Summer Camps
- Author:
Winthrop Talbot, M.D.,
Ilolderness, N. II.
The scope and extent of the work that is now being done for boys and girls in summer camps are not generally appreciated. The oldest of the present camps was founded twenty-five years ago, and during the succeeding ten years some twenty other camps were started.
In 1890 the number of boys in summer camps was about two thousand. Four years later there were about two hundred camps in existence, and five thousand boys were in the field. The number has increased steadily and rapidly in the last five years. Five years ago about ten thousand boys received the benefit of outdoor life during the summer months. During the past season, 1907, there were between four and five hundred summer camps and about twenty-five thousand boys. Of these, fifteen thousand were in Y. M. C. A. camps, and about five thousand in settlement and charity camps. The value of outdoor summer training was recognized officially for the first time by the Y. M. C. A. in the year 1893.
.Five years ago, in 1903, the first girls’ camp was started. In 1907 there were thirty girls’ camps in existence, providing for fourteen hundred girls. This number will probably be doubled during the coming season.
For the past eight years it has been the custom of the directors of summer camps to meet biennially for a Camp Conference, in order that they may become familiar with improved methods of helping, training, and caring for children, with a view to producing the best possible results. These conferences have been addressed by many educators of note, including President Eliot, President Stanley Hall, and Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These discussions, which are published in the reports of the conferences, have proved to be of the greatest value. The summer camps are not merely places to which boys and girls may be sent in order to keep them off the streets. ]STor are they refuges from the evils of summer hotels and boarding houses. They are veritable training grounds in technical muscular control, where the children leam the best methods in field sports and track athletics, where they become familiar with nature and woodcraft, and where they see and take part in the ordinary farm processes.
Many camps employ the services of a physician or experienced physical trainer, and in this w^y strengthen the boys in all vital processes, such as respiration and digestion. As a rule careful study is given to food and sunlight, and much stress is laid upon early and long hours of sleep. The main and most important training, however, which the camp gives is consideration of others,?unselfishness and a kindly spirit. !No group of men and boys, or of women and girls can live together for ten weeks successfully and happily without placing this training first and foremost. The punctual accomplishment of small daily camp tasks, keeping things clean, neat and orderly is an education in itself of a very real sort.
This movement is now so well established and of such recognized value that educators are beginning to feel the need of correlating it with the established methods of the public schools. Certain municipal camps have been established and have proved a success. It is probable that the future of the movement will include not only many municipal camps, but also the much larger development of the camp idea as expressed in the outing or farm school. Probably it is one of the most potent means of combating these tendencies in the young which make crime easy and vice prevalent. The camp teaches impressively. that moral degeneration may be a result of oxygen starvation and lack of training the hands to do useful things. In the camp, in the outing or farm school, we find the solution of many of our most difficult moral problems.
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