With media and technology creeping their way into our every thought, action and motive, humanity is rapidly being overcome and destroyed by the devices we produced ourselves. Many of us live in paralyzing fear of death, and yet we strive to continuously entertain ourselves in an attempt to make our lives go by quicker without having to actually live them. We are becoming incapacitated, having traded in our hiking boots and fresh-air filled lungs for sunken-in couch cushions and sore texting-thumbs.

Not only are we destroying our own lives, but we are swapping the brightness of our children, of future generations, for the brightness of our LED screens. As we surround our children with flat screened TVs, tablets, and smartphones, we bring ourselves face-to-face with a massive rise in the odds of our child receiving an ADD/ADHD diagnosis. However, the prevalence of the actual disorder has not spiked. There has not been an increase in the amount of children being born hardwired to fall into the category of having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Instead, the criteria of diagnosis is tailored to fit not only the children with the actual disorder, but additonally the children with learned behaviors as a direct result of being immersed in our media-crazed society.

How could we expect children to focus on long division when their attention is being divided by thousands of stimuli at any given moment? We've created games that give instant gratification and placed them on the literal fingertips of our youth, but still expect them to work for the diploma that is gradually becoming less and less of a job guarantee. We give them a million apps on a single smooth screen, but still expect them to scratch graphite notes on historical events from times so dissimilar to modernity, so foreign-sounding, until their hands ache. Then, when they cannot meet our expectations simply due to the fact that they haven’t been conditioned to, we medicate them. We stamp an attention deficiency label across their foreheads. We drug them. We numb them to the natural stimuli that keep us alive. To the stimuli we seem to be trying to avoid, or to replicate artificially. We numb them to life, to the feeling of fresh air in our lungs and the desire to run so fast that the wind deafens our ears. We numb them to belly laughs and grass-stained jeans. We may be progressing technologically, but we are depressing ourselves and our children.

We must come up with something bigger and better than the latest products if we want to stand a chance at fighting against this epidemic, and the only thing greater than having the world-wide web at your fingertips is having the actual world, in all of its grandeur, at your fingertips. By expanding education beyond the classroom, we give children access to an entire planet worthy of their exploration and adventure, inspiring learning and development in many more ways than can be possible within the confines of concrete walls.

We cannot force our children to attend to matters that they do not care about. Instead, it is vital that we give them reason to care. Outdoor education has the power to renew wonder and restore curiosity, giving children the chance to not only ask questions, but to seek and unearth answers. It is capable of freeing them of their dependence on artificial intelligence, allowing them to discover their natural creativity and imagination. In an outdoor classroom, movement and excitement are not distractions from the lecture at hand, but instead an opportunity for discovery; children get to climb the trees that allow them to breathe and run through the fields that allow them to eat. Thus, outdoor education fosters within them a sense of ownership and responsibility for the world in which they live. Until we return to our roots of receiving the majority of our stimulation from the outside world, our children will see no reason to look up from their phones. They will fail to appreciate, care about, and attend to the world around them unless they understand why they should, and until a massive societal change is made, it is unfair of anyone to expect them to.