This is an excerpt of an article taken from Canadian Camping Magazine – February 1949 Issue
The Magic of Camping – Hedley S. Dimock
Today organized camping has achieved a large physical dimension and a highly acceptable status in the educational and social structure of Canada and the United States. More significant than the physical expansion that has taken place in camping is the transformation and the enrichment in its objectives, program, and personnel. The curious soul is prompted to ask, what has brought about this transformation? What is this magic of camping?
The causes of the phenomenal growth of camping are, of course, many and diverse. Not least among them are the vision, faith, and quality of leadership of the persons who have conducted the kind of camps that have become highly prized by parents and the public. But the most fundamental cause lies in the distinctive role or function of camping as an essential complement to the experiences and education of our modern industrial civilization.
Life in the modern community, with its machinery and congestion and routine, is incomplete and impoverished. It tends to deprive persons of any vital sense of their kinship with the world of nature. The life and education that the city can give is only half of life and education at their best. To be complete it should be supplemented with “the other half”, the ingredients of which are fresh and vital experiences of outdoor living.
We are all children of nature, our closest kinship is with the universe “in which we live and move and have our being.” But the city man is fast becoming a creature of gadgets and machines, of routine and regimentation, of crowds and customs. We sense but dimly, if at all, through the smoke screen of man-made artificialities, that we belong to an orderly universe and are dependent upon it for breath and food and life itself.
It is a primary purpose and obligation of the organized camp to help develop in children, and to restore to those who are older, this throbbing sense of kinship with and emotional at-homeness in the natural universe.
The treasure house of the world – and of natural science – now fugitive behind doors that are barred and bolted to the city dweller – may be opened wide to the camper through contact and experience with field and forest, lake and hill, star and cloud. Man’s continuing dependence on nature for his physical needs may be sensed as the camper has firsthand experience in growing or cooking his food, in building a shelter, in the exploration of lake and forest.
Some day – soon, we hope – outdoor education will be as much a part of the education of the American child as reading and writing and “rithmetic.” But such a development will come because many agencies and persons have pioneered and proven its worth as the inalienable right of every citizen.