Summer Camps and Student Travel

Report Outline
Boom in Organized Summer Activities
Summer Camps and the Public Interest
Long-Range Impact of Summer Activities
Special Focus

Boom in Organized Summer Activities

Wide Participation in Summer Youth Activities

When school lets out this year, the summer vacation will mean, for millions of American youngsters, a change of pace but little or no respite from supervised education. Many will go on learning in the largely outdoor setting of organized camps. Other millions will pursue their studies in the classroom but under the relaxed or experimental conditions encouraged in numerous schools to combat the summer doldrums. Even as educators extend the learning season, they try to offer as diverse and attractive a collection of voluntary summer programs as possible. As one study said: “Most of the available evidence suggests that summer study and teaching are not necessarily debilitating; indeed, the opposite can be true. Yet it is equally sure the emotional opposition to summer work has scarcely abated.”

Organized summer activities for young Americans probably will be more variegated and extensive this year than ever before, and upwards of 12 million are expected to take advantage of them. Whatever it may be—a summer camp, a day camp, a work camp, a travel-study tour, summer school in some newly attractive form, or one of many specialized activities—virtually all will have a common purpose —to broaden the horizons of the growing generation.

Informed sources say that 7½ million American youths will attend camps, close to a million of them for up to eight weeks. Summer schools will enroll about three million boys and girls. Perhaps 10,000 American students will attend regular classes at foreign universities; many times that number will travel abroad. At home, the Boy Scout organization has half a million boys and leaders on the road every summer; the Scouts put them up at more than a thousand camps.