Outdoor education as a way of life

The lockdown, resulting from the pandemic, has clearly highlighted the need to rethink and relocate the human dimension; mutability and complexity make our reference systems precarious, making certainties now acquired waver. Education emerges in the front line with its contradictions and urgencies. It is necessary to think of school as an educational community capable of mediating and activating educational and training strategies that allows one to breathe, and have an encounter between the nerve centres of post-modernity, where awareness and re-appropriation of one's own identity emerge through forms of creativity. School, as a physical place leaves room for new territories of conquest where education in the open air appears to be the anchor of salvation. From the analysis of the most recent studies it is clear what the benefits of outdoor education are: physical, cognitive and socio-affective. An outdoor education experience can stimulate a more holistic educational process: the aim of this analysisis to show the evidence of this opinion and observe the development of empathic and socio-relational skills to cope with a new humanism. In fact, outdoor education is experiential education that refers to learning by doing and allows the practice of a specific case related to a real problem in order to enhance motivation, divergent thinking and the personal handling of the proposed cognitive problem. We do not want to present the outdoors as a temporary alternative, aimed at solving problems, but as a practice, a physical and metaphysical space to live in, a mental habit. Outdoor education should become a lifestyle, a mental form that allows us to be inside creative spaces and outside of often pre-established and stereotyped networks