Outdoor Education and Indoor Education

Abstract

The term outdoor education appeared in the USA around a century ago, first emerging in discussions of open-air or out-door schools designed to improve the health of children suffering tuberculosis and other ailments. Yet this “movement for out-door education,” as Elnora Whitman Curtis (1909, p. 169) described it, was seen even then to have broader potential. Expressing her thoughts in the language of the day, Curtis (p. 169) argued that “the present movement for the establishment of open-air schools while relating to sickly and backward children, merits serious consideration of educators, as pointing to possible changes in methods and curricula likely to be of practical benefit to all school children.”