The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

by Florence Williams

Not only will exploratory kids feel bored and inadequate in conventional schools, he said, the constrained setting actually makes their symptoms worse. Maria Montessori went so far as to suggest in 1920 that middle-schoolers should ditch lecture-based instruction altogether and head for farm and nature schools where they can move around and learn by doing. For kids like Zack Smith, school feels especially stifling and rule-bound; they act up; they may get moved into an even more restrictive environment, sometimes with chain-link fences, guards, and neurotropic meds that go beyond ADHD to deal with the ensuing anxiety, depression, and aggression. Sometimes they end up in trouble, or, as Zack feared might happen to him, getting “gooned” in the middle of night by burly strangers who would pack him off to a residential therapeutic program that may look like Outward Bound in the brochure but end up feeling like a gulag.