Parks offer firsthand acquaintance with nature that books cannot supply

Evidence

Good books about nature, and descriptive of places and things few of us can hope to visit, are precious, and we should feel poor without them. But at best, if it remains a matter of reading or of pictures, the acquaintance is secondhand. In the national parks, whoever wishes it can greet these things in their homes; it is firsthand. Nature is the teacher; the classroom is outdoors; the textbooks are the very things you see. And what the interpreters of the National Park Service really do is arrange an introduction to the schoolma‘am and lead visitors to the place where class is in session. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 708

Categorization

• XREF: Frames interpretation as arranging an introduction rather than teaching — connects to ch38’s ‘interpretation is a voluntary offering, not instruction’ and the polyad’s pedagogy aim. — connects to: Visitors arrive for recreation yet readily accept nature’s invitation to wonder — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 706; Seeing an object in its original place delivers a thrill no specimen can match — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 710; Parks are society’s best hope for teaching fruitful use of leisure — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 608