This past Monday, the Outside Kids celebrated Earth Day by picking up trash on and around our local beach front at Hanna Park where we often have school. While they are always on the lookout for litter and are careful to “leave no trace,” their Earth Day cleanup was undertaken with special care. They donned safety gloves and eagerly collected all they could find for more than an hour. Over fifty years after the founding of “Earth Day” in 1970, it is heartening to see the environmental ethic of that era alive and well in the next generation!
Indeed, it is heartening to see outdoor education on the rise all around us. In Jacksonville alone, several forest school programs have proliferated over the last decade since Miss Lynn was Forest Kindergarten certified and started the first Forest K program in town. But really outdoor education in the US and even in Florida predates Earth Day. Its origins go all the way back to the Conservation movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Less concerned with individual consumer impacts, the Conservation movement was a response to unchecked industrialization as corporate power consolidated in the “Gilded Age” at the turn of the twentieth century. This first generation of environmental advocates in the United States included such icons as John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.
A parallel concern at the beginning of the 1900s was the effect of urbanization on physical and mental health. The previous century saw staggering numbers of deaths from epidemics including cholera, scarlet fever, the bubonic plague, and others in the newly crowded cities across Europe and America. At the end of the Victorian Era were increased suspicions of the enervating high culture that dominated media during this time: melodramatic novels and plays, an overemphasis on manners and etiquette, a glorification of fragility that culminated in the rise of a “cult of invalidism.” Respiratory and nervous illnesses flourished, and doctors increasingly prescribed retiring to a sub-tropical climate for recovery. Florida was one of the most popular recommended locations.
Parents wanted more for their children than urban life seemed to offer. The foundation of The Boy Scouts of America in 1910 and its counterpart The Girl Scouts of America in 1912 were clear responses to their fears. The earliest outdoor summer camps were organized during this era and then grew exponentially after the first world war. And because of Florida’s reputation as a healthful climate, as the population increased, some of the earliest outdoor schools were founded here.
Florida’s industrialization and urbanization may have come later than much of the nation, but after the Civil War, the population began to pick up, unevenly at first, and then rapidly. St. Petersburg, Florida was the home of Sunny Hours Beach School and the Shorecrest Outdoor School. The Snyder School for Boys was a dual campus boarding school that held its winter terms on Captiva Island in Lee County, Florida. And the Adirondack-Florida School, as the name suggests, had a similar model, but spent their winters in Coconut Grove outside of Miami in Dade County, Florida. In all three locations, the population doubled in the first decade of the 20th century. In Dade County, it tripled in the following decade, and then tripled again by 1930. Founder and Headmistress of the Everglades School for Girls Julia Harris considered St. Augustine, Florida before she observed the demand for an all outdoor school in Miami. She opened it in 1914 and moved to a larger campus in 1922.
Some of these schools were explicit about their aims as a respite from northern city life. The Snyder School was established on Captiva Island on the Gulf of Mexico in 1913 and “flourished” until 1926. In promotional materials they advertised their campus as a place “far Removed from City Distractions” and “away from the crowded life of cities.” To combat rumors of Florida’s untamed and dangerous landscape, the school asserted that “there is less danger to a boy anywhere in the open, either on water or land, than on the streets of our crowded cities, so congested with hurrying cars and automobiles.” The dangers of modern life, they believed, outweighed the dangers of being outdoors.
The educators and directors of outdoor schools in Florida also understood nature as more than a balm for urban stressors. They touted it as an optimal place for children’s learning, in parallel with the national movement towards nature study. The Sunny Hours Beach School posited that “There can be no finer classroom than the one provided by nature.” The Snyder School recognized the trend in outdoor summer camps and presented their school as a year round extension of the same concept. They argued that outdoor education suited the students’ “natural tendencies,” supporting the growing belief that children belonged in nature and that their time out of doors ought to be maximized. The Adirondack-Florida School, founded in 1903, introduced the dual-campus model for this very reason, advertising its location “in two climates in order to give its students as much out of door life as possible throughout the school year.”
Honing in on the reputation of Florida’s particularly salubrious climate, the Sunny Hours Beach School publicized their school location "under the Healthful rays of the sun." Health was a recurring theme in their promotional literature which explained that "parents bring their children to Florida to keep them away from the severe winter of the northern states…" and that “many children are brought to Florida and to the seashore for their health.” In a Snyder School description of the Captiva campus environment, they exclaim, “What more invigorating, health-bringing climate and life could there be for the boy who remains pale and perhaps frail, threatened with coughs, colds and even pneumonia in our rigorous Northern winter…?” In reply to the “popular fallacy” that Florida’s environment posed dangers to the safety of the boys’ health, they contended that the school was actually situated in a “wonderful climate for all throat infections and nerve troubles.”
South Florida was reputed to be particularly edenic. During the population boom in urban centers below Orlando, vacation resorts along beaches abounded. Outdoor schools capitalized on this conceptualization of Florida as paradise in their planning and promotion. The Shorecrest Outdoor School taught at outdoor blackboards under pergolas roofed with dangling Spanish moss, citing the “mild winter weather” as conducive to such a classroom setting. The Sunny Hours Beach School boasted their location on the Gulf of Mexico, “in a semi-tropical climate, with 360 days of sunshine each year…” The Snyder School’s promotion of their grounds leaned heavily on paradisaical associations with such descriptors as “smooth carpet of sand” and “luxuriant vegetation.” Studying in Florida’s natural environment, it seemed, was a fine vacation from northern, urban life.
At Outside Kids, we still believe in the natural beauty of Florida. When our founder Lynn Coalson first trained for Forest K teaching in Washington State, she concluded that if they can run an all-outdoor school in their cold and rainy northern climate, we can certainly do it in sunny temperate Florida! As these pictures from over seventy years ago demonstrate, Florida continues to be an ideal place for learning outdoors! These days parents' concerns are less about urbanization and more about the persistent creep of tech, but mental and physical health are still at the top of their lists as well as an appreciation for protecting nature. So while much has changed, some things truly remain the same. Children still thrive in the great outdoors. And time spent in nature continues to be a balm and antidote to the challenges of modern life. But in order to maintain this respite, we must protect the natural places in our sphere. And so we will continue to sing and abide by our anthem:
Outside Kids have lots of fun, We play outside in the rain and the sun, We love the earth; it's our special place. Outside Kids LEAVE NO TRACE!
This article is adapted from research I conducted as a history student studying the history of nature education in 2019.
Sources:
Armitage, Kevin C. The Nature Study Movement: the Forgotten Populizer of America’s Conservation Ethic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Paris, Leslie. Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014.
Bradfisch, Jean. “Miss Harris' School.” The Historical Association of Southern Florida Update 14, no. 4, November 1987.
Graves, Jane Johnson. “The History of Shorecrest.” Shorecrest Preparatory School Annual Report 2011-2012. https://cdn.media78.whipplehill.net/ftpimages/656/misc/misc_107203.pdf.
Pamphlet 7.01-7.31. 1913. Captiva-on-the-Gulf Promotion Book. Captiva Island Historical Society, Captiva Island, Florida. https://captivaislandhistoricalsociety.pastperfectonline.com/bysearchterm?keyword=promotional+booklet&page=1.
“‘Reading ‘riting and ‘rithmatic’ on the Beach.” Sunny Hours Beach School Postcard. 1939. St. Pete Beach Library, Gulf Beaches Historical Museum, St. Pete Beach, Florida.
“‘School Can Be Fun’ Booklet.” Sunny Hours Beach School. n.d. St. Pete Beach Library, Gulf Beaches Historical Museum, St. Pete Beach, Florida. https://pinellasmemory.org/islandora/object/clearwater%3A9860?search=sunny%2520hours%2520beach%2520school.
Snyder School for Boys postcard front. 1922, SW00001512 (IID), 47798 (digitool), fgcu:21634 (fedora). Sanibel Historical Collection, Sanibel Public Library, Sanibel Island, Florida.
Typescript “Other Vignettes of Island History.” June 7, 1977. 12.06. Miscellaneous Snyder School Texts Collection. Captiva Island Historical Society, Captiva Island, Florida.