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All right, on to the show here.
Sometimes I wonder if we're getting this right.
I mean, I know camps are getting it right. But it's not like there's a report card for all of us, or a panel of camp judges showing up in August to score the summer.
We all put a ton of thought into how our summers are structured. What the days look like, what kids leave with, whether all of it adds up. And then a big part of the job is trusting it's the best way to do this.
Every once in a while, though, you end up in a room with some of the most thoughtful educators in the world, and they basically confirm it for you.
Breezy and I just got back from about two weeks in Japan, and four of those days were the anchor of the trip: the Hakuba Forum, in Hakuba. Absolutely stunning, one of the best ski towns in the world ('98 Nagano Winter Olympics anyone?).
Our hosts were Dave and Lynn Kenney, camp people through and through. They're at K&E every summer with their three kids, Dave runs trips for us, and the rest of the year they run the Hakuba International School.
Every year their school founder and a team of incredible facilitators bring together educators from all over the world to talk about well-being in education. About 40 came this year.
The best way I can describe it to this crowd is summer camp for world-class educators.
The Room Was Stacked
These are very prestigious schools. The Dalton School in Hong Kong. Two really cool schools from India. A new international school in Sardinia, Italy.
And the Island School in the Bahamas, where high school kids go for a semester and do real research with the scientists on the island. The kids give up their phones the whole time. It's camp, but science on an island instead of sports and arts in the woods.
Peter Senge was there as a speaker. He's a systems thinker out of MIT who wrote The Fifth Discipline. His big thing now is the Compassionate Systems Framework.
The ethos of the whole group was high energy, low ego. Every morning we broke into advisory groups, eight or so people from all over the world, meeting for an hour.
Every one of these schools is trying to take care of kids' education and kids' well-being at the same time, without trading either one. Their families want full access to the most selective colleges in the world, and the schools want those same kids feeling whole and connected to the people around them.
The Part About Camp
There was lots of joking about how at camp we're super lucky.
Camp gets to just fully focus on taking care of kids. Wellness gets to be at the center of everything, because nobody is expecting any of us to raise anybody's SAT score.
And I'll say to this crowd what I didn't say to my parents: more than a few people in that room were openly a little jealous of that.
These schools are trying to cultivate an experience as close to camp as they can, while still making sure their kids can get into great colleges and great jobs.
They're working overtime on bringing connection and belonging to their version of the classroom, and meanwhile that’s the stuff every good camp I know is already built on.
The more I heard about what they were striving for, the more familiar it all sounded.
The Gas Up
I sent a version of this to all of our K&E families this week. But the camp-people version of the takeaway is bigger than one camp.
This wasn't a camp conference. Nobody in that room was selling summer. And still, they’re circling these ideas for kids around “Who am I” and “Who are we”, which are the things camps have been running on since the beginning of summer camp time.
The way we think about kids aligns with what the best education minds in the world are trying to figure out and put into action. For a group of kids and parents who are holding them to a high standard.
We have work to do too. We always will. Getting clearer about the skills kids actually leave camp with is the whole industry's homework, every year. We have to get better at saying it more and more clearly.
But I flew home like a bajillion hours with a question something like:
Are the next generation of the world's best teachers leading campfires in the woods right now?
We just have to figure out how to keep showing up and telling the world how important camp is. Post on LinkedIn, make social content, pay influencers. I haven’t figure this out yet, but I know it really matters.
Because there's no camp report card yet.
But some of the smartest people in education seem to think we're all getting high marks. We'll take it.
You got this,
Jack
PS - One more call for Write For Camp. Registration closes tomorrow.
Have a question? Hit reply, or email doug@thesummercampsociety.com, and we'll answer everything.
