A reflection on forest kindergartens

So this post will be a little bit different, I don't think I'll be addressing an activity in particular but I will be writing a sort of reflection. The thing is the other day I binge watched videos on youtube about forest kindergartens and about taking your students outdoors, and our mini trip to Quinta Vergara made me think about it even more.

This is the video I liked the most in case you want to watch it.

Basically, the video shows the concept of forest kindergartens, that is to say, children who instead of going to a regular classroom kindergarten, go to the forest. According to what they say in the video, the world's first forest kindergartens were from Scandinavia, and now they popular in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Usually, one of the main concerns when we discuss taking our classes outdoors is safety. We worry that there might be some sort of accident but in fact, accidents could also happen inside the classroom. I think that what prevents those accidents from happening in the classroom is that children are familiar with everything that is around them, but then, why not teaching them about the outdoors?, maybe if they are familiar with what they could find outside, that risk of accidents would diminish dramatically. In the video we can see these children using knives and the adult in charge explains that it is not dangerous because they have been taught how to use them, and also because they don't see them as weapons, they see knives as tools.
I think that if we don't trust our children, that is because of our own inefficiency to teach them about the world, and also our inefficiency to allow them to discover things themselves. Another interesting video that I watched (though not related to forest kindergartens) is about children in Japan and how they are allowed--encouraged, actually--to go to school alone. They take the train, walk, or bike, and they learn that if they take the wrong train they will have to find a way to get to school anyway. Children there are allowed to discover, to make mistakes, to solve their problems. In that sense, I think we underestimate our children, and I also think that those children who are not allowed to discover and make mistakes end up being adults who lack confidence in themselves, who don't take risks, who are not capable of becoming leaders.
Now, going back to the subject of outdoor learning, during our lessons we also talked about the initiative No Child Left Inside in the United States. Basically, the idea is that children nowadays suffer from 'nature deficit disorder,' because the new technologies have pushed them away from the natural world. But they don't only refer to the benefits that outdoor learning offers for the children, also, in the long run, for the environment. I think this concept is very clever, because children who know and appreciate the natural world, have the potential of later becoming adults that take care of the environment.
All in all, I think we need to start taking our students outside, and we need to start trusting them more, that way, they will become the confident and caring adults who will lead the world in the future.