Loving Earth, Understanding Earth, Serving Earth

In today’s education circles, there’s a lot of talk about teaching children to take responsibility for the earth. One might argue there’s direct pressure on children to shoulder the burden that we’re destroying the earth with our lifestyles. Yikes. Is this the best approach?

I know how quickly I feel overwhelmed by alarming news of man’s destructive actions: another creature is becoming extinct as we encroach on its habitat; birds are being killed by windmills we’ve built; and insecticides are affecting aquatic plants that are important to many ecosystems. Then I wonder at the hopelessness young people must feel when they hear such things over and over in school.

Students can make posters, fundraise for a cause, or picket policy makers…but they must feel how little difference this makes in the grand scheme. It is easy for them to be discouraged inside, to get depressed, or become unproductively anxious. Young people may even disengage in effort to protect themselves. Children are not stupid; they can see that the bad news keeps on coming no matter what they are told to do.

Maria Montessori gave us a different tact to try. She posed that we first help children to LOVE the earth. She showed us that children will never care to protect something they have not first come to love. In our classrooms, our task is to help young children fall in love with this world: we present the insects, the leaves, the flowers, the sun and moon, all with love, wonder and awe. Isn’t it all MARVELOUS? Isn’t it beautiful? Astounding? Inspiring? We keep the message positive.

Next, Montessori proposes that we help children to UNDERSTAND Earth. This comes through the Great Lesson stories we tell in the elementary level and through the continuing lessons that help children explore every aspect of geography, geology, biology, chemistry…

In their enthusiasm, two elementary children might decide to paint their own charts depicting the arctic, temperate, and tropic zones of the earth after learning about them from their teacher’s animated presentation. They learn that the zones reach temperatures corresponding to the amount of sunlight they receive with the tilt of the earth and its annual revolution orbiting the sun.

This makes sense to the children because they’ve received presentations leading up to this fact. Each point has been made individually and builds on the previous ones. Learning that temperature zones correspond to latitudes interests the children in this unfolding drama of the earth: they discover what types of fauna grow in each zone; what life is like in each zone; and how the air moves in cycles around the equator or the poles. It is all so fascinating!

And with each layer of information––given in small, quick lessons over the first year following the first Great Lesson story, and with matching science experiments that demonstrate certain realities––children come to understand more and more about this incredible place we call home.

Meanwhile, Montessori teachers invite children to SERVE this planet and care for it alongside us in tiny ways. We show the two-year-olds how to wash the dust off the leaves of a plant so it can breathe. We help five-year-olds to collect milkweed seeds to restore a habitat for Monarch butterflies on their migration path and then watch the butterflies visit. We assist eight-year-olds who want to write a report on recycling. We support ten-year-olds who choose to collect recyclable items around the building for the school community.

Rather than starting out with pushing advocacy the way traditional educators tend to, Montessori’s approach is to begin with these gentle steps that emphasize optimism, love, joy and simple actions. This must come first, before children can become citizens who will advocate for the environment. It does no good to raise a generation that only gives lip service or empty actions to our earth. In order to effectively find solutions for human problems, Montessori knew that these first points must be fully embedded in childhood over the period of many years; each at the age-appropriate moment.

Children must first fall in love, then learn to understand, and then be moved to serve, Earth!