Categories Good SOIL Jim Vitale October 9, 2024

Why overnight camp | Pt. 2: Camp cultivates creative thinking

By Jim Vitale

This article is part of our “Why you should send your child to overnight camp” series. The series introduction explored the current research on outcomes for overnight campers and offered a list of the most important outcomes. Here, we go more in depth with one of those outcomes.

I’m a big fan of the liberal arts education. I am a graduate of a liberal arts institution and it is my hope that my kids will choose to attend one when they head off to college (a long, long time from now).

A liberal arts education is defined as a broad education encompassing a wide variety of subjects: literature, history, science, math, art, physical wellness, sociology, music, psychology, religion, philosophy, foreign languages, communications, linguistics, etc. A student at a liberal arts institution will declare a major and focus their studies on a particular topic, but they will also spend a significant amount of time studying subjects quite different from their declared major.

The goal of a liberal arts education is to create a well-rounded human being, someone who has a diverse knowledge of the world. A vital result of such an education is that students become exceptional critical thinkers.

“Critical thinking” is not taught, per se, but is developed through the studying of diverse topics. In my time in college, I was regularly amazed at the relationships I could draw between my theology, biology, and literature classes. I would not have been able to make critical connection between these topics if I had not studied them all at the same time.

While the scope of education has shifted decidedly toward more technical knowledge, a team of scholars at MIT reflect that there are certain human skills required in the workforce. “These human skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, initiative, integrity, and comfort with ambiguity, complement technical skills and cannot be directly replicated by today’s technology.” In studying a wide range of topics, the liberal arts education seeks to cultivate these kinds of human skills.

By now you’re probably wondering why the associate director of a summer camp is prattling on about the liberal arts. The reason is this: the camp experience functions very similarly to the liberal arts education in providing a wide variety of experiences.

One of the outcomes of sending your child to overnight camp is that it helps them to develop their “human skills,” particularly creative thinking.

In her Washington Post article, “I send my kids to sleep-away camp to give them a competitive edge in life,” Laura Clydesdale speaks to the immense importance of sending kids away to overnight camps. She talks at length about the challenges parents face in making summer plans for their kids. Parents want their children to be successful in life and for many, that means starting to prepare them for college as early as possible. Many parents, in collaboration with their children, have turn summer into another semester, squeezing in more educational opportunities to further their child’s academic career.

Often, these experiences are not summer camp or a summer job, but more school, music practice, or sports training.

We all want our kids to become successful in all areas of their life. But a successful life requires more than technical knowledge. A key part of success is giving people the tools to make creative connections between wildly different things (which is the goal of a liberal arts education, and, I would argue, the summer camp experience). In Clydesdale’s article, she references Adam Grant’s Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World. In that book, Grant says that Nobel Prize winners (some of the most successful people around) have both a depth of knowledge in their field and a breath of experiences outside it. Nobel prize winners are far more likely than others to participate in creative activities likes woodworking, writing poetry, singing, dancing, or even magic.

“It’s not just that this kind of original thinker actively seeks out creative pursuits,” Clydesdale writes, “These original experiences provide a new way of looking at the world, which helped the prize-winners think differently in their day jobs.” Prize winners don’t seek out a breath of interests because they’re prize winners; they become prize winners because they seek out a breath of interests. Having experienced so many different things, their brains are wired to approach challenges creatively. Camp, with its diversity of activities, is a goldmine for cultivating this kind of creative thinking.

A typical day at camp can involve studying the Bible, learning how to canoe, hiking in the woods, learning a new song, telling a story, navigating a tricky element on the ropes course with your peers, cleaning up your cabin, identifying wildlife, swimming, laughing with friends, worshipping, etc. All the while, camper’s brains are alight as new neural pathways are formed, making connections between things they normally wouldn’t experience in their daily lives.

The result, over time, is the cultivation of “human skills.” Clydesdale says it like this, “They might not have anything ‘constructive’ to place on their college application, but they will reflect, unwind, think and laugh. They will explore, perform skits they wrote themselves and make those endless friendship bracelets to tie onto the wrists of lifelong friends. The result will be that when they come back through our door, we’re pretty sure that, in addition to having gobs of creativity and independence, they’ll be more comfortable with who they are as people.”

And that might be the best gift we can give to our kids.

 

Read more entries in this series