March 13, 2023

Five years before I was born, a great war ended and we had entered into an age that I still think of as the Leave it to Beaver era. Suburbs were new and there, still left behind my childhood home in Manhasset, Long Island, lay thick woods. My earliest memories are of running wild through soft paths on summer nights, with no sense of boundaries. 

Fireflies are hard to find these days, but they weren’t back then. On summer nights in the forest, we illuminated glass jars with fireflies we had caught from around the low hanging tree branches—a moon in a jar—then set them free. Back then, we were free to scout and to roam as far as our legs would take us. 

Then on my sixth birthday, we all sensed something in the works. Land movers made their first clearance into my childscape. By my seventh birthday, I peered through the chain linked fence that now stood where I once roamed and climbed trees, and spied B. Altmans, Newberry’s 5 & 10, and Davega’s jumbo sporting goods and appliance store. Along with suburbs, malls were being invented, as well. This new neighbor was called “The Miracle Mile.”

I became a master at hopping that fence, even though the chain links were topped with barbs. Eventually, I got a hacksaw and cut out a “V” and we could just slip right through, like passing into the Twilight Zone. We zigzagged through the cars spread across the flat, black lot where, for centuries beforehand, rabbits and robins and spiders had coexisted in their natural habitat. I would disappear for mornings or afternoons into the alleys and doorways of the shops and enter into new, fluorescent micro-climates with no sense of the forest expiry, too young to weep for the loss of our forest and rich soil.

In the mall, in packs of two or three kids, we roamed, weaving in and out of the big stores, learning the best aisles and stairways as if they were passages to grottos. It wasn’t like roaming in the woods, it was a new kind of  aseptic wild. Our instincts to play were the same, and we looked subconsciously for new “species.” We lined our pockets with trinkets: One day lifting a 5-cent candy bar. Another day a pencil charm. Stupid stuff. A pack of Juicy Fruit gum. Gathering in this wild became the game and we became light-fingered thieves. We were innocent and subversive at once, a paradox you find in children (and foxes). We slipped through the chain link passage into a forest of linoleum trails where we roamed and chased and escaped.

For me, this all occurred in a sort of dream state. We had lost our land and wildlife to the powerful and wealthy. And like many who lose their lands, we were proceeding with our traditional ways, now renegade. I don’t recall having much guilt about any of it until approaching the age of finishing elementary school. One day my mother asked, “You don’t have any money—where did you get that baseball scorebook?” And at that point the truth sunk in and the dream ended. It was one of those times in life when a thing is ending and another is starting. That’s what this story is about. 

I forgot about this supposed shame for at least 40 years and all the while childhood changed. Something was shifting in America. Over this time, we watched the walk to school disappear. Aimless breaks and free time became supervised and timed. Gone was childhood free play, along with a lot more of the world’s forests. Daily experiences of things like the smell of soil, or the sight of the same night sky that guided the ancients were becoming merely abstractions for children in schools. A lot of parents started thinking their job was to create a perfect world of innocence. Over that 40 years, childhood games got timers, and grownups to govern them, and boundaries. 

Through these years, school greens and sandlots were replaced with asphalt, and village schools consolidated into isolated compounds at the edge of town.

In my early teaching career as a tenured history teacher, I tried to conform to the weatherless world of desks in rows and time periods that ended with drilling buzzers. 

Then like a miracle, one day, I found myself standing at the highest place on the lot where we now have our school, The Grauer School, contemplating what we might do with five acres of coastal sage and maritime chaparral. The site was right around the corner from Cardiff surfing park and the San Elijo Lagoon and bird flyway, and some of us thought maybe we could reclaim the natural world as a part of school and youth. 

We built The Grauer School, but, on our very campus, left behind a sloping two-acre forest of native habitat and wildlife. It includes sage, wild radish, pepper grass, wild cucumber, wild morning glory and honeysuckle. Lizards, hummingbirds, owls when we’re lucky, wrens, endangered gnatcatchers, four different kinds of sparrows, squirrels and woodrats and snakes, and 24 kinds of butterflies still coexist.  We preserved our wilds—and shall forever be short of parking—and before we knew it there were middle schoolers running renegade through it all, pounding the trails.  We planted native torrey pine trees all around, and right in the middle of the whole preserve, we created a beautiful, archetypical, green quad where students perform great lunchtime concerts. 

My favorite thing to do is watch kids outdoors. With my students, I’ve hiked through forests up in Yosemite and Mammoth, dove the giant bull kelp forests of the Channel Islands and Sea of Cortez, marveled at the forest bee hives in Ecuador, and even bow hunted through the woody hills of the Central Valley. I have surfed the local and coastal waves with my students. 

But my favorite place to watch students has been right on our campus. I love watching middle schoolers running through our wilds. I can’t even imagine what Emerson dug up back there, planted long ago by some Kumeyaay living by the rhythm of the seasons, or what Quinn dreamed or found back there in this shadowland, students looking for a quiet wander or a first kiss beneath the Mexican elderberry, or a place to hide. Francesca strumming in the sandy wash we have a native tree stump circle. And the whole crew in Nick’s environmental science class studying the land, till one year, as epidemiologists explained, a virus, originating in some distant forest or lab, probably brought to the city by poachers and outlaws, escaped, and shut us all down. Preserving our wilds has not been the way of the world.

From the standpoint of our teachers, we have been watching the whole definition of intelligence change in schools. That change is a real issue. Historically, intelligence refers to sensitivity to the environment. But if you are not attuned to natural forces, how can you be called intelligent? If you are not studying the natural forces that surround and govern us, how can you be educated? 

The Dutch have an old rite of passage ceremony called “dropping,” where they drop their coming of age children off in the forest for a night in summer so that they can make their way around, absorb, and contemplate. These ways are no longer native to our students or teachers, and they often feel foreign. But what are the dangers of severing our lives from the natural world or permanently disturbing it. What are the dangers of turning the wilds over to the highest bidder? 

When we were quarantined with the pandemic, I read some of the shops in Miracle Mile were boarding up—I was secretly thinking, if they knock that whole thing down it might make a good forest some day. I know we all have to make a living. But during that amazing time of pause, the man-made world came to a halt, and I could see some things more clearly: the costs of taking more from the natural world than we give back. That time of isolation made it clearer than ever that Nature will abide with or without us, but there’s no vice versa there. I built nine outdoor classrooms then.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that humankind is the central or most important element of existence, especially as opposed to God or animals, but when we take ourselves out of the balance of nature, the greatest harm comes to ourselves, or to our children and theirs. 

In sum, we can all draw a line from habitat disturbance all the way back to the riddle of childhood loneliness and loss, and here is that line: Our minds need a whole world of wild freedom, our bodies need natural, unfenceable spaces and clean air and water, our eyes need unbroken sky if we are going to see 20-20 (and face up to the myopia epidemic), no matter how many masterpieces we read. Nature is our medicine, the prescription school expeditions, play times, and pickup sports have been writing. It changes the brain, causes clearer reflection, and creates our connection to the whole of creation if we study it well. No other teacher comes close, no matter how much we remove our schools from it.

This makes for a tough but perfect final exam question I’ll close with, for every student before they complete any part of their schooling: What could possibly be more valuable than knowing the wilds or experiencing the freedom and connection we find there? 

Knowing this, answering this, even amidst chaos, is why we are teachers and what gives us an abiding faith in the spirit of our students, in their capacity to be generous, creative, far-sighted, and kind, no matter what. Witnessing our students free in the wild is not only the way to see the renegade spirit within us, but also to discern the emergence of the leaders they will need to become.

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You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Stuart Grauer for Intrepid Ed News.