Schools can’t be expected to instill a love of nature in our children

This week saw a group of well-intentioned academics and experts seek to pressurise the Government to create a GCSE in natural history and for this to be taught as a subject in all schools.

The idea, supported by the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, is of course exemplary. All children should know and care about the natural world – particularly our native birds, trees, and flowers – and its importance is as undeniable as the value of mother’s love or apple pie.

The problem is that this latest lobby group is asking that a child does not learn mother’s love from the mother, but rather from the school. It is part of a wider trend to grossly overburden the school curriculum.

The argument runs that the current emphasis on core subjects squeezes out vital topics such as the natural world. Yet what is to go from an already overfull curriculum to make room for this new topic?

When a staggering number of our pupils leave primary school still unable to read or write properly, is the suggestion that we should spend less time on English? When international surveys show that our children underperform in maths, do we need to teach less maths? Schools are designed to teach “core” subjects in a way parents are not.

Equally, there are some things we learn from our parents or grandparents, not from school. The real problem, therefore, is not the culture of schools. It is the culture of parenting.

I learnt more about the natural world from my father taking me on walks into the Yorkshire moors than I would ever have learnt from school. My father worked all the hours God gave. Yet he chose to put a love of, and a respect for, the natural world into his curriculum as a parent, whatever it cost him in other time.

My own children acquired a love of nature through their grandparents, who were endlessly willing to name a bird or a flower, and point out how silent the wood became when a hawk landed in a tree. Of course, most of us don’t live in woods, but most of us do have easy and free access to parks.

Schools inherit the children from the families, and it is the family which installs the core values in the child, just as schools install the core subjects. Schools can improve and encourage, but it is much harder for them, if not impossible, to create something that is not already there. They are farmers who can nurture and harvest the seed, but not magic the seed out of nowhere.

In short, we are asking too much of schools, and increasingly we are asking schools to do what should more properly be done by parents. We have to recognise that a child learns more from its parents than it does from attending school, however good that school might be.

Render unto the parents the things that are the parents’, and render unto the schools the things that are the schools’. If our children lack an awareness of the natural world, it is the culture of parenting we should be targeting and changing its curriculum.

Of course, the reality is that this means tearing our children screaming away from the Xbox and the television to go for a walk in the park. But no one said it would be easy.

Martin Stephen is a former High Master of St Paul’s School and Manchester Grammar School