Biophilia in the Classroom: How Traditional and Montessori Schools Engage Children's Innate Connection to Nature

This record contains a narrative review built around a deceptively simple question: when a child arrives at school already inclined to notice and care about living things, does the schooling in front of them keep that inclination alive or quietly wear it down? The review reads that question through the biophilia hypothesis and places two educational models side by side, conventional schooling and Montessori education to consider how each, through its structure rather than its stated intentions, tends to either sustain or erode a child's felt connection to the natural world. Rather than reporting a single new experiment, the piece weaves decades of theory together with a recent, closely documented body of empirical work from a Montessori school in Hyderabad, India. It is written for educators and school designers as much as for researchers, translating an evolutionary-psychological idea into concrete implications for curriculum, for the physical classroom, and a thread that runs throughout for something as small and controllable as the wording of the prompts teachers use when they ask children to draw or imagine. What sets the work apart is less any single result than how its evidence was produced: the underlying studies were preregistered, coded against published schemes, and released as open datasets, and they come from a non-Western context that is thinly represented in this literature. The review therefore doubles as a map of an ongoing research programme, marking what has been demonstrated, what so far rests only on theory (notably the direct Montessori-versus-conventional comparison, which none of the in-house data can yet settle), and where the most valuable next studies lie. Readers wanting the data, preregistrations, and methodological standards behind the argument will find them in the linked records listed under Notes.