Forest Kindergartens Push Back Against Academic Focus For Young Kids

For many children, even young ones, school has become more of a training ground for the tests used to measure the efficacy of their teachers and schools than a place to learn about the world. As pressure to focus on academics pushes into ever younger grades, some parents are being drawn to alternatives that they hope will help inspire their children to discover a lifelong love of learning.

Schools that use nature as the classroom, focusing on student-driven inquiry, are becoming increasingly popular. Called forest schools, these programs couldn’t be farther from traditional preschool or kindergarten. There are no rubber-padded play areas, no ABCs and no structured activities. Instead, rain or shine, teachers take the children to different natural places to explore forests, meadows, creeks and shorelines. The philosophy centers around exploring and connecting with the natural world.

Forest schools have been around for decades in Europe, where children play outside and mostly unsupervised in weather much colder and nastier than anything California can dish up. The motto of these schools is: “There’s no bad weather, only bad gear.” The forest school movement is gaining momentum in California with several new schools popping up in recent years in places like San Diego, Laguna Beach and Santa Barbara, in addition to a handful in the Bay Area, including Sebastopol.

Lia Grippo runs Wild Roots in Santa Barbara, one of the oldest forest schools in the state. She’s recently begun convening a conference of forest school educators in the summer. She says there was no need for such formality until a few years ago because she personally knew the directors of the other three or four programs. But now that there are closer to 13 programs with new ones opening every year, she and others are trying to form an Association of Forest School educators.

“My sense is that people are not feeling great about the direction that education is taking with young children, towards academics early on,” Grippo said. “People are noticing that it’s taking a toll on young children to be indoors, to be inactive.”

The Berkeley Forest School opened in 2011 as a small neighborhood preschool program, but is steadily growing and will offer kindergarten next year. When students come to school there isn't a set schedule of activities. Instead kids investigate their own interests, moving from one thing to another at their own pace.

“They decide the direction they're going in and we give them the tools to help them along their way,” said Andrew McCormick, co-founder of the school, along with his wife, Liana.

Kids often draw on literacy and math concepts to make their ideas come alive, McCormick said, but no one is telling them they have to learn academics. Instead, students, even young students, drive the process based on their passions. A big job of forest educators is to trust kids and give them space to have great ideas, McCormick said, remembering one little girl’s determination to build a swing.

“We had her start with drawing what that swing might look like and then talking with friends about what materials she might need,” McCormick said. It took weeks, but she tested different versions, settled on a model made of bamboo and rope, and used a saw (with supervision) to cut the materials down to size.

Along the way she developed her confidence as a designer, a builder and an idea-woman. “As with everything we do, it's not really about the result, about building a successful swing,” McCormick said. “That wasn't nearly as important as just discovering that process and exploring it.”

Another Berkeley Forest School student named Okotiyo loves to build. He often gets frustrated that other children don’t want to build with him all day long. His dad, Ed Boyda, recalls his son's excitement returning to school after summer vacation.

“He got out of car on the first day of school and he said: ‘Papa, it's good to get back to work.’ And with his hard hat on he marched up to the gate and let himself in to school.”

As a physics professor at St. Mary's College, Boyda see lots of students who can't figure things out for themselves. He thinks that's a product of schools that reward students for rote learning and following instructions. He loves that his 3-year-old son is passionate about building and can spend hours absorbed in a design challenge. He doesn’t want to take that joy away from him by sending him to a traditional school.

“I think, especially at this young age, the most important thing is the impulse towards curiosity and to explore and figure things out and have that nurtured,” Boyda said. “Once they have that, the rest will come.”

A central part of what makes forest school special and appealing to many parents is the focus on unstructured free play. In a busy world filled with overscheduled children and harried parents, the freedom to wander and explore outdoors is hard to come by for many children. And yet psychologists are clear that play is a cornerstone of child development. Kids play to master concepts, experiment with new roles and test out their understanding of the world.

“We want them to be able to engage in really active construction of knowledge where they are exploring and experimenting and able to interact, able to raise questions, take risks and make sense of the world through active engagement with it,” said Julie Nicholson, an education professor at Mills College specializing in early childhood education.

Nicholson says the No Child Left Behind law and the standardized tests that came with it are largely responsible for removing play from classrooms. She’s adamant that standardized tests are developmentally inappropriate for children younger than 8.

“One of the things that's happening in a lot of kindergartens is that we are increasing the academic push and the desire for academic outcomes, and we're doing that in a way that we're not maintaining what we know about how children learn best,” she said.

The growing number of forest schools is a response to that criticism. Though most common in preschool, some families are even choosing to stay through kindergarten and beyond.

Some parents even say that forest kindergarten has changed the way they interact with their children.

“There's been a shift in the way I've learned to talk with my kids in order to draw out more of their thoughts and feelings and have more interesting conversations with them,” explained Rivkah Medow, a mother at the Berkeley Forest School. “Instead of telling them how something works, just ask them and it makes a much more interesting conversation.”

At the heart of the forest school movement is a respect for the child and his or her individual emotional and physical development. “Stick true to child development and help to grow a healthy, capable, confident, curious human,” Liana McCormick said of her goals at Berkeley Forest School. “That's where our hearts are and that's what we keep working towards.”

The McCormicks recognize that they’re only able to offer their program to a small, select group of kids. That’s why they’ve also started a nonprofit called Bay Farm and Forest to begin partnering with public schools. They’d like to make the kind of connected, outdoor learning experience they specialize in accessible to more kids.