Four-year-olds spend their mornings in a specific type of forest in southern Finland. It’s more of a loose arrangement of trees, mud, and whatever the season has to offer than a playground. There is no lesson plan being followed by the kids. By purposeful national design, they are engaging in what Finnish early childhood education has come to view as fundamental: learning with their hands, outside, and in any weather. It wasn’t an accident. Someone wrote a resolution, which contributed to its occurrence.
For decades, the OMEP World Assembly, which represents early childhood educators in over 70 nations, has been releasing resolutions on child development that are supported by research. Drawing from studies involving over 44,000 children in 28 countries, its persistent work on outdoor learning and education for sustainability produced an evidence base that was difficult to refute. The results were consistent and, in some ways, unsettling: structured outdoor learning significantly enhances developmental outcomes, and young children comprehend environmental responsibility better than most adults believe. The existence of the evidence was never a real question. Whether anyone in a position to take action would was the question.
The response was “yes” in Sweden. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, or UNCRC, had already been deeply ingrained in Swedish law, impacting early childhood policy’s rights frameworks, school curricula, and parenting laws. The policy environment was prepared to accept OMEP’s outdoor learning research when it confirmed what Swedish educators already suspected. In preschool design, nature-based learning has evolved from a pedagogical choice to a structural requirement. Finland took a similar approach, incorporating outdoor activities into national core curricula and viewing the natural world as a valid learning environment rather than a diversion from it. New Zealand took a similar approach, incorporating outdoor and nature-related learning into its early childhood framework in ways that mirrored the nation’s relationship with the land as well as the influence of OMEP.
That is not the case in the United States. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provided nations like Sweden and Japan with a legal framework for taking children’s rights, including educational rights, seriously at the policy level, is still the only UN member state that the United States has never ratified. That is not an accidental absence. Where institutional frameworks were intended to receive OMEP research, it found its way into policy. The research seldom makes it all the way to a state education department, much less a national curriculum, without that scaffolding. Instead, it circulates in academic journals and conference rooms.
From a distance, the disparity in outdoor learning between the United States and these three nations may appear to be due to cultural preferences for structured classrooms, standardized standards, and quantifiable results. Additionally, there is a component to that. For the better part of two decades, American education policy has shifted toward testable, scalable, and quantifiable learning, leaving less and less space for the murkier, slower, and more difficult-to-evaluate advantages of spending a morning in the field. However, Finland’s early childhood outcomes seem to consistently confirm what OMEP’s research indicates: sometimes the most important things are also the hardest to measure.
Observing this discrepancy over years of research and policy comparison gives the impression that the US isn’t so much rejecting outdoor learning as it hasn’t established the framework necessary for such recommendations to be implemented. There was a solution. There was proof. Three nations were able to take action. Although the trees and mud aren’t going anywhere for the time being, it’s still unclear what would be required to alter this calculus.
