Jayne Dowle: Let them discover the world the natural way

ASK my son Jack if he would like to go for a walk, and his answer is likely to be, “what’s the point?” Ask him if he would like to go and run about in the woods and he’s off to retrieve his trainers from the garden trampoline as fast as his legs will carry him.

Although they are wedded to the Playstation, television and laptop, both of my children do genuinely love to be outdoors. But they have an in-built ability to spot anything remotely worthy or self-improving at a hundred paces..

So I’m not sure that either of my two would entirely satisfy the requirements of Sir David Attenborough who. on the eve of his 85th birthday, has complained that modern children don’t know enough about nature. He is backing a new project being rolled out in schools to inspire children to find out more about the natural world by showing them key moments from his remarkable 60-year career in natural history broadcasting. Sir David is undoubtedly an amazing individual, and you have to respect him. Anyone who can sit down and talk man to man with a gorilla deserves his knighthood.

But if you ask me, this obsession with nature for nature’s sake can grate a bit. And it has become yet another thing to measure our children by and find them lacking in comparison to some hazily-imagined halcyon past when we could all name everything that lived and breathed on the earth. A few years back, someone did a survey and found that only 12 per cent of kids could correctly identify a primrose. Well frankly, I’m not sure I would have recognised a primrose when I was a kid, but like my five-year-old daughter, I certainly knew what a buttercup and a dandelion was. So let’s focus on the positive here. The same survey found that 95 per cent of kids could spot a robin. The world is a very big place, and I don’t know about you, but I’m still learning about it. I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t know the Latin name for a tree frog.

This being Britain though, this nature issue has inevitably turned into a bit of a class thing. I don’t quite know how this has happened, but it seems to me that over the last 40 years or so, knowing your ant-eater from your aardvark has become as much a badge of middle-class respectability as knowing how to hold a knife and fork. Someone has to buy all those wooden animals you see in politically-correct toyshops, and you can bet your life it won’t be the teenage mother with two kids in a buggy. Who do you think it is who gives their grand-children a share in a giraffe in Africa for Christmas? Well, put it this way, it’s not the great-nannan putting a bit away for presents every week from her bingo winnings.

And then you have all those aspirational families who decamp from the city to the countryside in search of the good life and bracing walks through the fields, only to find that the good life includes mud and manure and the fields actually belong to someone who is trying to make a living off them. That said, the prospect of letting their offspring off the leash to explore on their own could be too terrifying for over-protective parents to contemplate.

Is it any wonder that for so many kids understanding “nature” is surrounded by barriers? And sadly, the possibility of even visiting a zoo to see a real zebra this Bank Holiday is so beyond the realms of affordability, it’s just not going to happen. I know of one family who drove all the way to a well-known safari park, saw the prices and drove all the way home again in shock, because if they had coughed up the entrance fee they wouldn’t have been able to eat for the rest of the week. I don’t know what they told the children, but the message there was clearly, “wild animals aren’t for the likes of us”.

This isn’t helped by an ecological and conservationist lobby which guards its treasures so closely that the rest of us aren’t allowed a look in. Even if there aren’t physical signs saying “Keep Off”, you do get the feeling that you can only see and experience certain things if you have the key to the door. And that key, runs the subliminal message, can only be gained if you spend long years studying and travelling. Again, ordinary kids can only gaze in wonder and think “no chance”.

So, although I have my reservations (no pun intended) about Sir David’s rather evangelist approach, I do think it is important that we think about what children know and understand about nature. And for me, the challenge is to make nature something that isn’t as remote as the Madagascar rainforests, but a living, breathing thing that is right outside the back-door. And to make that knowledge and understanding something that doesn’t have to cost anything, needn’t involve a lecture, and most of all, well, comes naturally.