Outdoor Learning Isn't Alternative—It's Original
By Stuart Grauer

I hear teachers ask whether their students can learn outside. But if you look back through history, you find a different question: How did we convince ourselves they were meant to learn mostly inside?

The ocean taught me this a long time before I thought of founding schools. No surfer has ever mistaken information about waves for real study of waves. You learn by paddling out. Education—the arts and sciences alike—works the same way.

An Orchard

For years, we talked about creating an orchard at our school. We raised money, planted trees, waited through dry summers, protected young trunks, pruned, celebrated a tiny harvest of 6 peaches, and mostly tried to be patient. Fruit trees have no interest in the school calendar.

We talked about our plans for what we’d do some day. Apple-picking? Harvest festivals? Cooking classes? Science labs? Over time, we were learning the orchard wasn’t supposed to become just another program. It was suppoased to become another place, another classroom.

One morning I watched a student cross campus, reach into a tree, twist off a ripe piece of fruit, and continue walking with friends. No teacher organized that and obviously no assignment had been given. Nobody stopped to announce that learning was taking place. But it was still the picture of a lot of what we want education to accomplish—or at least not leave out. Right there. All we did was plant and water and prune that classroom, i.e., the tree. Experiential education can be like happiness: it comes more like a butterfly out of the brush than something we program.

The student of course knew where food came from. He knew the season. He knew our place and felt like he belonged here. He wasn't participating in an educational activity; he was participating in life. But many students do not. Most kids don’t even know how to pick an apple. Can we pause on that for a minute?

The memory reminds us how often schools and teachers and parents confuse instruction with education just like we confuse entertainment with happiness. Instruction is something we organize. Education is something we cultivate and immerse in. They overlap, but they are not the same.

History

For more than a century in our country we have inherited a picture of education that seems almost unquestionable: A real school has classrooms, desks, schedules, bells, whiteboards (used to be black), teachers at the front of the room, and students spending most of the day indoors in row chairs. Where did we get this format?

(If you want the answer, here it is: Largely from the industrialization of mass public schooling in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cities grew and governments tried to educate huge numbers of children efficiently, and schools borrowed the logic of the factory: age grouping, standardized schedules, bells, rows, specialized teachers, and centralized buildings.)

In that format, outdoor learning was what happened after the real work was done.

However you address it, the allure is undeniable: Everything is organized, simple, efficiently laid out, and controllable. It covers what’s centrally “required” (by states or districts). And it can make up a fair part of our education, but there’s another fair part.

For nearly all of human existence, there were no classrooms. Children learned to read landscapes before they read books. They learned mathematics by measuring fields, navigation by following stars, biology by gathering plants, engineering by building shelters, ethics by living in communities, and history by listening to elders around evening fires. Circles, not rows.

The classroom row is one of humanity's newest educational inventions. Plenty of research points to the hypothesis that it is not making our kids smarter or happier or more productive. The outdoor classroom is among our oldest inventions—if it’s even that; maybe it is intrinsically human. Post-pandemic and today, an emerging generation of small school founders and entrepreneurs is showing us that idea doesn’t belong just to philosophers or romantic educators.

An Emergence

All over the country, little schools are building around this old idea. Jess Alfreds founded Carolina Kids Co-op because she couldn't find the kind of school she wanted for her own daughter. Today hundreds of students learn rigorous academics while spending much of their day outdoors—not because nature is a reward for learning, but because it is one of learning's most powerful settings.

Toni Frallicciardi's Surf Skate Science invites students to discover physics, balance, weather, tides, ecology, and motion not primarily from diagrams but from lived experience. The ocean becomes both laboratory and teacher.

Travis Holleman's Roots Farm and Forest School asks children to solve real problems, care for animals, grow food, steward forests, and belong to a community. Kids tend to become responsible when we give them something real to be responsible for.

These schools look different: The world itself is the classroom.

These educators are picking up the threads of some of the greats, some of whom may have been boxed out of today’s classrooms: Friedrich Fröbel, founder of the kindergarten movement; Maria Montessori, physician and founder of Montessori education; John Dewey, philosopher of experiential education; Kurt Hahn, founder of Gordonstoun and the educational force behind Outward Bound; and John Muir, naturalist and evangelist for learning from the wild. Hahn in particular made expedition, service, challenge, and the outdoors part of education itself—not an extracurricular break from it. Marina Ewald is far less famous, but she worked with Hahn and led a month-long student expedition across Finland in 1925 that Outward Bound now describes as the first Outward Bound expedition.

Notice that none of these educators are just dragging desks outdoors. Outdoor learning is not about relocating the classroom. It is about recognizing that the world has always been one. And I’m not saying to hold class exclusively outdoors—only to challenge the historically fairly recent presumption that indoors is where the real learning occurs. To routinely find a place out of doors for your teaching and learning. The outdoors can make it more memorable, less stressful, more engaging, more attentive, more social, and, more alive. Healthier.

It all feels intuitive to many of us, but formal research is catching up. Studies are associating meaningful times outdoors with better attention and executive functioning, emotional regulation, collaboration, motivation, resilience, and long-term retention. Outside, there is everything to discover. Nature can calm the nervous system while awakening curiosity—a combination every teacher hopes for but cannot manufacture.¹

None of this surprises the outdoor educator much. Human beings evolved outdoors. Our senses evolved outdoors. Our imaginations evolved outdoors.

The Greeks walked while they philosophized. Indigenous cultures across the world taught children through rivers, mountains, seasons, stars, animals, and stories rooted in particular places. The Buddha was enlightened under the bodhi tree, and the Sermon was on the Mount. Farmers, hunters, builders, artists, and craftspeople all understood something that modern schooling sometimes forgets. We have still not caught up to the navigational skills of the ancient Pacific islanders.

Knowledge grows differently when it is attached to places: ecosystems, locations, climates, histories. Someone notices a hawk overhead. We can spend half an hour watching ants reconstruct a colony after the rain. We can wander to the lagoon because the tide is unusually high. We can spend all day on a cliff writing in a journal. These things take time, so we have to check out guilt that we’re missing some “real” curriculum.

None of those moments appear on standardized assessments. If our recent Grauer School reunion of classes from the 1990s was even the slightest indicator, most of our alumni from 30 years ago retain those moments as memories for life.

In The Way to Pancho's Kitchen, I suggest that education is ultimately about becoming more fully human. Relationships come first. Places matter. Meaning grows through participation rather than consumption. There is a growing movement of schools that embrace this idea and some of them are fascinating and courageous. (See footnote[1])

The AI Part

Children rarely remember every lesson, but they remember where they discovered themselves. That insight feels important at the moment: Artificial intelligence is making information astonishingly abundant. We can ask almost any question and receive an answer in seconds.

Could that be exactly why experience has become education's most precious resource? AI can explain photosynthesis beautifully—we can do that in an office. It cannot smell sage after the first autumn rain.

AI can key out an osprey. It cannot reproduce the silence that settles over a group of students as one circles overhead.

AI can generate an image of an orchard. It can’t hand a child the first orange of the season.

Technology keeps getting better at getting us information. Nature is where we go to “become” and to experience real life.

We can stop asking whether outdoor learning is legitimate. History has already answered the question. Instead, we could ask something more interesting: If human beings learned outdoors for nearly all of our existence, why have we come to believe children belong indoors for most of theirs? Outdoor learning is not an innovation. It’s just education going back to its roots.

¹ See, for example, Ming Kuo, Matthew Barnes, and Catherine Jordan, "Do Experiences With Nature Promote Learning?" Frontiers in Psychology (2019); and related work in environmental psychology and outdoor education. Contemporary examples include Carolina Kids Co-op, Surf Skate Science, and Root Farm and Forest School.

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[1] And the two new August 12 studies give that proposition some fresh empirical company.

Australian Bush School study
New Zealand “Learning that lingers” study
Indiana University East microschool
NAIS microschool research advisory

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