September is a great month to tour the United States. The crowds of summer are thinned after most children are back in school and their parents have returned to work. Just fellow geezers and international tourists and occasional newly-weds.
Most children are back in school but not all. Children and their folks stood around Old Faithful and hiked the ancient volcanic slopes of Mount Rainier. They walked the trails in the coastal rain forests of Lake Quinnault in Washington and took pictures of Half Dome in Yosemite. Through parental choice, these children were in their in non-traditional classrooms.
Touring can provide wonderfully, rich educational opportunities. Park rangers provided we tourists with expert information about how mountains are formed and how some mountains are caused by tectonic action and others are volcanic. They talked about the history of the western United States and the preservation of natural resources, including national parks. A corporate naturalist, one of the best non-certified Biology teachers I have encountered, made a hike in the rain forest into a supernal of a seminar. What opportunities to not only see these natural wonders in person but to breathe them and feel them! Better than photographs. Better than videos. Better than virtual touring. Some parts of home schooling beat traditional schooling all to heck.
I was ecstatic. As an adult, and an educator to boot, I looked, I experienced, I asked questions of others and of myself, and I learned a great deal from my month on the road. I was a self-learner in a rich learning environment. Looking at the children on tour, I wondered about the richness of their learning. If they are not self-learners, who is Socrates for these children in the splendor of their first-hand education? Who asks the important questions that build the concepts and generalizations with which the great mounds of information they experience can make sense? Who assists children to sort out the rich detail that forms the background knowledge for a lifetime to come from the unimportant?
Asking questions, what’s the big deal about that? When touring in Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, who needs someone nagging with questions? Learners do. The right question at the right time makes the difference between seeing the Golden Gate or just another bridge over a lot of water. Hello, Socrates, one of history’s great teachers who taught through questioning. So, I wonder who is Socrates for children whose classroom is our natural world?
When children saw a banana slug at work on bear scat on a forest trail did they see a very specialized organism cleaning up the environment or was it just a fat, yellow worm eating crap? When they looked at Mount St. Helens from the heights of Rainier, did the Volcano Evacuation signs along the highways downslope into the suburbs of Seattle make any sense to them? Did they see a problem with so many people living in the shadow of an active volcano? Or, when they saw the remains of the Rim Fire northwest of Yosemite and later heard a Park Ranger talk about using managed fires to prevent future Rim Fires, did they think about the mix of political and economic and ecological problems inherent in managing natural resources? When they heard German and Japanese being spoken by internationals looking at Mount Rushmore, did they try to use the context of place and time to consider what was being said? Did they wonder what descendants of soldiers and civilians from three warring nations would think when looking together at Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln? These and thousands of other questions jump up and bite a tourist at every turn.
Learning begets questions and questions beget learning and children are natural learning machines. So, I answer my initial question. Socrates in absentia, to speak of the Greek in Latin.