Designed by Andrea Piacquadio
After babysitting for ten begrudging months during graduate school, I swore that after graduation there would be not a single child in my workplace future. Fast forward to eight months post graduation and I find myself working in the office of a children’s summer camp. And what’s even worse for the consistency of my personal narrative – I’m enjoying it. By no means is it a glamorous job, and on the days when the dogs smell especially bad and the campers’ parents are particularly demanding, I remind myself that, if anything, summer camp is temporary. The season will end and so will this season of my career. But before that happens, before I can recall my time at camp with the mental clarity that only hindsight offers, there are themes I find deserving of my attention.
Summer camp is nothing less than a phenomenon. I say “phenomenon” intending the full weight of the word. It’s a culture all its own. There are practices, words, songs, in-groups, out-groups, and materials that are all specific to camp culture. Beyond the culture of one camp organization, American summer camps as a whole are generally thought of as rustic, sleep-away experiences for children to encounter the outdoors in a supervised setting and outside their family unit. There are expected to be canoes, a mess hall, a lake, cabins, and other elements that create the archetypal “summer camp” feel that rarely exists elsewhere in American society. I understand summer camp culture as being in direct dialogue with three main facets of capitalist ideology: intentional technology, localized community, and the prioritization of fun.
The first facet is a camp culture that is adverse to “distracting” technologies of convenience. These technologies are usually cell phones, smart watches, tablets, and anything that connects to the internet. If capitalism wants you to be hyper connected at all times, camp foregrounds the benefits of disconnecting. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the absence of these modern technologies was readily embraced by the vast majority of campers as well as their parents. At the camp I work at, campers and counselors alike are separated from their internet connections by locking their devices away in a large metal tackle box to be retrieved at the end of the week. Only upper management and medical personnel have their phones with them during the camp session, and the rest of the staff use walkie talkies. One walkie talkie per cabin group, and one for the office; there’s certainly a novelty to the situation. During a rainstorm last week, all the campers retreated to their cabins with their counselors and checked in on the walkie talkie system. There was an excited lilt to the way each counselor said, “over,” at the end of their message. We were all together, experiencing the rainstorm, and no one existed but us.
The rainstorm vignette leads us into the next facet of camp culture that is in dialogue with capitalist ideology: intense and localized community. Much like the discourse around American college campuses providing a uniquely walkable living environment, I find that summer camp is a parallel experience in this regard. Camp creates for campers a localized community environment where all of their social, physical, emotional, and bodily needs can be met, for perhaps the first time in their lives. Their “neighbors” are the cabins next to theirs. They get to wake up and all go to breakfast together before the day of activities. All meals are shared, and the intimate practices of washing are done in close proximity. There is an onsite infirmary where campers can take daily medicine or receive first aid treatment. There’s a “General Store” stocked with snacks, hats, and flashlights. There are no commutes involved, no liminal wait times between events, and campers have the autonomy to decide for themselves how to go about their day.
This palpable “hereness” is visible also in how potential barriers to social relationships between campers are dissolved in favor of the vastly more important commonality of being in the same place at the same time and experiencing the same events. For many campers, summer camp is the first time in their lives where they feel truly loved by someone outside of their family. This intentionally chosen and physically localized community created by summer camp is a community that exists because it was chosen and created.
Perhaps most radically in dialogue with capitalist ideology, summer camp prioritizes fun. The expectation of summer camp is that children are essentially playing games all day. They are watching skits, they’re on the lake, swimming in the rock pond, making friendship bracelets, or singing camp songs. This is a facet of summer camp that can and should stand on its own. It’s interesting for me to notice how camps decide to sell their importance to parents. Some camp mission statements may describe how they serve a particular population, while others may purport to teach a selection of moralities. Indeed, lessons learned at summer camp can be incredibly valuable, as camp presents a particular opportunity to impart information about the world to children. But in reading a spectrum of summer camp mission statements, it becomes apparent that there is a trend towards rationalizing the existence of camp beyond fun and play. Choose our camp because here your child will learn how to be the best leader they can be! But what if the camp is purely fun? Would it be so terrible that a child spends a week or two of their summer playing and making friends? If capitalism prioritizes the ideals of constant work, improvement, and growth, summer camp culture is a response that says to stop, look around, and enjoy. This is actually the point of it all.
All that said, the summer camp industry is by no means a utopia. While it may be interpreted as a response to capitalism, summer camp still exists within the capitalist system. There is a baseline monetary fee to attend, and if the child’s parent(s) cannot afford it, they don’t come. Furthermore, there is plenty to be said on the history of military romanticization and nationalistic undertones that characterized the foundations of many American summer camps. To this day, a camp is merely a framework for activity, but it is up to the camp organization to design their own value systems and outcome priorities.
When I say that summer camp is a response to capitalist ideology, I do not mean that it is an answer in and of itself to the woes of capitalist inequality. Rather, summer camp demonstrates a desire for an alternative way of being. The loudly individualistic, fast-paced, workaholic, technology-obsessed culture of modernity creates within itself reprieves. As Paris explains, this is how “modernity is actually lived: not as an endless parade of new technologies and consumer products but as a back and forth between tradition and innovation. As camp life demonstrates, the modern [is] inherently plural and untidy, and it [is] experienced as such both by adults and children” (2008; 10). To me, this means there exists wiggle room to cherry pick for ourselves what innovations we want to promote and what traditions we want to keep.
Are summer camps going to solve the world’s problems? No. But I would argue that if we recognize specifically the reasons why summer camps are so beloved, we may begin to wonder how to implement some summer camp mentality into our everyday lives. We can start by engaging with our hyperlocal communities, interrogating when technologies of convenience are actually convenient or simply distracting, and working to regularly prioritize fun.
Citation
Paris, Leslie. 2008. Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. New York
University Press.