Camp Treetops

The links on the side of this blog are for three educational institutions to which I am affiliated. The third one on the list is for Camp Treetops (or click here), a children’s camp in the highest peaks of the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. I’ve worked there since 1999 when I began as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. During the summers since we started, my family and I have had many wonderful experiences there as members of the community.

When folks ask, I tell them that in many ways CTT is like other sleep-away camps. The kids live either in platform tents or in cabins and they take their meals in a central dining room. They swim, ride horses, do arts and crafts, play games, sing songs, sit around camp fires, and go on trips. They make new friends, get homesick, and in the end (for the most part), have great summers.

But in other ways we are vastly different than other children’s camping experiences available today. How and why are we so different? I think the differences become evident, one by one, as one begins to peel away the many layers that give the place its personality. The differences can be found in our rich history as an educational institution and in the values we cherish and strive anew to uphold each summer as our community gathers in late June.

Our values date back to the beginning of camp in the early 1920’s. CTT was founded then by several proteges of John Dewey. Helen and Doug Haskell (Helen too had been a student of Dewey's at Columbia), who became the directors a few years after CTT's founding and ran it for decades before they retired, strove to create, with great purpose, a community for children firmly grounded in the Progressive ideals of integration, democratization, and child-directed experiential learning espoused by the likes of Dewey, Parker, and Hall.

To this day, CTT is firmly grounded in these values. Determination and self-discovery, living and working together to accomplish tasks for the good of the community, engaging in the service of others for the common good, and the importance of environmental stewardship are camp values that are as evident today as they no doubt were during the first decade of its existence.

Here are five ways CTT is different from other children’s camping experiences available today:

First, we strive harder (with real purpose) to provide a more diverse camping experience than other camps and although sometimes it is hard to accomplish this to the extent we might like, we strive nevertheless to make it so. At our founding, we were a camp that served boys and girls of various ethnic backgrounds, all living together in one camp community (an extreme rarity in the 1920’s). We have since grown to be a community in which children can be found from a variety of ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds; countries of origin; socioeconomic circumstances; and family configurations. All these children bring to camp varied cultural and social complexities, as well as unique abilities and interests.

Second, virtually all choices about what activities to do each day rest in the laps of individual campers. Many camps have proscribed programs for their children, who are scheduled each day to a degree that is similar to their school programs, with very little inherent choice. At CTT, children participate in three councils each day, one after each meal, during which they make choices about what they will do for the next portion of the day. Because of this, children are free to pursue activities that are of interest to them, thus helping to ensure even more growth as their natural interests and inclinations work to their benefit within the specific activities they have chosen. We are as child-directed a program as I have seen.

Third, we are community-service oriented. We work, at a variety of levels, to accomplish necessary tasks for the community. This service is evident when, for example, four children work together throughout the course of the summer to maintain their living quarters. It is evident when members of the community (children and adult) undertake daily “workjobs” designed to provide needed community services ranging from supplying toilet paper to washhouses and setting tables for meals, to fixing boats at the waterfront and supplying firewood to fire pits. It is evident when, once a week, the entire community assembles to accomplish a large community service task like weeding the potato field or clearing rocks from new horse pasture. It is also evident, perhaps more so, when a sense of volunteerism sweeps the place on the spur of the moment such that we accomplish difficult tasks such as quickly moving large amounts of hay into the barn.

Fourth, CTT maintains as one of it’s central tenets a focus on sustainability as it pertains to both the environment and to agriculture. We recycle all that can be recycled and we compost both food and barn waste, but we also have a working organic farm with several acres of gardens and a barn full of animals that we all work together to sustain. We tend to the gardens and to the animals so that ultimately the harvests of both can help sustain us. It may seem a mundane task to go into the garden and pick carrots or lettuce, but for many children it is quite novel. It is even more unique to participate in the harvesting of, for example, chickens, as I did last summer. It is a powerful and emotional life cycle lesson.

Finally, child-directedness and choice-making often lead to wonderful moments of self-discovery. Since we place a premium on these methods, we tend to see, more than do other camps, I suspect, evidence of accomplishment as a function of sheer will and perseverance. And the examples are not all related to the big goals such as arriving at the summit of a mountain or jumping a horse in the riding ring. Many of the triumphs are small ones that go almost unnoticed: spending seven weeks away from home, overcoming a fear of the water, making friends with someone who doesn’t speak your language so well, or feeling good about helping others.

One of the things I do at camp is teach a college-level course on progressive education as it is applied at CTT. As you might imagine, we focus much on the work of John Dewey who was born and raised not all that far away from camp. Given that camp was founded by his proteges and conceptualized in a manner that was in keeping with the things he believed, I sometimes sit and look out across the pasture toward the barn and the driveway and picture Dewey arriving for a visit with his former students. It is plausible, I believe, to think that he may have been a visitor here. If it did happen, I am sure he must have been pleased to find a community striving hard to maintain ideals he held very dear. If he could visit today, I think he would find that very little has changed.

Until next time…