Sometimes I wonder if we're getting this right.
I mean, not really, I know we're getting it right. But it's not like there's a report card for camps, or a panel of camp judges showing up in August to score how we did overall.
We put a lot of thought into how summer is structured. What the days look like, what kids leave with, whether all of it adds up. And then a big part of the job is trusting it's the best way to run everything start to finish.
Every once in a while, though, you end up in a room with some of the most thoughtful educators in the world, and they basically confirm it for you.
Breezy and I just got back from about two weeks in Japan, and four of those days were the anchor of the trip: the Hakuba Forum, in Hakuba. Absolutely stunning, one of the best ski towns in the world, and the site of the '98 Nagano Winter Olympics.
(Adventure!) Dave and Lynn Kenney, who have been K&E mainstays for a lot of years, invited us. They're at camp every summer with their three kids, Dave runs so many of our trips, and the rest of the year they run the Hakuba International School. (I'm going to write a lot more about them next week. Deserves its own email.)
Every year their school founder and a team of incredible facilitators bring together educators from all over the world to talk about well-being in education. About 40 came this year. The best way I can describe it to summer camp people is summer camp for world-class educators.
The Room Was Stacked
These are very prestigious schools. The Dalton School in Hong Kong. Two really cool schools from India. A new international school in Sardinia, Italy.
And the Island School in the Bahamas, where high school kids go for a semester and do real research with the scientists on the island. The kids give up their phones the whole time. It's camp, but science on an island instead of sports and arts in the woods.
There were plenty of others.
Peter Senge was there as a speaker. He's a systems thinker out of MIT who wrote The Fifth Discipline. His big thing now is the Compassionate Systems Framework.
The ethos of the whole group was high energy, low ego. Every morning we broke into advisory groups, eight or so people from all over the world, meeting for an hour.
Then exercises all day. Every one of these schools is trying to take care of kids' education and kids' well-being at the same time, without trading either one.
Their families want full access to the most selective colleges in the world, and the schools want those same kids feeling whole and connected to the people around them.
We also spent a lot of time on a harder question: how do you prepare kids for a world that nobody understands what it's going to look like yet?
And how do these schools ensure that they are helping to guide kids on their path to being successful, confident, and happy? Which should all be synonymous with each other, but aren't always.
The Part About Camp
There was lots of joking about how at camp we're super lucky.
We get to just fully focus on taking care of kids. Wellness gets to be at the center of everything we do, because nobody is expecting us to increase anybody's SAT score.
The people in that room do all of that same thinking about well-being, and then run classes, exams, and the whole college process on top of it. I left with a ton of respect for how hard that job is.
And sitting in this unbelievably beautiful place, looking up at these mountains, talking about how to connect kids to each other, it was hard to miss that we're all reaching for the same thing.
The best schools in the world are working to give their kids the connection and belonging that we get to build whole summers around.
The more I heard about what they were striving for, the more it sounded familiar.
What I Think I Might Be Trying To Say
I came away really encouraged. The way we think about things at K&E really seems to align with what the best thinkers in this space around the world are trying to figure out and put into action for kids around the world who are going places.
One of the reasons I write this newsletter every week is accountability, to all of you and to myself.
Writing it down forces us to be constantly figuring out what we believe, what our culture is, and what kids actually get from being at camp.
Sometimes a camper says, "It's a friends camp, not a stuff camp," and it boils the whole thing down easily.
Sometimes it takes more than that, like talking to people who are thinking about these same things, just in a slightly different arena. Taking their ideas and putting them into action. Trading best practices. Talking through the stuff that’s working and what we need to think about for the future.
I want to be thinking about that all the time, and the best way I know to do that is to talk about it and write about it as consistently as possible.
We have work to do too. We always will. Getting clearer about the skills kids leave here with is part of the job every year.
But I got to sit for four days with people who think about kids' futures at the highest level. I'm appreciative to have been in the room. And I think, as a camp, we're on a very good track.
There’s no camp report card yet, but this group of educational pros seems to think we’re getting high marks. We’ll take it.
You got this,
Jack
PS - Have a question about how we plan summers? I'd love to talk. Schedule a call or even text me (cell below).