness. It It's incredible. I mean, anything can happen, and we're really let loose now. I feel like we can do anything we set our minds too. I wish that they would be excited to go back in the world, and that they would make the best of situation they in. So my biggest wish for them would be that they would look at all the beautiful things that they are in the world and put themselves right in the center of making change start from themselves.
[End of video.]