Applied Research on Training Children’s All-round Abilities in Nature Education

Economic development and the expansion of cities have added to the tension between human and nature, and intensified the conflicts among human, nature and the society. Urbanization has narrowed the gap between human communities, but widened the distance between human and the natural world. Against this backdrop, the term “natural deficiency” came into being. This term was first proposed by the American scholar Richard Louv in 2008 in his book “The Last Child in the Forest”, indicating that children had long been cut off from the nature and nature had been reduced to a mere imagination. A survey report on the intimacy between urban children and nature released by a research center in Shanghai in 2013 pointed out that “out of the more than 1, 300 children surveyed, over 150 children have natural deficiencies. The tendency is mainly manifested as: inability to concentrate, inability to blend into the environment quickly, and lack of curiosity about the natural world.” The reasons for this symptom are mainly twofold: first, in the information age, children are so attached to a slew of electronic products such as mobile phones and computers that few prefer to spend time outdoors; secondly, the prevalence of off-campus training classes has robbed the children of time to go to parks and natural scenic spots where they can be exposed to the natural environment. Nature education can combine classroom teaching with natural activities to effectively narrow the distance between people and nature