No Child Left Inside

Okay, you know about “No Child Left Behind,” but do you know about “No Child Left Inside”? In case you've been sleepwalking through the last five or six years, No Child Left Behind is the propaganda… errr… umm… excuse me, public relations name given to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (EASA), and was signed into law in 2002. It is controversial, and justly so, for subjecting students and teachers alike to a regimen of standardized tests in the name of “accountability.”

The No Child Left Inside Initiative is in some ways almost the polar opposite of ESEA. Signed into law on April 21st -- John Muir's birthday - by Washington state governor Christine Gregoire, the initiative will provide $1.5 million a year to outdoor education programs working with underserved youth in the state, according to a press release by the Children and Nature Network.

Nor is Washington the only such forward-looking state. New Mexico's legislature passed, in March, the Outdoor Classrooms Initiative, an effort to increase outdoor education in the state through the use of state parks, federal public lands, ranches, nature centers and other locations, again according to the C&NN (not to be confused with CNN, the cable news provider).

Martin LeBlanc, vice president of C&NN and national youth education director for the Sierra Club, was quoted as stating that “In pursuing a national Leave No Child Inside movement, our goal is to secure this level of support for all children in every state.” That is indeed a worthy goal. But it's sadly ironic that government support is needed to get children outside to play.

I clearly remember my own youth, in which “go outside and play” was a commonly-heard refrain, often coupled with “it's too nice a day to be indoors.” And go outside and play I did, often and for extended periods.

Either alone or with friends from the neighborhood, I built forts in the woods, climbed trees, explored (and splashed, and occasionally fell) in the streams, and created whole worlds of fantasy and imagination -- just the sort of self-directed, unstructured free play experts now hail as essential for psychological and emotional development in children, not to mention the development of an ecological consciousness.

Free play in the outdoors is the absolute antithesis of standardization and cramming for tests. Perhaps that's one of the reasons it may seem threatening to some educators, government officials, and even parents.

From “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” I am struck -- and not positively -- by the way in which 21st century Americans have become willing to let the government make their decisions for them, in effect almost live their lives for them, dictating everything from how subjects are taught in schools to what kinds of food we can and cannot eat.

The much-quoted ideal that “that government is best which governs least” seems to have been left lying wounded somewhere along the road to a plasticized, idealized, technotopian future.

One of the ways in which governments can provide a positive impetus, however, is in funding opportunities for children to get out into the wider world of nature and play. If the so-called “learning” and “educational” opportunities are not themselves too structured -- remember the wise dictum that “the work of children is play” -- these kinds of programs can provide a healthy (in every sense of the word) counterbalance to our increasingly inward-looking, indoor, virtual, and regimented future.

But come on, folks: we don't need to wait for the government to fund our children's play. In fact if we do, we're just buying into the system again. All we really need are parents willing to encourage, if not require, that their children get out from behind the PlayStation or X-Box, up from in front of the TV or DVD player or internet-enabled computer, and go outside to play.

Yes, it may require a bit more parental supervision. But then, any of the aforementioned indoor, technological activities really requires more supervision than it often receives. And anything worth doing requires making choices, and setting priorities.

What is your priority for your children? To be cogs in a well-oiled machine? Or to know and appreciate the beauty, grandeur, and awe-inspiring possibilities of the natural world within which we live? The choices we make, for ourselves and our children, have never been more important, for our future and theirs. Let's choose to leave no child inside.