I feel a need to brag on Susie Ma’am. She spent Thursday in Austin meeting with the Extended Learning Opportunity Council (ELOC).  The ELOC is a committee created the Texas Legislature to study non-school education environments.  The Texas Secretary of Education personally appointed each of the 13 members to represent various education and enrichment offerings, ranging from Boys and Girls Clubs to service organizations to camps.

The committee is part of a trend that I have found exciting and encouraging.  Educators and youth development experts have come to realize a critical truth: parents and schools are hugely important to children, but they are not enough.

Young people need to develop a wide array of skills in order to thrive in later life.  Schools teach many of these, including self-control, language and reasoning skills. Parents teach many of these, including outlook on life, work ethic and empathy.

But some skills are not well taught at home or in class.    For example, we parents cannot teach our children to be independent of us.  The classroom puts children together, but it is not a good environment to hone peer to peer communication and teamwork skills.

What is particularly exciting for us as camp professionals is the recognition of camp as an education environment. If you look back to a blog I posted here on June 12, you will see one entitled “China and the 3 Legged Stool” that talks about this trend as well.  Rather than repeat the information in it, I would like to share a few pieces of evidence that camps are entering the conversation.

1. First, having one of the seats on the ELOC designated for summer camp is very cool.
2. The Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (P21) has created a committee on “out of school time”. This partnership consists of some of the nation’s top companies and has become one of the most influential education groups in the world.  Singapore and Finland have used their data to reform their excellent education systems. P21 has named a camp professional to head up this new “out of school time” committee.
3. Major publications (the Atlantic, New York Times, Time and others) have written articles about the benefits of summer camp.
4. Recent research has revealed the importance of social-emotional learning as well as other “noncognitive skills” (grit, optimism, leadership) that need other learning environments.
5. Countries that have traditionally focused exclusively on high-pressure, classroom-based education (like Chinese education systems) are now exploring the possibilities of camp as a way to develop entrepreneurship and innovation.  Just this last year, I spoke at the International Camping Congress in Turkey and the inaugural China Camp Education Conference in Beijing.

So if you were in Austin on Thursday and saw a talented woman that looks like your camp director, but she seemed too well dressed, that might have been Susie Ma’am (or a supermodel)!

Steve Sir  

Want more like this? See: http://blog.campchampions.com/summer-camp-and-disruptive-moments