A socio-cultural history of outdoor education
A sociocultural history of outdoor education suggests that
outdoor education has emerged as a semi-ritualized form of
encounter with nature since Western consciousness moved indoors.
 Once upon a time, all education took place in the
outdoors.
In the days of hunter/gatherer lifestyles, a child learnt by
observing others and experiencing the challenges of survival for him/her
self.
But early on humans also began making shelters. The
"door" became physically and symbolically a critical access point between
the inner sanctum of relative protection (inside) and the relative wild
and uncontrollable outside. Previously the human only lived inside
his/her skull and skin, occasionally journeying outwards on shamanistic
flights.
But with the advent of simple dwellings, the human
consciousness expanded and became contained within the space of the
house. Two critical aspects of the house negotiated entry and exit
of consciousness -- the door and, later, the window.
The door has had a remarkable and profound cultural
impact. Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" and Jim Morrison's "The
Doors" (e.g., "Break on through") are just two examples of the power of
the symbology expressed by the door explored in recent culture. Both
these references draw their inspiration from William Blake's poem The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to
man as it is: Infinite.
When the invention of the door was combined with
industralization there was a mass shifting of the loci of human
consciousness indoors. Long forays into forays into the natural,
outside world in order satisfy their basic living needs became the
exception rather than the rule. It was not the door per se --
animals also use door technology for a variety of purposes; molluscs, for
example, are experts, as are trap-door spiders, and many mammals, such as
those which use tunnels -- the problem was the massive shift of
consciousness away from intimate encounter with the rhythms of nature.
During the twentieth century, the fruits of
industrialization became over abundant, and excess material wealth
accumulated in industrialized civilizations. Houses and suburbs got
cluttered with possessions and absorbed the time and focus that people
used to spend engaged with the natural environment. Industrialized
countries lost connection with the sustainable systems of nature.
The people of industrialized nations lived during the 19th and 20th
century lived off the back of nature and off the back of people in less
industrialized nations, two-thirds of whom lived in poverty. The
resource consumption rate of the average US citizen, for example, is
approximately six times that of the rest of the world.
Its a remarkable story but so much of the remarkableness is
lost because its common knowledge which is taken for granted. The
situation needs to be "made strange" to sense its remarkability. For
example, what observations would aliens make about our human
situation? They might report back to their fellow aliens something
like these World facts
about the universe and human activity.
The excising of everyday contact with nature for humans was
problematic not only for the natural environment, but also for the humans
themselves because were genetically pre-wired over millions of years of
evolution to live in natural environments (E. O. Wilson's biophilia
hypothesis). What's more, there seems to be an innate calling to
adventure in the human (as Jung said, "man needs difficulties; they are
necessary for health") to keep the survival instinct sharp and
strong. The difficulties inherent in surviving in nature are perfect
for the shaping of human behavior and nature's deeper effect on the psyche
has been critical in guiding humans through the past challenges and,
undoubtedly, the future challenge of sustainable human living on
earth.
Outdoor education, then, can be understood as a logical
response to the widespread societal disconnection from immediate
experience with nature-based living. Since industrialization created
material wealth and humans have largely lost the simple cultural living
skills, they now largely either fear returning to nature at all, or return
scared and ill-prepared, thus feeling the need to drag along excessive
amounts of equipment. The tent, for example, in most situations,
really only serves the psychological purpose of being a mobile door, to
create a sense that the individual is protected from the unknown.
In this socio-cultural sense, outdoor education programs are
symptomatic of post-industrial societies suffering from prolonged and
institutionalized disconnection from the natural environment.
Outdoor education programs can be very valuable in helping
individuals or groups to develop higher levels of functionality and
consciousness, but unless longer-term, nature-based living systems are the
real purpose, then the value resources and efforts used for a foray into
the woods remain somewhat questionable. Currently, outdoor education
programs are a mere drop in the ocean of the global human challenge.
Whilst this might seem grim, let us take heart from the wisdom of
Marx:
Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can
solve;
since, looking at the matter more closely,
it will always be
found that the task itself arises only
when the material conditions for
its solution already exist
or at least in the process of
formation.
Karl Marx, A Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Outdoor education programs, then, can be seen then as
offering some of the initial materials and possibilities for a more
widespread rejuvenation of sustainable living experiments. To date,
outdoor education programs have largely been in an extended hippy period,
functioning as modern substitutes for the paganistic, romantic attachment
to a simpler lifestyle in the Garden of Eden. Then commercialism got
hold of outdoor education programming and we now have a glut of
irreverent, shallow outdoor education programming. But there are
grains of gold and speckles of jewels deep within outdoor education
programs -- and therein lay many fascinating examples, possibilities,
experiments, research leads, and inspirational people. From these
beginnings and with existing outdoor education infrastructure we can stand
a chance of initiating a new phase of programming which will help guide
human adaptation for the future. After all, the new phase of human
history will have to be one of human adaptation and only nature can teach
us how to adapt.
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