Might the best schools not be schools at all? Are summer camps a better starting place?
I am planning my annual pilgrimage to The Chewonki Foundation, where I spent eight summers.
The Foundation in its current form was brought into existence by Tim Ellis, a former teacher at a prestigious New England prep school, who took over Chewonki when it was "just" a boys' summer camp. He believed, and as it turned out quite rightly, that he could shape and enrich boys more in two months during the summer than a traditional school program for the whole rest of the year.
The camp (and now additional academic programs) stresses community, stewardship, projects, leadership, and responsibility. 
While these are now clichés used in the marketing lies of most school brochures and mission statements, Chewonki actually meticulously focuses on them and delivers.
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The camp would nail most of Gardner's multiple intelligences, from music to linguistic, before noon. Rather than grades or metrics for the camp, the parents get extensive written notes on their boys both half-way through and at the end of the summer.
The boys chose their activities (they couldn't do nothing) but all were different paths to the same core themes. The cultural alignment of the counselors was done through an extensive "pre-camp" that taught both skills and values (what does it say that an eight week summer camp program has a longer "onboarding" process than Microsoft?). When I think what I personally learned, I have to include both my time as camper and counselor.
As the cracks in the current school system get larger, as the new toxic vision of "classes as test-prep" curdles, hopefully we will look for new models to get off of our current false peak. And I worry about the return of the default vision of most schools to be a well-funded prep school, and most colleges to be Harvard or Brown. But if I were in charge of the collective consciousness, I would set the inspiration of most schools to be much more like Chewonki.
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I have often written, the best place to learn about forestry is in a forest, the best place to learn about law is in a courtroom.
This is no doubt influenced by my own childhood, as I spent what added up to months in summer camps.
What I learned there has noting to do with tests or academics. But I learned to sail a boat, paddle a canoe, build a fire, find food in the wilderness, sing (badly) at a campfire, and so much more.
I also learned attitudes of self-reliance and independence, camaraderie, ceremony, attentiveness, and appreciation for wild spaces. I would not be the person I am without that experience.
I wonder, why can't childhood be a series of adventures - two months at a camp, a month in a courtroom, two months traveling with police officers, three weeks at the fire station, and more?
What I want most of out an education, I think, is to spark a dream in a child's eye, a dream born out of authentic experience in a real world, and nurtured with the best care and support a society can provide.
Ayuh. John Seely Brown has said that he learned more about complex math by taking apart engines in his backyard than in a classroom. I know the defining learning of my own son (whom we home-school and sometimes unschool) is taking care of his flock of chickens. I learn myself through throwing myself into tough challenges for which I am unqualified.
Yes, experienced based learning is so much richer and often faster than classroom based experiences.
A trend is Australia that worries me is that that the "kids that are not good at school" do work based learning programs and are being streamed in vocational learning. These sort of experiences should be open to everyone.
I keep in wondering what the barriers are to experience based learning in schools. Is it just to hard and to chaotic for most educators? or is the focus on tell and test
The intellectual range of current media (and thereby schools) is narrow, focusing mostly on analysis and symbolic manipulation. Any "learning to do" is then shunted off to vocational. In fact, leadership and other "doing" skills are at a much higher level than analysis and symbolic manipulation, but because they fall through the cracks of words, they fall through the cracks of curricula, and are not understood nor developed.
Thank you for your response.
The idea of these complex higher level skills falling between the cracks of words is interesting. My own background is in the visual arts, where training is all about doing, building and making visual experiences and assessment evidence is always visual portfolios.
A friend that was a science researcher that didn't believe in the idea of a visual art PhD by practice came along to seminar and afterwards her comment was "what you do is hard, science is easy"
What I think is really hard about these area is assessing and measuring them. We know them when we see them, but that hard to explain in words.
Robin,
I believe all of the Big Skills have fallen through the cracks precisely because they cannot be easily captured nor nurtured in other people using only linear content. Visual arts will certainly get more important, and take a look at the display entries here as well to see clumsy examples. The other notions of aesthetics and design is also getting some momentum, in part due to Apple's success.
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