The Sublime Chaos of Nature: Why Generation AI Need More Than Rectangles and Algorithms

Now more than ever kids need the outdoors. Here's why.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much of a child’s school day is spent staring at rectangles? Rectangular classroom walls. Rectangular desks. Rectangular whiteboards, laptop screens, iPads or smartphones. Rectangular worksheets, textbooks, and exercise books. Even the dinner trays are rectangular in many canteens. And when kids play football in PE? They kick a ball into a rectangular goal.

The problem is that the rectangle is a limiting form. However practical it is, it constrains, borders, reduces options. These limitations curtail creativity and stop children from fully expressing themselves. No child has ever explored their authentic nature filling out a worksheet.

Now, think about the natural world. How many naturally occurring rectangles are there? I can think of none. The patterns of nature are diverse, complex and beautiful. The unique geometry of a snowflake. The Fibonacci precision of a snail’s shell. The soft repeating ripples made by sea on wet sand as the tide recedes at dusk. 

Think also about how children doodle in their books. Doodles are usually circular, sweeping and soft edged. It’s rare you see pointed forms when kids are left to wander across the page with their pen. Curves are important. They move where the brain wants to move, without a clear junction or direction change. They work how the mind works. This suggests our minds are far more attuned to the natural world than they could ever be to a box filled with boxes filled with boxes. 

If you’re wondering why this post begins more lyrically than usual, it’s because nature brings out this quality in my writing. I’ve been a poet for as many years as I’ve been a writer, and much of my poetry centres on the chaotic beauty of the natural world. Indeed, I write this as I sit on a wild beach in the north of Latvia, the wind whipping clouds across the sky and my kids building a fortress from wet sand and driftwood. Benidorm this is not. 

As we move into an increasingly digitised, virtual and highly mediated future, we more than ever need the uncontrollable in our lives. Nature is the ultimate borderless presence, unframed and unframeable. This is why, when we’re confronted by a beautiful scene and photograph it, we’re often disappointed by the result. Nature simply cannot be captured in its purest form no matter how hard we try. 

Therefore, as our lives and those of our children become further embedded with the devices we use, we sometimes need to break free from man-made rectangles: and what better way to do it than to take learning outdoors. 

We can both learn in, and learn from, nature. By moving lessons outside that might normally take place within a classroom, children are given the chance to breathe fresh air, get sunlight on their face, be surrounded by a more inspiring setting. Not every school can take their students into wild nature without a coach ride, but almost every school can find somewhere local where they can experience the natural world in some small degree, even if it’s just examining daisies on the school playing field whilst listening to a chapter from a novel.

It’s funny to think how much this was frowned on when I first started teaching back in the late 90s. Then we were simply not allowed to take our classes outside unless there was a specific reason. But when we did (maybe the Head was away, I can’t remember) there was a collected sense of mischief, a delight in collusion with our class as we snuck out under a tree to do our creative writing. And guess what? The results were usually superb. 

The attitude that learning outdoors is somehow inappropriate must change. Outdoor learning isn’t only about pond dipping and collecting leaves for an art lesson. It’s about getting children into a more enriching environment as much as possible, enabling them to experience how it feels to write about the sound of the wind whilst experiencing it first hand or learning the physical qualities of materials through building wooden boats and floating them on a local river.

If we spend too much time boxing children into the rectangular confines of a computer screen or interactive whiteboard, they won’t build the sort of characteristics that will enable them to flourish in the AI age. Generation AI need way more than boxes. They need to be confronted by what Ruskin called ‘the sublime’, that ineffable feeling we experience when we’re surrounded by a world we know we’ll never be able to fully capture into words. 

The more our lives march to the cadence of the algorithm, the more we need nature’s chaos as counterbalance. It’s how we’ll ultimately flourish as homo technos.