At Everwood Day Camp and our resident Camp, Camps Kenwood & Evergreen we specialize in teaching the skills that will be most important for kids to master in the 21st Century, yet are the most difficult to assess. Education thought leader Will Richardson wrote an interesting piece on “The Immeasurable”, and the challenges associated with teaching them in a formal school setting. At some point, I hope that Richardson comes to understand that many of these skills can be mastered during out of school time through experiences like Camp. Recently I was reading through Richardson’s blog, and came across this gem, in which I substituted the word “CAMPS” for “schools” to fit my thinking:
“We have a case to make, I think, for valuing the immeasurable over that which can be easily measured, and that the powerful role that CAMPS can play now is not delivering that narrow curriculum (which is now in a million places) but in developing the skills and dispositions or the “opportunity to participate in civic and deliberative discussions” which, at the end of the day, is kinda hard to machine score. It’s not an easy case to make in this world of competition and ranking and sorting. But it is where our real value is now. How we articulate that value and move it into the mainstream thinking is where our collective laser focus needs to be.”