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

You have an extraordinary opportunity before you. Because of the human scale of your enterprise, you are better positioned than most to make a significant difference in the lives of children. Each one of you oversees a little world unto itself, "occupying a few acres nestled in the woods somewhere." When you do your best work, your world is full of community spirit, cooperation, and caring. There is intensity of giving, extension of self and dedication to the common good. Your best programs cultivate trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, justice and fairness, caring, and civic virtue and citizenship after all. When you give of yourself completely, rest assured you are doing what needs to be done.

To that end, I implore you to keep in mind that these are difficult times, times that are especially hard on children. Even the "grown-up" ones I worked with in the university were overwhelmed by the complexities confronting them, by the monumental nature of the problems passed down to them by their parents' generation. Even they found the yoke of responsibility almost too much to bear. So go easy on your children, particularly the younger ones. They live in a troubled world, a world, I hasten to remind you, for which they are not yet responsible.

You should also be forgiving, not only of your children, but of yourselves. For among the many things that humble us in life is the tentative nature of our knowing. Yesterday's speculations are often today's facts. And today's facts are often tomorrow's past speculations. That it is difficult to know for sure what we know for sure should lead us all to be less judgmental and more tolerant of ourselves and others. Life is full of surprises, of little reminders that we are not the omniscient beings we like to think we are.

The challenge for each of us is to make the best possible use of our expanding knowledge in making day-to-day decisions such that we act with humility and the best of intentions. What it means to be a human being, what we can become, is largely up to us. What our continuing education gives us is an increasingly better vantage point from which to distinguish good choices from bad, to distinguish right from wrong. Our education helps us see more clearly. And that is both liberating and confining. The liberation lies in the opportunity our education affords us to shape the way we live. The confinement lies in the obligation our education demands of us to answer for the way we live. Opportunity and obligation. Together they constitute our freedom. History will judge us by the use of that freedom.

To use our freedom in a way that benefits children is the highest of purposes. For children represent all the possibilities yet untried. In their eyes we see a genuine inquisitiveness about the world. In their words we hear hypotheses just bursting to get out. And in their smiles we see the good for which we all yearn. There is no greater sadness than to see a child's enthusiasm for life diminished by the harshness of the outside world, or by the indifference of a parenting generation. At the same time, there is no greater joy than to take part in cultivating a child's enthusiasm for life and in seeing that child reach her or his fullest potential. For in the final analysis, as Tom Goodale from George Mason University avows, "There is nothing more central to the evolution of human society and culture than the responsibility of each generation for the next.