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P.I.N.E.-ing For a Better Kind of Education
P.I.N.E. students exploring natural space by building a pretty sweet fort. Photo by Sarah Carter.
“We are raising the weakest, most unresilient generation in history,” nature educator Mark Morey told a room of parents, teachers, environmentalists, and outdoor educators at a recent talk at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton. Not surprisingly, the room went silent.
In this era of over-scheduled kids whose parents structure family life around the goal of providing the best opportunities for the children to succeed, it’s jarring to hear that children growing up in a world of computer screens, standardized testing, and customized early-childhood education could turn out to be less effective adults than the generations that have come before them.
Andrew McMartin, founder and executive director of the Toronto-based P.I.N.E. Project, sees connections between so-called Nature Deficit Disorder (a hot topic brought on the cultural radar by Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit disorder) and rising rates of obesity, ADHD, depression, and anxiety among children with a lack of time spent freely in nature.
While traditional nature and outdoor education programs take students out of the city and into the woods, one of P.I.N.E.’s key differentiators is using the natural space in Toronto—High Park, Humber Valley, or the patch of lawn or tree by the front stoop—as a classroom.
“The goal is to foster an intense connection to where they’re from and what sustains it,” McMartin says of his choice to base his children’s programs in the city.
McMartin teaching from the treetops. Photo by Sarah Carter.
Now entering its second year, P.I.N.E. offers programming for adults, youths, and children on wildlife tracking, herbalism, plant identification, and mentoring. After-school and home-school programs have activity rosters that include fire by friction, wild edibles, basket weaving, shelter construction, nature awareness and wildlife observation, and maple syrup and tree studies.
After years spent travelling and leading outdoor adventures all over North America and the world, McMartin graduated from teacher’s college at Lakehead University wondering whether sitting in classrooms didn’t stunt some kids’ minds and bodies as much as he felt a prescribed curriculum would stunt him as an educator.
“Are kids healthier than they were twenty years ago? Are they fitter? Are they happier?” asks McMartin. “There’s this idea that kids are healthier and safer if they have no freedom.”
It took McMartin a few years to find his path, but eventually it led him to develop P.I.N.E., where children are educated in nature, by nature, and the experience is directed more by their innate curiosity and capacity for imagination than by any textbook or curriculum.
P.I.N.E’s mission is “to inspire healthy, lifelong connections between people and nature through outdoor learning and play,” which will hopefully raise a generation that understands, appreciates, and protects nature at a level closer to the principles upon which indigenous cultures once relied.
“If you’re connecting kids in any meaningful way to the environment and nature, you’re teaching them how to treat it well on a daily basis,” he says. “The best thing we could do for children and the environment is to raise them in a culture where they don’t know any different.”
The philosophies behind P.I.N.E., Morey’s Vermont Wilderness School, and several other organizations throughout Canada and the U.S. are largely derived from an education technique called the Art of Mentoring, developed by John Young.
The Art of Mentoring’s methodologies for creating a connection to nature are based on the belief that mentoring and experiences in nature are inseparable from raising resilient, engaged children who are responsible in their treatment of the natural world.
“People spending time in nature often see that when things work together in nature, they work better. Humans seem to be adapted that way too,” McMartin says. “If we spend time in the places we evolved in, it makes sense that there would be some benefit, some emotional or intellectual good.”