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. Playtime 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.

Peg L. Smith

Chief Executive Officer

COPYRIGHT 2005 American Camping Association
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group