When fulfilling the duties of a typical summer internship, teenagers and college students will find themselves engaging in such oh-so-complex tasks as making photocopies, fetching coffee, and setting up conference rooms. On occasion, they might even bear witness to some actual work. It’s a wonder, then, that job recruiters continue to be swayed by these brand-name resumé builders and regard summer camp work as soft, adolescent play in a land of make-believe. I guess they haven’t realized that no charge could be more concrete, grave, and educational than building and sustaining a world inhabited by other people’s children.Internship grunt work imbues few, if any, of the skills necessary for future positions, but the bigger problem is that it doesn’t inspire, empower, or motivate young people. You know what does? Responsibility. During the nine summers I worked in camp, and now, as I cap off my tenth summer as a staff trainer, I would point to an inspiring pedagogical practice we employed in the development of the source materials disseminated to counselors for weekly ethics discussions with their campers. When building these packets — sourcing the prompt texts and writing the guiding questions — we would only slightly alter the content and language utilized for the younger divisions. Despite the six-year age gap between oldest and youngest campers, we maintained that the children could and would rise to meet the intellectual challenges presented to them. We would remind our counselors that children are capable; far more capable than we tend to think, and if we want them to grow into people of substance, we must take them seriously and indicate, through our posture toward them, that we believe that they can rise.The same is true for camp staff. If, as so many summer camps do, we lay the responsibility of the program’s functioning at the feet of young adults — a responsibility that includes the interdisciplinary and dynamic work of managing teams, sustaining constant communication in high-stress environments, ensuring the safety and emotional well-being of children, literally building and dismantling the programming infrastructure, and being flexible with respect to one’s job description — they will assume that responsibility with pride and a sense of mission. It’s simple, really. When we give people real responsibility, thereby making them vital to an operation, their emotional, temporal, physical, and ideological investment in that operation increases. When I train camp staff, I tell them to hold this mantra, among others, at the forefront of their minds: If I don’t do it, it won’t get done. With that, I hope to engender the paradoxical and powerful pairing of the humility and inflated sense of importance that fuel a person’s commitment to the project at hand and stimulate his desire to exercise leadership.In John Holt’s book “Escape from Childhood,” wherein the revolutionary educator, known for his objection to traditional schooling, explores the needs and rights of children, he writes, “My own belief is that young people smoke and drink too much as a way of trying to look grown-up in a society in which there is no real and serious way to be grown-up.” The focus of substance abuse aside, there is something radical and important about Holt’s recognition that young people aren’t regarded and valued as they should be, that they crave opportunities to be held accountable and taken seriously. Summer camps are magical-feeling places because they are worlds unto themselves in which society is assembled differently; in summer camp, young people top the hierarchy, taking up as much space as their imaginations, spirits, and bodies allow, and the programmatic and developmental results are astounding.Looking beyond the responsibility and empowerment that a camp work experience offers, there is also something of unparalleled long-term value in the camp environment — the container in which these skills develop.At bottom, no matter how serious camp staff training or programming may be, the summer is still about developing and deepening friendships — in other words, it’s about community. Existing and evolving in a truly interdependent community forces a person to develop deep self-awareness and exercise muscles that work to care for the collective. This is a world in which the physical movement of hundreds of young children through the course of a day — from meals to sports to bunk meetings to shower time to camp-outs to color war — depends on the synchronization of the office, kitchen, athletic, maintenance, lifeguarding, music, art, nature, theater, and education staffs’ efforts. Synchronization at such a level forces reflection — it forces a person to hear others’ criticism of his shortcomings and to understand that the collective’s reception may weigh more than one’s intentions, and it yields an understanding of one’s place within a larger mission. As we all, eventually, learn, there are hard skills that are easily acquired through coursework, and there are soft skills that can only be developed in the course of life. If I were recruiting for any sort of work short of surgery, welding, or some other profession requiring expert mechanical skills, I would sooner look for people who know what it means to work in service of something bigger than themselves than people who know how to work a spreadsheet or put together a powerpoint presentation. I would look for confidence, passion, grit, team spirit, and a sense of responsibility. I’d trust the onboarding process to train my employees in what’s teachable, but I’d be sure to only invest in powerful, hungry learners. I’d be sure to find recruits who have done the real-world work necessary to be sensational.
