Forest School Returns Learning To Its Most Authentic Roots. Nature, Play, And The Ingenuity Of Kids. We Need More Forest Schools, Fewer Classrooms.

Sienna (5) and Cameron (10) spend three hours in the forest learning through nature with Forest School Singapore every Friday morning.

“When children engage in the process of discovery, they develop positive dispositions, i.e. risk taking, flexibility, creativity etc.” — Forest School Singapore

My wife and I share Forest School’s child-led ethos.

In a previous essay about first principles thinking, I wrote about how school’s expectations of kids to follow instructions is entirely at odds with how the real world works. Try, fail, learn, refine is a much better approach that mirrors how things work in real life. In a child-led learning environment, learners are given the space to discover and decide. The adults are sending kids the message that we trust in their decision-making.

Failures are inevitable. Forest School builds resilience in kids by letting kids know it is ok to not succeed at the first few attempts. The phrase ‘fail forward’ comes to mind. Each time a child does not succeed, they are getting closer to nailing it. Compare this with the typical classroom where teachers regularly use words like ‘mistake’ and ‘correction’.

I asked Sienna what she likes about forest school. She said ‘playing games’.

“… explore their own curiosities and motivate themselves to create their own play; and learn through their own ingenuity.” — Forest School Singapore

Play-based learning is a key tenet of the Forest School pedagogy. Kids learn so much through play, especially unstructured play, where they invent their own games and make up their own rules. One of my favourite quotes about learning through play is something the inventor of Scratch wrote:

“Kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. We need exactly the opposite: the rest of school (even the rest of life) should be more like kindergarten.” — Mitch Resnick

There is so much kids (and adults) can learn from nature.

One of Ray Dalio’s principles is this — all the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn’t create these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals. Or to put it simply:

“Look to nature to learn how reality works.” — Ray Dalio

Two summers ago, I organised a three day outdoor camp in Karuizawa for twenty five kids from Singapore. We call it Saturday Kids Unplugged. It was the first time we ran an outdoor camp, and a few of my colleagues were worried the kids would get bored, ask for their devices etc. What we observed over the three days completely exceeded our expectations. The kids were completely in the moment, all the time, going from creek to waterfall to high ropes course.

Learning is most effective when it is experiential. It’s the difference between filling a cup (traditional classroom) and lighting a fire (Forest School). Metaphorically and literally.

We cannot teach kids everything. The world is moving too fast. But we can help kids become curious, self-directed learners. That should be our goal as parents and educators.

“Self-directed learning is the North Star of education. The goal of the educational process is to produce self-directed, life-long learners.” — Gary Schoeniger