A National Priority: Providing Quality Field Experiences for All Students

Abstract

THE vast majority of people on this crowded planet are confined to cities. They live between home and the workplace, if they are fortunate enough to have a full-time regular job. Urban living consumes their existence to the point where survival becomes the issue. Life is, for all but the financially secure, a struggle in self preservation. This homocentric life-style revolves around paying the bills, traveling to and from work-by buses, subways or personal autos-maintaining personal property, enjoying some level of entertainment within the confines of the city and confronting domestic problems in a wide variety of family structures. At the same time these practical people, struggling to make ends meet, are encouraged by the scientific community and environmentalists to be concerned about global issues, those issues that extend far beyond the day-to-day problems, and in many cases beyond their lifetimes. are encouraging society to take a giant step from a homocentric existence to a global or ecocentric worldview, while for the individual home, economic problems and the educational system operate at the local level. For most people the ecocentric global view is so far removed from their lives, including their life experiences, training and education, that they often find it difficult to take the scientific community seriously. The natural world of ecologists and biologistsincluding teachers and professors of the natural sciences-is not reality for the larger society, even though most people may have completed life science and biology courses in high school and college. At the same time, serious education that involves students in the natural world-the world beyond the limits of cities, or school and college campuses-has been so reduced over the past quarter of a century that a trip to a crowded beach, a highly disturbed city park, or a state or national park is the only contact most people have with any part of the world not overrun by Homo sapiens. An appreciation of serious scientific study in a remote natural setting that deals not with people and their problems, but with the study of other organisms under field conditions, is extremely rare for young and old alike. Our failure to expose all citizens, including those with a secondary education as well as those with advanced degrees outside the sciences, to the natural sciences through participatory field study, has resulted in a world inundated by a single species that is incapable of making those basic decisions vital to the future of the planet. are asking the world's human population to make long term decisions that require considerable knowledge of such basic concepts as evolution and ecology without ever providing science education in the appropriate environment. As we have moved quickly into teaching the new scientific discoveries and their related technologies, we have failed as teachers and professors to learn and teach from the history of the natural sciences those lessons that have been so eloquently taught by Ana Botsford Comstock, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Aldo Leopold, Paul Sears and Garrett Hardin. Consequently we have fallen short in passing on to present and future generations the ecological concepts of diversity and variables in living systems. Evolution, if taught at all, has become a classroom lecture, or computer model laboratory study, rather than a detailed field study for identifying, collecting, counting and measuring real organisms in natural habitats. Aldo Leopold provided us with an excellent model for developing this method of teaching that is as important today as it was at the time he presented it. The following comments by Leopold provide justification and objectives for the development of field biology programs for all students. This quote, taken from an address titled, Natural History, The Forgotten Science, was delivered by Leopold on April 28, 1938, at the University of Missouri. At about this time Leopold had started to develop not only an educational philosophy that was critical of the sterility of textbook and classroom education, he had started to attack science that specialized in taking things apart, but neglected to explain how things hang together. In this address he theorized a field trip with a typical Phi Beta Kappa student. Leopold states, We can safely assume he knows how angiosperms and cats are put together, but let us Jack L. Carter is a professor of biology at The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO 80903.