Bodies of children running and jumping in the woods, between the bran ches and rocks: this is first of all the ‘kindergartens in the woods’, places of outdoor education equipped with a covered structure reserved for cases of bad weather of exceptional severity, today relaunched by the Covid emer gency, which has identified the classrooms as unhealthy places and become prisons of constraints, obligations, prohibitions, controls, distances, fears. What children do in the forest, what actions constitute the educational practice of the ‘pedagogy of the forest’, in a constant interaction with the natural environment of the ‘rediscovered forest’: the ‘pedagogy of the forest’ is examined in its different theoretical and operational aspects and in its historical roots. A first map of the oppositional semantic traits that make up its underlying cultural ideology describes the semantic paths that have led to attribute to the modern forest the exceptionally positive value it has acquired