School focuses on teaching what comes naturally

Bat and Moth is a game designed by Joseph Cornell, one of the world's most revered nature educators, to help children understand through role-playing how hearing, instead of eyesight, is used by animals to locate their prey.

When Zhang Xinyu introduced the game in his school－Natural Campus, in East China's Zhejiang province－he soon found it was too simple for his students and replaced it with more complicated games where "kids might learn more than one thing from nature within a session".

Zhang, 42, is one of the first in the country to start a private institution focusing on nature education. He had spent most of his childhood in rural areas of eastern China's Anhui province.

"China has possibly undergone the fastest rate of urbanization in the past three decades in the world. For people like me, who grew up in the countryside and later relocated to big cities for work, there is a disconnection and a sense of loss," said Zhang, founder and principal of the campus, which he established in 2011.

After an outing to the suburban area of Hangzhou－the capital of Zhejiang province, where he had worked with an international advertising agency for years－Zhang quit his job in 2010 and rented a piece of land at Liangzhu, one of the most famous archeological sites in the Yangtze River Delta region, known as the archetype of China's prehistoric rice agriculture civilization.

"People often ask me how I could give up everything and begin my life in nature. The fact is, I don't see it as giving up. None of the possessions I earned from my previous work meant anything to me," Zhang said.

By combining the drawing skills acquired from working in the ad industry and extensive knowledge of flora and fauna gained during childhood, he managed to make a living from teaching while enjoying an idyllic life on campus, surrounded by lush mountains, trickling streams and a few small animals.

Parents of most of his early students, who range from 4 to 16 years old, learned about his school through a Sina Weibo account run by Zhang.

Today, his school has 18 full-time teachers and receives 1,000 or so children every year. Apart from children from across China, those from countries such as the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom take advantage of their summer vacations back home to sign up for the programs.

Parents pay about 4,000 yuan ($582) for a weeklong summer trip in the wild or a little more for a 10-session annual package for indoor natural education.

"We are not interested in turning the kids into walking encyclopedias of botany or biology," Zhang said.

The syllabus and extracurricular activities designed by his team are meant to "reopen the five senses of humans that have been very often shut down by concrete buildings and cement roads".

A report released in early May by consultancy firm iResearch and New Oriental－a Beijing-headquartered, New-York-listed private education services provider－found that in 2018, Chinese parents spent about 94.6 billion yuan on outdoor camps and trips not related to conventional school work or examination-focused content.

Nature education, along with music, art, science and military studies are among the most popular subjects that parents choose for their children to spend their leisure time, according to Wang Yin, an executive with New Oriental.

"The new generation of Chinese parents is different from their predecessors. They are highly educated, well-off and sophisticated," Wang said. "When it comes to the upbringing of their kids, providing a comprehensive education is as important as getting them into a prestigious university."

New Oriental, the largest educational services provider in China, started as an English-language tutoring school in the 1990s. It included nature education in its study program in recent years by working with biology and botany professors in the country.

Wang Ying, an accountant with a multinational company in Shanghai and the mother of an eight-year-old girl, doesn't see having her daughter exposed to nature once a week as complementary to school education, but rather, an essential part that has long been missing.

"School work involves the brain, but nature education touches the heart and trains the limbs," said Wang, who has signed up her daughter for Zhang's Natural Campus since 2017.

"My daughter used to be very shy. She would always remain silent for the first 30 minutes in a new environment. But during her first stargazing trip with the campus, she easily connected with dozens of children and teachers she had never met before and stayed up the whole night to learn about astronomy. I don't know how to explain it scientifically, but I think nature has a unique power to make people open up," she said.