Mini-series: Education Extinct (Episode 1)
Our classroom had a jam jar of frogspawn that either did something spectacular or quietly gave up over half term. Nobody ever knew which it would be.
All this week I’m digging up the bits of school that have quietly gone extinct in a single working lifetime. Today, the nature table.
Every classroom had one. A table by the window, a bit of green sugar paper, and whatever a child had found in a hedge on the way in and carried the whole way to school in a warm hand. The stuff came from the children, and that made it theirs in a way very little else in the classroom was.
I’ve been thinking about it since I read a lovely piece in Inkcap about a teacher called John Paull, who set up his first one in a Leicestershire village school in the mid sixties with a little tin of shells and pine cones. His class were so taken with it that he gave every child a tin of their own to fill. One of them called it a pocket museum. I love that.
They faded out for reasons that made sense at the time. When curriculum time gets squeezed, the things you can’t put an outcome against go first, and a table of pine cones has no outcome you can write down. I’ve made that sort of call myself.
But here’s what I think we misjudged. The value of a nature table was never going to show up in a book scrutiny. It was in the hunting and the finding. The child who walked to school with their eyes on the hedgerows because the table needed feeding. The question that started with “what IS that?” and ran for a fortnight. The awe of a wasps’ nest up close, the strangeness of frogspawn between your fingers, the fact that you could touch the curriculum. Curiosity, wonder and a reason to look closely at the world. That was the whole offer, and it was enormous.
The research has since come round to the same conclusion, as it often does, a couple of decades after the classroom already knew. Studies now link nature-based learning to early literacy, executive function, even GCSE outcomes down the line. I’m glad it exists. But I’d want the nature table back even if it didn’t.
Verdict: bring it back.