Tried and True . . . and Hard to Do Advancing Camp’s Original Mission Requires Better Precision, Not Better Packaging Christopher Thurber , PhD, ABPP The ideal summer camp is therefore isolated from home and its comforts; nestled in a tight community setting; populated by children different enough from one another to blend just the right amount of curiosity with trepidation; replete with mental, social, and physical challenges; and supervised by young adults who are — because they are expressly not anyone’s parent — willing to take healthy risks with other people’s children. That’s the 153-yearold truth we should be pitching. Harvard or Bust External market pressures have buried camp’s simple truths. A recent camp ad campaign aimed at Asian parents in North American metropolises with large immigrant populations teased “Get a Harvard Diploma.” The text under that alluring headline explained that college admissions officers increasingly sought evidence of character development on applications. Camp, as it turns out, is not a frivolous waste of time. Yet many parents still need to be convinced of this fact. Which is why I appreciated the spirit of this advertisement. Of course, we’re all still waiting for the director of admissions at an Ivy League school to champion camps in particular, not character development in general. In 1922, Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot declared, “The organized summer camp is the most important step in education that America has given the world.” The hope that Eliot’s famous endorsement would be echoed by a contemporary director of admissions is, for now, a pipe dream. Wi lliam Fitzsimmon s , Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, came close to endorsing summer camp when he offered this advice to prospective applicants: “Bring summer back . . . Students need ample free time to reflect, to recreate (i.e. to ‘re-create’ themselves without the driving pressure to achieve as an influence), and to gather strength for the school year ahead” (2011). Fitzsimmons and his co-authors, Marlyn McGrath, director of admissions, and Charles Ducey, adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, also wrote that summer and other “time out” should be “time to step back and reflect, to gain perspective on personal values and goals, or to gain needed life experience in a setting separate from and independent of one’s accustomed pressures and expectations.” That’s camp. But let’s hear them say that explicitly. What a bold and important step that would be, nearly 100 years after Eliot’s proclamation! Linking pines and maples to ivy is disingenuous, but there is a grain of truth in every hyperbole. As Fitzsimmons explains, admissions officers at competitive schools do search for personal strength behind the numbers in every application. Sadly, their ability to fathom camp depends largely on an individual applicant’s ability to translate camp’s nourishing qualities. That complication means that many young people whose character has been forged at camp Believers in organized youth camping regularly flirt with ways to repackage the experience. Although many feel this market-driven approach is necessary to boost registration, it causes mission drift. Each time we recast camp’s beneficial outcomes — as something that helps with college admissions or career achievement — we avoid the gritty, unvarnished truth about camp’s power to accelerate development. The central truth that camp’s founders understood is this: Camp works best when it’s difficult, not when it’s Club Med in the woods (Dimock & Hendry, 1929). If building character were easy, organized camp would have no foundation and no justification. And if building character were simple, the world would be devoid of criminals, prejudice, and greed. The truth about building character is this: Maturation of social skills requires rejection; nurturing self-reliance requires loneliness; acquiring a sense of adventure requires fear; boosting self-esteem requires fai lure; learning emotion regulation requires loss; promoting unselfishness requires hardship; increasing kindness requires crowding; and establishing secure attachment requires homesickness (Peplau, 1985; Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994; Thurber & Walton, 2007). Camp works best when it’s difficult, not when it’s Club Med in the woods.
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