Education: Boys & Girls At Work

A young Harvard graduate, Robert E. Lane, work-camp secretary of the International Student Service, arrived in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. last spring with an incredible proposal: a group of college boys & girls wanted the town to give them a tough job at manual labor—and they would pay for the privilege of doing it. Wilkes-Barre’s puzzled citizens at first refused to bite. Eventually young Stanley Mesavage, industrial forester for the Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce, who was worried about forest fires that annually ravage the nearby Poconos, persuaded State and U.S. forestry officials to accept the collegians’ offer.

Result: ten college girls and eight boys last week were hacking their way, with axes, brush hooks and mattocks, up a wooded mountainside, building a truck trail for fire fighting, clearing the way to a new mountain park where Wyoming Valley coal miners might go to picnic and play. The Valley was thoroughly mystified. So were some 40 other U.S. communities where 800 high-school and college students set up similar work camps this summer and paid $50 to $100 each for a chance to do constructive work.

Work camps, a new phenomenon in U.S. education, have twice as many campers this summer as last, are assuming the proportions of a national movement. Eleanor Roosevelt, sponsor of Robert Lane’s group (I.S.S.), has proposed that they be compulsory for all U.S. youth.

The idea of work camps has distinguished parentage. Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin advocated them, and William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War, proposed in 1910 that all youths be conscripted as an “army enlisted against nature . . . to get the childishness knocked out of them and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” First work camp was organized in northern France in 1920 by Pierre Ceresole, a Swiss pacifist. By 1931 Republican Germany had 280,000 youths enrolled in Government-subsidized work camps; Adolf Hitler expanded them into the Nazi labor service.

First U.S. work camps were those of CCC. But not to be confused with CCC are such camps as the one in Wilkes-Barre, whose prime purpose is not conservation or relief but education. They enroll rich youngsters as well as poor, are intended to give them experience in democratic living. Introduced in the U.S. by the American Friends Service Committee (1934), they are still run by private groups. The Friends now have 16, the Student Service five. They build schools, parks, playgrounds, cooperative houses, community centers. In Grafton, N.H., Student Service campers last month rebuilt a dam and reclaimed 500 acres of farm land.

None of the students at Wilkes-Barre had ever done manual labor; one boy was so alarmed by the unknown ordeal that he prepared himself with typhoid injections. They live in the 150-year-old house of a retired Wyoming Valley lawyer-farmer. They pay $50 (some have scholarships) for the four-week session, for food, staff salaries, etc. Camp director is young (32), pipe-smoking Edward Wright, teacher (Fieldston School), New York City Republican reform politician (he ran for the City Council last year). On his staff are a medical student, who looks after campers’ hurts, an educational director and Work Director Stanley Mesavage.

Up at 6:15 a.m., campers gather after breakfast for a ten-minute period of silent “contemplation” (an idea borrowed from the Quaker camps), then rattle off in three jalopies to their project. Boss Mesavage hands out assignments, shows them how to use tools, sees that no one overstrains himself. Work is strictly limited to four hours a day; Mesavage overruled a demand that they be allowed to work six.

After lunch, students listen to a speaker or make a field trip. Their most exciting trip: into a coal mine. They also swim, play tennis and badminton. After supper they have discussions (no cuts) on conditions in the Valley, on national problems, on foreign affairs. Wednesday and Saturday evenings are free for square dances, movies, bridge, reading. At 10:30, bed.

Last week the campers sat down to discuss their progress. Those who had come because they were bored at home were no longer bored; those who were fed up on book learning had found an exciting new kind of learning; those who wanted to taste work liked it.