What does a pig's nose have to do with the future of education?

Last night I went to the cinema to watch 'Wilding' - a beautiful film celebrating one of the most significant rewilding projects in Europe, in the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, UK.

Roaming the estate are a team of Tamworth pigs, whose very favourite thing to do is rootle. When they first arrived, they were found roaming everywhere across the landscape, but it wasn't until they wandered into the manicured driveway of the gardens that they started to really make their mark, turning over clods of turf with their snouts and completely digging up the garden.

Knepp Estate is 3500 acres of agricultural land (described as "like concrete" in high summer, and the rest of the year "unfathomable porridge") had been intensively farmed for decades. Farm subsidies, chemical fertilisers, modern machinery and new varieties of crops kept the estate under a regime of intensive agriculture for most of its modern history - turning soil into dirt and requiring constant prodding to enable anything to grow.

In early 2000 everything changed when the decision was made to devote the land to a pioneering rewilding project, regenerative farming and so much more.
And one of the biggest transformations came from the humble nostril of the pigs...

Pigs' noses are constantly in search of roots and rhizomes, earthworms and other invertebrates which are found in healthy soil. What their nostrils unearthed was the complete lack of healthy soil across the entire estate, with only a small patch to be found on the driveway to the house - the only piece of land not to have been ploughed up over the years. This discovery led to the appreciation of what happens when soil is allowed to be healthy - and what it then enables to grow within it.

As well as following their nostril's intuition, these pig started following an innate knowing in their DNA that enabled them to live 'wild' - remembering how to forage, how to keep their babies warm and protected, how to be part of a community. They were left alone and allowed to just be - enabling what was natural and innate within them to simply flourish.

This is the story of any process of rewilding - when we enable and allow life to flourish, it needs no more permission than that.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned over all my years in education is that these same principles apply to children. When enabled to grow in their own innate way, children blossom. When supported with the conditions to enable healthy growth, children thrive. When allowed to be their natural, intuitive selves, children flourish.

When we think about the future of education and transforming classrooms to enable healthy learning communities, one of the most powerful things we can do as educators is literally 'get out of the way' and enable and allow what is natural - the urge within us all to grow well - to simply flourish.

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