Our real education begins outside the classroom with the joy of discovery

WHAT do you see when you go for a walk? I suppose it depends on what you are interested in, and what you are looking for.

I used to be what they call a birder. This meant that I saw birds everywhere I went (no jokes, please, those ones are so very tired).

I would walk out of the door onto the street in Stoneybatter, and the first thing that would catch my eye was the gull perched on the chimney opposite. When I landed in a foreign airport, I would be scanning the grass and pools alongside the runway. I still do. A snowy owl in Boston! A cattle egret in Orlando! What kind of plover is that? When I went for a walk in the Wicklow hills, I was conscious of the scenery as well, of course. I even thought I appreciated it, but I still focussed mainly on what feathered life might be left on the blanket bogs. I thought I loved nature, and knew quite a lot about it, but a walk without seeing something flying, or perching, seemed like an empty walk.

I liked to think that I could always take a few moments off, even on a frantic work trip to a foreign city because, as I rushed from hotel to interview, I might still catch a glimpse of a woodpecker as I walked through a park.

Then, in my early 50s I became interested in ecology, and it changed the way I look at things, quite literally. Specifically, I became interested in ecological restoration, about attempts to repair damaged ecosystems. I started to write a book about these complex projects, and that was when I began to realise how little I really knew about nature. Most ecologists specialise in plants, because they form the biomass at the base of every food chain, at least on land. I had to know what vegetation grew in what places, if I was to have a bull’s notion of what ecological restorationists were up to.

To my chagrin, I discovered that I could barely tell an oak tree from a beech. Was that an ash or a willow? I often wasn’t sure. Which species of willow? I still haven’t much of a clue.

But I did begin to grasp something of the vast and marvellous variety of forms that vegetation takes, even in an ecosystem that might seem fairly uniform to a lay person, like a bog or moorland. On a Irish lowland blanket bog, for example, the National Parks and Wildlife Service tell us that you can find 10 different species of Sphagnum mosses, just for a start.

And no, I have not learned to distinguish all of them, and I probably never will. But I can spot two or three of the most common ones, on a good day.

But that is not really the point. This is not about trainspotting. It is not about keeping an obsessive list, like some birders, where ticking a rare bird becomes more important than taking pleasure and interest in the beauty and behaviour of a common one.

What I did learn is that the world is a much richer place than I had ever imagined. There are no empty walks anymore, where I “didn’t see anything” because I did not see a bird. On every walk, even in the middle of a city, there are always plants to look at, to wonder about, and sometimes, a little more often as time goes on, to recognise.

It can start right at your feet on an urban pavement. I remember finding a little creeping plant with a pretty white-and-purple flower on an old stone wall in Glenmalure. My guidebook told me it went by the strangely evocative name of ivy-leaved toadflax. Because I had not seen — or rather recognised — it before, I imagined it must be unusual.

Then I began to find it again and again, on old walls made with lime-based mortar all over the country. Then I found a patch of it on Arbour Hill in Dublin, quite near our home. Finally, I noticed it was growing on the angle between wall and pavement just two doors down from our house. Along with wall-rue, and maidenhair spleenwort, which I had also “discovered” in the depths of the Wicklow mountains. So you don’t have to travel very far to find what interests you in the world.

What applies to plants, I began to realise, applies to almost anything else you can think of. On a recent holiday in Florida, I picked up a general field guide to nature in the state, because I was curious about the butterflies, lizards, and mammals I was seeing around our hotel, just for starters.

Flicking through it, my wife found a few pages on clouds, and began to ponder the glorious sunsets with fresh eyes. Were those high-up silky fleeches cirrus or cumulus? Neither of us knew, but again, a whole new dimension to the world suddenly opened up. The sky will never look quite the same. It is as if the whole world is becoming more richly populated, as one’s curiosity expands.

I’ve focussed on nature here because that is where my interest happened to expand recently. But this engagement with a richer vision of our surroundings can happen just as easily in the man-made world. If you develop even a slight interest in architecture, a walk down the most banal street takes on a whole series of new angles, provokes new questions about history, culture, people and their tastes.

What disturbs me about this revelation, if I may call it that, is what it says about the poverty of my education, and, I guess, that of most of us.

I believe that children are born curious about the world. Recently I happened to tell a three-year-old grand-niece the names of a few autumn leaves. A week later her mother, unsure whether to curse or bless me, was having to send me digital images of every leaf in her garden for identification. We all know that children literally poke around the place in a kind of frenzy of discovery, looking and seeing, sniffing and smelling, touching and feeling, hearing and listening, chewing and tasting. What happens to us then, that we soon find we are bored with the same old same old? As young children, we knew that things were never, ever, exactly the same, and everything was always worthy of our attention? Maybe electronic media are partly to blame, with their cultivation of the high-octane, zap-the-senses sensation, the ennervating pursuit of fast-moving drama.

But that same technology can also be an invaluable source for stimulating and satisfying our curiosity. The internet brings data and image banks into ordinary homes on a scale beyond the scope of the biggest libraries of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the past. It enables us to share our own discoveries across the entire planet through digital imagery, email and other social media.

I fear that the real roots of this problem lie in our education systems. Despite the best efforts of some inspired teachers, these systems conspire to kill curiosity stone dead, to replace the joy of discovery with the superficial digestion of obligatory — and very limited — lumps of “knowledge”.

The great educationalist, Paul Goodman, asked in the 1960s why so many children remain almost illiterate, in so many senses, after years in our schools. As he put it, any young animal learns to survive by reading the complex signs of its environment, so any street-wise kid should be able to learn basic literacy from street signs. Until we rediscover ways of making learning a pleasure, “school’s out” may well remain the point, for very many of us, where true education begins.

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