When I heard the news that the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University would be closing I felt a sadness that I know was shared by so many people. I have been a teacher and a social worker in Philadelphia for 30 years and I am also a parent of two teenaged children. In speaking with colleagues and fellow parents, I can’t tell you how many times in the last 24 hours people have said, with tears in their eyes, “the Academy raised my children.”
My own children grew up at the Academy. We went there at least once a week for most of their childhood; they attended the Academy summer camp; they watched live animal shows with Anwar Abdul-Qawi with rapt attention as he held a huge python on his shoulders or a great horned owl on his arm. And in a full circle moment, my daughter Fiona became a junior counselor at the Academy summer camp and then went on to intern weekly at the Academy for the past two years as a part of her Philly public high school’s Independent Learning Project. I have lost count of the number of times I have taken children on field trips to explore the wonders of the Academy. And so I know, deeply, the value of the Academy for our community and for our children.
We are living in a time of turmoil and polarization. A time where our children spend more time on screens than they do running and playing outside. As a social worker I am intimately aware that their brains and their hearts are exhausted. But inside the Academy there is a different world for children to explore. It encourages them to slow down, be curious, observe, think and be one with each other and their more than human kin. There is a gentleness and a quietness here that allows children time to listen to their own voice. There is spontaneous joy and community in the shared awe over the beauty of a swallowtail butterfly landing on a 6-year-old’s red shirt and giggles when Morbo the Destroyer, a waxy monkey frog, shoots a hose like stream of urine all over the floor. That joy and community continues long after a visit to the museum is over.
Inside the Academy there is a different world for children to explore. It encourages them to slow down, be curious, observe, think and be one with each other and their more than human kin.
There are no screens here but there are the softest of striped skunk pelts to feel and a tortoise named Frances who enjoys a good shell scratch. It is normal here to eat your snack nose to nose with a polar bear and there is time to get to know every hair and claw and tooth. It makes you care about the polar bears that aren’t behind that glass too. The fears and othering that I see adults expressing for each other out in the world are so easily overcome by children in this museum when they see that Stevie the rat has tiny hands that look just like theirs, and that Madagascar hissing cockroaches are ticklish when they are crawling up your arm rather than scary. To take the time to know someone removes barriers that can’t be removed with AI and social media.
What does it mean to take this away from our children for generations to come? We want future doctors to know how to observe and listen to us when we’re struggling with health issues, teachers who know how to build community in their classrooms for our children and grandchildren, politicians who know how to be curious and think critically so they can work towards a more just society, and executives who understand themselves and others so we can all be in workspaces that care for us as employees. If we want our children to develop all of these qualities, then we have to support the institutions that create space for them to flourish and grow.
In her oft quoted poem, The Summer Day, the poet Mary Oliver asks each of us, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” She wrote that poem while sitting in stillness, watching a grasshopper. Let us hope that our children will in some way continue to have the peaceful world of the Academy to ponder what they will do with their one wild and precious life. Our future depends on it.
Allaire Wohlgemuth has worked with children in the Philadelphia public schools as a teacher, social worker and administrator for 30 years. She is also a member of the Children and Nature Network.
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APPRECIATING OUR VITAL INSTITUTIONS
