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Dec.11,2011
It’s almost time to load up the sleigh – Christmas is just around the corner! But before students from elementary school through college can begin to deck the halls and get ready for Santa, they have to finish what they’re doing at school. And for the vast majority of them that involves a whole lot of studying and taking tests.
Whatever they’re called – 9 weeks exams, semester tests, finals – nobody calls them fun. And most everybody would agree (including the teachers who have to administer and grade them all) that the only good thing about them is the feeling you get when you’re through with the last one and school is out until after New Year’s!
(Note: The teachers I know are doing an amazing job with the tools they have at their disposal and under all the requirements placed on them by school boards and the state and federal government. This post is not about teachers – it’s about the system we’ve required them to work under.)
Tests are how our education system measures what students learn. Some people (many parents and educators included) believe that what tests measure best is how good we are at taking tests. Their perspective: Teachers tell us something, and a few weeks later they ask us to recite it back to them on a test. If we’re good at that, after 12 years we can go to more school and take more tests. We might or might not be ready to get a job and earn a living when we finally graduate – but we’re bound to be at least pretty good at school!
There’s a lot of debate going on around the country about our education system and whether we’re giving our kids what they need to be happy and successful in the years to come. People generally agree there’s a problem, and that we need to do a better job of educating our kids, but they don’t all agree on the answer.
To many, the answer is more money for education. To others, the answer is more parental control and more school choice. Best-selling author and speaker, Seth Godin (who credits much of his success to growing up as a camper and counselor at summer camp), has his own ideas about What’s High School For?
If you read his thoughts, you’ll notice that he believes learning should be a lifelong pursuit. Most people would probably agree. But are our schools instilling “An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.”?
In school, many children (and college students) are motivated almost completely by grades. It might not be the grade itself that matters to the student - it might be the approval of parents, or the consequences incurred for making lower grades than someone else expected, but, usually, it all comes back to the grade.
In fact, if you think about it, you rarely hear the question, “What did you learn in that class?” Almost always it’s, “What did you make in that class?”
At camp, though, learning isn’t a job that has to be done. After a while, children begin to understand that even though they can earn awards and recognition for accomplishing something new, that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re no longer learning things for a grade – there’s much more to it than that.
Usually sooner rather than later, campers start wanting to learn – and they try new things simply for the joy of the experience and because of the realization that the more they put into something, the more they’ll get out of it. They’ll talk about how much fun they had at camp, and the fact they learned a lot in the process is almost lost on them – until they stop and think about the things they could do after they got home from camp that they couldn’t do before they left.
In a nutshell, in the vast majority of cases, learning things at camp is fun! And after we learn one thing, we want to build on it and learn even more. Not for a grade, but because we like the feeling of satisfaction we get when we work hard and we’re able to do something we’d never been able to do before. That satisfied feeling of accomplishment leaves us with “the desire to learn more” – because we want to feel that way again. Sadly enough, that’s not always the case at school.
This YouTube Video with some clips from The Office helps show what can happen when we try to motivate others simply by offering external rewards (such as grades, goodies, or cash) for desired behavior.
Sure, many of the things we do at camp are probably a lot more fun than many of the things we do at school. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have to work hard and continue to keep trying after we’ve failed, and then failed again. Plus, if we don’t learn how to ride a horse, or ride a wakeboard, or hit the target, then those things are pretty much no fun at all – and some can even be more than just a little bit scary.
We learn a lot of things at camp, but learning to love learning might be one of the most important of them all.
) can stay at camp forever, and they have both decided it’s time they spend their summers enjoying a few of the things that life outside of camp has brought their way.
