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Rethinking character education: challenging the conventional wisdom about camp and kids: a substantial number of people believe that camps can do more than provide an opportunity to have fun: they can also promote children's social and moral growth
Camping Magazine, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Alfie Kohn
Another well-known experiment was conducted at an Oklahoma summer camp many years ago (Sherif et al. 1961). Researchers took a group of normal eleven- and twelve-year-old boys and divided them into two teams, the Rattlers and the Eagles. They lived for three weeks in separate cabins and were pitted against each other in competitive games, with prizes for the winning team. The boys soon began taunting and insulting each other, in some cases turning against good friends who were now on the opposing team. They burned each other's banners, planned raids, threw food, and attacked each other after the games and at night.
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The adults became alarmed and assumed that the best remedy would be to set up athletic contests between this camp and another one, so that the Rattlers and Eagles would have to join forces against a common enemy. (This is a typical American response: competition proves destructive, so the solution must be ... more competition.) It didn't work. The only strategy that finally succeeded in reducing tensions was to bring the two teams together not to face a common enemy but a common problem: fixing things at camp that had broken.
The moral of this study is that the nastiness that developed in the camp was not due to a defect of personality or character, but to the structure of the camp experience in which they found themselves. Thus, helping kids to be good people may require us to transform that structure rather than trying to remake the children.
More specifically, this experiment speaks directly to one central feature of camp: the extent to which it is experienced as a "caring community." The importance of that notion was affirmed in the "Principles of Effective Character Education for Camps," adopted by the National Camp Executives Group in September 2002. However, it may be an example of an ideal affirmed by everyone but not always fully supported in practice. Maybe there's room for more interdependent activities, where campers have to help one another to succeed. Maybe boys and girls are kept apart more than necessary. Maybe there's room for more cross-age activities, in which older kids have regular, structured opportunities to play with, guide, and nurture younger kids.
And maybe we need to rethink the pervasive use of win/lose activities. When I do workshops for educators, I sometimes ask them, rather perversely, to figure out a way to eliminate a sense of community and to extinguish any feeling of belongingness and safety. The most common response I hear is that awards and competitive games would do the job nicely. After all, the central message taught by all forms of competition can be summarized in a sentence: "Other people are potential obstacles to may success."
Small wonder that research consistently finds that setting kids against one another in contests leads to less trust, less accurate communication, less sensitivity, less likelihood of helping people in need, and less capacity to imagine how things look from someone else's point of view. All of this is troubling to contemplate, particularly in a society so in thrall to the ideology of winning, but the implications of these data are unmistakable. The problem isn't with individuals who need to be taught sportsmanship. The problem is with activities that stipulate that one child (or team) can succeed only if another fails.
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