The weight of the world: why camp is ever more important - 1993 Cal-West Camping Conference keynote address - Repositioning Camp For The Future

Camping Magazine, March-April, 1994 by Daniel L. Dustin

Editor's Note: The following was the keynote address given at the 1993 Cal-West Camping Conference.

When I was a college professor, I began each semester by posing the following question to my students: "If ignorance is bliss, then what is an education?" I did not expect a quick answer. Indeed, any such answers would have been suspect. What I did expect was that the students would brood over the question, that they would chew on it for the length of the term. The students understood that we would come back to the question later.

While some professors enjoy asking questions to which they already know the answer, I was not one of them. If I had known what an education was, I would not have inquired about it. Perhaps I was selfish in that regard, but I was never particularly interested in covering old ground with my students. I did not consider myself their guide. I carried no detailed maps with me, no specific lesson plans. I saw myself simply as a fellow traveler, an explorer of half-baked ideas, a person who was interested in learning too.

What I have come to understand about an education, then, is a result of observing both my students and myself over a number of years. And while I would like to report that our education has been joyous, it has not. On the contrary, it has been onerous. For what our education has taught us is that the more we know about the world, the more responsible we become for its welfare. The more clearly we see the connections between our actions and the consequences of those actions, the more accountable we become for them both. Our education has led us slowly but surely out of a blissful, childlike state of ignorance into a more exacting, adult state of awareness. It has demanded, like it or not, that we shoulder more and more the weight of the world.

This evolution of responsibility for our conduct is, in the main, desirable. It is what an education ought to be about. It may even be the most important part of growing up. For what it eventually leads to is an internalized locus of control, a sense of efficacy, a feeling that we can make a difference. But there is also a down side to this education that is seldom talked about. The down side stems not so much from the fact that life gets more burdensome as our responsibility for it increases, but from the fact that we ask each generation to carry this burden at a younger and younger age.

When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, cigarette smoking was little more than a matter of taste, a social convention to some, a mere irritant to others. Not much was known then about the deleterious effects of smoking on human health, other than the fact that athletes who smoked seemed to get winded more easily. Indeed, smoking in my age group was dismissed quickly as an act of rebellion, a defiance of authority, a relatively harmless way of demonstrating one's coming of age. When it came to understanding the consequences of smoking, 35 years ago we were living in a blissful state of ignorance.

Today it's another story. We understand the connections between smoking and ill effects on human health. We understand that cigarettes harm smokers, even kill them, as well as nonsmoking others. Cigarette smoking today is not the same activity it was in the 1950s and 60s. People who smoke now, including youngsters, are responsible for their choice and its consequences in a way people never were before. Why? Because now we know better. And the more we know about the consequences of our behavior, the less excuse we have for misbehaving. The more knowledge we possess the more difficult it is to be innocently irresponsible. Knowledge makes the world, and our responsibility for it, a more serious proposition.

In this regard, smoking is but one of many behaviors that we have come to think of differently as more and more is learned about their negative effects. Sexual promiscuity that used to be naughty is now known to be deadly. Drug and alcohol abuse that used to be irresponsible is now understood to be self-destructive. Even food that we used to eat with little appreciation of its effect on our body is now served with a warning. The very living of our lives, then, has become more demanding with each passing day as a direct result of our learning.

Were this an issue for adults only, I would not harp on it. I expect adults to bear the burden of responsibility. But these problems percolate down through the lives of our children as well; either indirectly through parents who have been diminished by self-destructive indulgence, ordirectly through their own bad habits. Smoking, sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and a host of other social and biological maladies are strangers neither to our colleges and universities, nor to our high schools and junior high schools, nor, increasingly, to our elementary schools. Our children's lives are becoming more demanding too.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating, consider a recent article in the Congressional Quarterly Researcher that contrasts the top problems in the public schools as identified by teachers in 1940 with those of 1990. In 1940 those problems were: talking out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, cutting in line, dress-code infraction, and littering. In 1990 the top problems were: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Consider as well that the National Education Association recently reported that 100,000 students carry guns to school every day in the United States, and that 160,000 others miss school because of intimidation or fear of bodily harm.