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by Peg Smith, ACA Chief Executive Officer
Pulled in All the Right Directions at Camp
While camps across the country are getting children up off the couch
and into the fresh air far from their electronic playgrounds — the
cell phones, television, and video games — we are increasingly aware
that our roles as educators, parents, and citizens assume more of an imperative
than we imagined. Play time is markedly decreasing, outdoor activities
according to researchers, who monitor how our children are actually spending
their time, are on the decline. Even walking is an endangered activity.
"Our nation's young people are, in large measure, inactive, unfit,
and increasingly overweight," according to a presidential report
from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. William Doherty, a University
of Minnesota researcher, reports that over the last twenty years there
has been a 25 percent decline in the time children spend playing and a
50 percent decline in time spent in unstructured outdoor activities.
While fleeing indoors may not be a "Movement" in itself,
there is a profound cultural shift occurring that risks leaving behind
an entire generation of caretakers of the planet — those young people
who find the silence, wonder, and discovery of the open air, the friendship
of others in the camp setting, the self-reliance that comes from independent
action who need our voices, our encouragement, and our counsel more than
ever.
Independently conducted research from the American Camp Association
and supported by Lilly Endowment Inc. further demonstrates the positive
outcomes for youth surrounding the camp experience and confirms just how
powerfully the values of the camp experience translate into children’s
lives — children who are more prepared to participate in the richness
and diversity of our culture and more prepared to be the stewards and
leaders of the planet. In the largest study of camp outcomes ever conducted,
young people and their families report that following the camp experience,
there were measurable gains in positive identity, social skills, physical
and thinking skills, and positive values and spirituality. Capitalizing
on this knowledge will help us all to advance the case for experiential
education and turn it from conventional wisdom to practical wisdom.
No stranger to the outdoor life, naturalist John Muir wrote in the early
years of the twentieth century, "You cannot feel yourself out of
doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe
in these spirit beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp
fire." For nearly one hundred years, The American Camp Association
has supported the idea that in addition to the nurturing and role modeling
that occurs at camp, there is a larger force, riotous and intricate, delicate,
and noisy that has such immediate power to connect children to a world
of possibility and imagination, a non-stop world of growth and a way to
take the outdoors indoors — directly to the heart. Every day, millions
of children and adults share this connection at camp.
Ultimately, camp is never about getting away from the real world; it’s
all about tuning into it.
Originally published in the 2005 September/October
issue of Camping Magazine. |
