No canoes, campfires at these summer camps
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Summer camp used to be someplace away from home and civilization where children were sent to be kept busy and out of trouble. Older folks might have recollections of fresh-faced counselors in T-shirts and hiking boots, campfires, ghost stories, sleeping on cots in musty cabins and getting a “pink belly” for walking across the “sacred grass.” A few of those old-style summer camps remain, but times have changed. Sports and band camps proliferated, and then came a vast variety of camps to nurture and improve specific skills and talents.
Wednesday’s edition of this newspaper featured two of the most unusual summer camps.
Children have come from all over the country to attend the “I Can Talk” camp at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Bethel Park. Campers are kids with autism or with a disability that prevents them from speaking and who want to learn to communicate better.
And at California University of Pennsylvania, about 30 singers, actors, teachers and students of performing arts attended a weeklong retreat to help them improve their voices. The Estill intensive voice training was more of a workshop than a camp, but its purpose was the same: It brought people of similar goals and interests together in order to improve their skills.
These two programs underscore the need to maintain and improve our old-fashioned forms of communication in a world gone crazy with technology; a world in which too many people have retreated into cocoons, reaching out to other humans only through abbreviated cellphone texting and social networking.
There is no satisfying substitute for human interaction. So much more information is communicated and – more importantly – understood when people talk face to face. Speaking and listening are critical skills, and those of us with disabilities that make such interaction difficult should not be shut out of the conversation.
New communications technology has made it possible to earn a college degree without ever leaving the bedroom, but it can be better used to assist human interaction rather than replacing it.