Why not each year send thousands of school-children through the
National Parks? Mother Nature is the teacher of teachers, these Parks
the greatest of schools and playgrounds. No other school is likely so
to inspire children, so to give them vision and fire their
imagination. Surely the children ought to have this extraordinary
opportunity.
The percentage of children aroused and started to greatness by schools
of prison-like policy is small indeed. The proper place for at least a
part of every child's schooling is the great outdoors. In our great
National Parks we have an unrivaled outdoor school that is always
open; in it is a library, a museum, a zoölogical garden, and a type of
the wilderness frontier. In this school-children are brought into
contact with actual things, and become personally acquainted with
useful facts, instead of merely reading about them. No better
surroundings can be devised for developing common sense.
Learning under such conditions is delightful, yet it is discipline--a
discipline that develops, not mere drudgery that discourages.
Education cannot be separated from enjoyment. "Let us live for our
children," said Froebel, the early exponent of the school of Nature.
It is doubtful if we could do more for our young folk, for the nation,
and for humanity than to have ample National Parks and opportunities
for the children to enjoy them.
If each boy or girl--or any traveler--were to follow a particular line
of nature-study during vacations, and give most of his time to one
species of tree, flower, bird, or to the characteristic scenic feature
of the region visited, each would return with a new and pleasant
resource, and would have something definite and worth while to report
to his friends.
One of the greatest inheritances of each individual is imagination.
The child instinctively believes in fairies. Unfortunately, the
imagination too often is stifled and extinguished in childhood. It is
imagination that "bodies forth the forms of things unknown," and makes
all objects interesting. It lights the path of education and throws
changing color and romance over every act and scene in life. It gives
a magic spell to existence. This matchless torch may be set blazing by
a visit to the wonderland of a National Park where wilderness is
king--where the fairies live.
Often, the chief incentive that starts a child toward the acquiring of
an education is interest in this fairyland of Nature. Interest is the
highroad to education. Interest the mind and it will grow like a
garden. The National Parks have, through this fact, an educational
value which entitles them to be ranked among the strongest potential
forces of our pedagogical system.
I have never known any one who had enjoyed the pleasure that comes
from even a little knowledge of natural history to sink into the
empty-headed pastime of trying to see crude forms in Nature's
story-book. Usually, an individual given to this, when on an outing,
is a bore to his companions. I simply cannot understand how people
find pleasure in trying to discover animal forms, or various
zoölogical figures, in the geological formations of the mountains,
while the beholders are in the midst of a thousand objects of real
interest. Such an exercise may be called humbug imagination.
Playing in the outdoors--especially when there is intimate association
with birds and flowers, trees and waterfalls, mountains and storms--is
one of the best ways of training the senses. The study of geology and
glaciology, of the manners and customs of the beaver and the bear,
gives physical and mental and spiritual development of the best
possible kind. The outdoors gives originality and individuality, and
develops that master quality called the creative faculty, with which
usually are found associated courage and wholesome self-reliance.