Before we talk college and job applications, just a quick note about hoodies, blankets, and now… classic long-sleeve T’s.
We are running the Year of K&E Gear with a new item drop coming every month after you register. Hoodies and blankets are already on the way. This month are the long-sleeves below.
November 1st is the Registration Deadline for these. Check out the 2027 Dates and Rates page to register.
All right, on to kids and the future...
It's college and job application season, which means I'm writing recommendations right now for former campers and staff.
Dartmouth. Wake Forest. Michigan. Skidmore.
Art sales. Teaching positions. JP Morgan.
I don't miss applying for college or for jobs, but I do have to say I kind of love writing these. Each one is a reminder of someone amazing who went to camp or worked at camp. And it's a reminder of how many of these camp kids are going places.
Writing them has me back at the Hakuba Forum, where I met with educators from some of the most elite and premiere schools around the world.
What Is A Teacher For
There was a lot of talk at the forum about AI, and what the world looks like when it's full of bots and LLMs and apps that answer almost any question you have and build whatever you ask them to.
The role of a teacher used to be a whole bundle of things, but a huge piece of it was transferring information from the front of the classroom to the kids sitting in the rows and rows of desks out there in the crowd.
The best info is now more easily available through the internet and AI. So the standing-at-the-front-delivering-information piece of the job is getting smaller and smaller.
So these schools are asking a big question: what does it mean to teach and learn in this new future? And what does it look like to train the next generation of great teachers?
I know how it sounds when the guy who runs a summer camp says this, but the answer sure looks like camp counselors to me. They have never really been focused on the information transfer piece. They've always been focused on the connection piece.
Doing And Being
The schools at the forum are doing hard, impressive work on all of this.
Lots of them are building project-based learning, giving kids the space to have interesting ideas and build things. And then they spend hours and hours building assessment tools to measure how it's going, because that's the world they have to answer to.
One idea kept coming up all week: education is really good at doing, and not really good at being. (This was their version, not mine fwiw)
Camp is the flipped version. Nobody gets tested at camp. Kids have space to not be tested, space to not have all this pressure to succeed put on them. They just get to succeed by being.
And kids are here for almost seven weeks. It might be the only place on the planet where they get this kind of break to take care of themselves while living in a really healthy place.
It's as if ice cream was good for you. They love it that much, and it happens to be giving them the space to build the best skills there are.
Both Things Are True
Jason Cody Douglass was at the forum. Has degrees (plural) from Yale and runs The Innovation Fellowship, a school in Tokyo. He talked about the balance every school is trying to strike.
For the educators, the point is the whole kid, opening up how a kid thinks about themselves and the world. And the byproduct happens to be that lots of kids get into Yale and Dartmouth and Wake Forest and Michigan and Skidmore.
For plenty of families, it runs in the other direction. The point is the school, and the whole-kid stuff is the happy byproduct.
Families take one look at a university and often ask an obvious question first: what jobs do kids from here end up with? If the answer is great ones, the well-being piece can feel like a bonus instead of the point.
But really, those things are not mutually exclusive. Our camp kids tend to be really driven. Our camp families tend to be really driven. We get to focus on the being side all summer because our kids live the rest of the year inside all of that doing.
Which brings me back to the recommendations. The kids applying to those schools are the same kids who spent their summers at a place with no tests and no grades.
And even without those things, it's so easy to write about how they're going to succeed inside of institutions and jobs that require the skills needed to crush tests and ace report cards, all while feeling whole and staying connected to the people around them.
Honestly, when you think about it that way, the letters kind of write themselves.
Camp is great at the development of the whole child, but I want to help more practically as they leave us.
Can you run a 6-week internship this spring, May-June, just for a K&E former camper to help them launch their career?
Send me a quick reply saying “I’ve got an internship,” and let’s talk.
You got this,
Jack
PS - Have a question about how we plan summers? Schedule a call or even text me (cell below).