+9 Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
URBINO, Italy – Imagine a school that is all recess. In the hills on the outskirts of this ancient city there is a place where kids play outdoors all day.
At the preschool Maestra Natura, founded by the L’albero Maestro association, nap time is a picturesque scene of children sleeping on blankets underneath a shade tree. Their library is a tarp with books scattered around for the children to choose from. Even the bathrooms are potty-training plastic toilets outdoors in the open air right next to the colorful boots they use when they are about to embark on a muddy adventure.
You’ll find no technology or store-bought toys at this school. The children make toys out of whatever they can.
One recent morning, a group of three boys spent 45 minutes pulling benches and pieces of wood together and covering it with a tarp. In the hot sun, it seemed to be a strange project, until they started filling up pans, cups, and even balloons with water from the spigots and running back and forth in an attempt to fill their homemade pool. It barely covered the bottom of the tarp, but they were learning through trial and error how not to make a pool.
The children seem to have a different kind of curiosity than most. They are excited and intrigued by nature even if they have seen something a thousand times. A little girl screams “un fiore!” as she runs to show the teacher; the school is surrounded in these flowers. Some of the children are delighted to find a snail and examine it carefully with their magnifying glasses.
As other children run around joyfully screaming, a teacher pulls out a small black box and some kids surround her looking in. Inside the box is a baby bird that has fallen from its tree. The teacher begins feeding it with a small syringe filled with baby food while telling the children about the importance of respecting nature. She is not forcing them to watch her or calling all the kids over to see the bird. She is just waiting for those who are interested and curious.
This school allows children the freedom of finding what they are interested in, which you wouldn’t find in a traditional school, even another pre-school. Kids do what they want but seem to be more engaged than most children forced to sit in a classroom all day with only an hour recess, at most.
With freedom, what often follows is independence – and risk. As children explore the forest one chilly and muddy afternoon, a boy tumbles to the ground. At another school, you might expect worried teachers to hover over the possibly injured boy and call his home. Here the teachers just look to see him stand up. This atmosphere of not coddling makes the children less prone to fits and tougher than most. There seem to be no “crybabies” at this school, just happy children.
Among today’s children in general, the diminishing experience of freedom and the outdoors is creating a problem that American author Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” Louv, an award-winning journalist whose 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods” was a national best seller, argues that kids are spending less and less time outdoors, leading to long-term behavioral problems.
Louv, when told about Maestra Natura in an email, responded that a preschool like this leads children to play more cooperatively and be more imaginative in inventing their own games. He also wrote in an email that such increased time in nature leads to gains in almost all areas of typical elementary study and better problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making. Later in these children’s academic career, he said, it could also lead to higher grade point averages and standardized test scores.
“People look at us like we are wild things, wild people.”
At Maestra Natura, co-founder Nicoletta Santini stands tall surveying the children with her months-old baby, her third child, strapped to her front. She is one of the school’s parents as well as one of the teachers. After working in a private preschool for 12 years, she raised her first daughter largely outdoors on her farm. With donkeys, goats, and other animals wandering around, she realized she wanted all her children to grow up this way.
She met Serena Panti, another teacher, and together in October 2016 they founded L’albero Maestro, which means both “the mast” and “the teacher tree” in Italian. The association began with weekend excursions for children. They opened Maestra Natura in September 2017. Both say that this kind of school is drastically different from their own experiences. “People look at us like we are wild things, wild people,” says Panti.
Santini says that this school goes deeper than having the founders’ philosophy. It has also adopted their own pedagogy. The two founders took inspiration from other sources, like the teachings of Marie Montessori, a renowned educator who was from this region of Italy. They are focused on the children’s ideas, letting them decide the day-to-day routine.
The children are learning to be happy, Santini says. But what else are they learning? She pauses, then continues, “To know each other, to live, to know the world and respect it, to respect others.”
Translation of interviews and other language assistance by University of Urbino student Antonia Perreca.
Video by Eliza Friel & Kelsey Robertson
