538 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



ment of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, OE- 

 87010. 



RICHARD E. KLINCK. To preserve beauty and maintain its values 

 boys and girls must understand that beauty. With their under- 

 standing the beauty is not endangered. When the understanding 

 is not present, as is generally the case, only a valid and extended 

 program of properly designed education in the elementary grades 

 can develop attitudes and understandings that are both meaningful 

 and lasting. 



As a sixth grade teacher I am too often aware that students I 

 contact are so overcome by the intricacies of the fast-developing tech- 

 nology that surrounds us that they tend to be only aware of its im- 

 mediate satisfactions and unaware of the beauty that exists beyond 

 that technological shell the beauty that gives grace and meaning 

 to human existence. Therefore they become adults who have little 

 awareness of their natural world and care to do little to affect it. 

 They have been so numbed they do not react to the stimulus of 

 beauty, for they are surrounded by its lack. 



If we are to have a war on poverty in this Nation it must be most 

 effectively a war on poverty of the soul a poverty made evident by 

 the increasing demands on the resources of our earth, especially its 

 beauties, with too little concern for where this demand leads. This 

 poverty of the soul can be overcome, in my opinion, in the follow- 

 ing ways: 



1. Continue to develop a system of Outdoor Laboratory Schools 

 in the public school system schools similar to those present in several 

 systems today, as in Jefferson County, Colorado. These outdoor 

 schools will be places of teaching fact fact that allows concepts 

 to develop and understandings to dawn. Fact is easily taught in such 

 surroundings because it exists on every side in reality a glacially 

 carved slope, a plant community, an ecological balance, an example 

 of plant adaptation. However, since fact is so easily taught outdoors 

 it may become the end as well as the beginning of an outdoor pro- 

 gram. If so the true worth has never been realized. The outdoor 

 school must teach of ideal as well as idea. It must train the eyes and 

 other senses to grasp the over-all picture so that it can train the mind 

 to grasp the aesthetic values in the natural scene. Given a chance to 

 approach the outdoors quietly with all the senses in full action not 

 only seeing, but listening, smelling, feeling and tasting as well 

 the youngster will develop a new reverence for life, will experience 



