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"This book describes a concept that needs to be told to America and is one whose greater practice in the United States would have wonderful, tangible results in improving the character and stamina of our people."
----SENATOR CLAIBORNE PELLFor nearly twenty years, thousands of Americans have tested their physical and emotional limits in the, outdoor adventure programs of Outward Bound. The experience has been exhilarating for them. Much more than an encounter with the wilderness, the programs have been a means of building inner strength and a heightened awareness of human interdependence.
Josh Miner, who helped bring to America the innovative ideas of British-German educator Kurt Hahn, was the first president of Outward Bound. Joe Boldt, his coauthor, talked at length with almost everyone who has played a significant role in the remarkable growth of Outward Bound in the United States. From the Peace Corps training program to the founding and expansion of schools across the country, the authors present the entire fascinating history of the organization, including Outward Bound activities in colleges and school systems and in working with juvenile delinquents and the disadvantaged.
Grand in scope, spanning the continent from the inner city to the ice caves of the Cascades, this book is a movingly personal document that tells the story of a great experiment in human potential, a classic American adventure.
"This book has an important message for ... anyone who wonders what might be done to develop our sense of control of our own lives in the face of forces which seem to threaten the loss of that control."
----HAROLD HOWE II"Rather than fret over government retrenchment, OPEC, and lowered expectations from our own economy, we can all be heartened by the vision of an aristocracy of service throughout the free world,' described in these pages and lived by thousands of Outward Bound graduates ... all over the world."
---SARGENT SHRIVER
Contents
Introduction
1. Scottish Journey
2. Gordonstoun
3. Hahn
4. Outward Bound and Salem
5. Report and Decision
6. Return to Gordonstoun
7. Andover and The Break
8. Drownproofing; Visit to Hahn
9. The Birth of U.S. Outward Bound
10. Washington, Arecibo, and Marble
11. Hectic Year
12. C-1
13. 1962-63
14. A School in Minnesota
15. A Tragedy
16. A Sea School
17. The Disadvantaged: Experiment with Delinquents
18. The Mainstream Policy
19. Young Women
20. New School in the Northwest
21. Trenton's Action Bound
22. North Carolina
23. Winter Courses
24. The Dartmouth Center
25. Hazard and Adventure
26. The Adjudicated
27. School in the Southwest
28. Into the Educational Mainstream
29. The Alternate Semester
30. College Orientation: The Mobile Term
31. Upward Bound and Outward Bound
32. Project Adventure
33. Institution for Tomorrow
Afterword
Acknowledgments
IllustrationsIntroduction At long last, a book that takes us back to the basics of learning and healthy growth. Of course, learning the three "r's" is basic; no one questions that. But too exclusive an emphasis on only reading, writing, and arithmetic that ignores a youth's sense of self, values, and interpersonal skills too often distorts healthy growth and ultimately blocks mastering even the three "r's" themselves.
Formal schooling is not a youth's "natural" mode of learning. A youth is built not just to think but also to feel and act. But within the past several hundred years, especially the past several decades, society has encroached upon more and more of its young people's feeling and acting space. No person who cares for young people should ever forget that by the time they graduate from high school, they will have had more than 29,000 hours of conditioning to sit immobilely, passively, apathetically, drugged by 17,000 hours of TV, 12,000 hours of schooling in which teachers have talked about 85 percent of the time, and 2000 hours of yellow school bus rides. Nor should we forget that youth nowadays attend large impersonal schools in which they no longer have as much opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities, to hold positions of leadership, to see their friends, to come into close sustained contact with adults who know them well, to grasp hold of responsibility for their own growth. A survey of Minnesota high school students reported that they felt school was a "waste of time, boring, endless, dumb, repetitious, tedious and childish." Nor should we forget that today's youth grow up isolated not just from nature---its unpredictability, its wilderness, its solitude, but also from others---young brothers or sisters or grandparents for whom to care, intact families to which to belong, neighbors to trust and with whom to work and cooperate.
Have these dramatic changes in the living and growing space of young people furthered their sense of wholeness? Those who have worked closely with them over the years say, "No." More, though certainly not all, young people seem to be excessively dependent upon novelty, rapid changes in pace as well as on direction. Ceaseless noise, like stereos, is needed to block out silence; drugs are needed to release inhibition and imagination; sex and violence are needed to make one feet "alive." Relationships with others, while seemingly more carefree, mask for many deeper fears of rejection; putdowns and sarcastic bantering block the development of empathy; and fears of tenderness stifle compassion. And what of youth's hope and dreams for a better society, out of which passion for and devotion to service can spring? Surveys show that youth are more pessimistic about the future and more self-absorbed than at any time in the past several decades. Fears of war, economic collapse and nuclear catastrophe constantly lurk around the fringes of adolescent consciousness.
What way can adults offer today's youth for growing more wholely, or, in the perceptive words of Kurt Hahn, whose philosophy inspired this book, for having "health-giving experiences" in which they can learn how to "harvest the lessons of . . . life . . . in aloneness," "defeat . . . defeatism," and become compassionate to those "in danger and in need"? How can we empower youth to be able to say, "I never thought I could do that" or "I learned . . . I could trust and cooperate with other people in ways I had never experienced before"?
Joshua Miner and Joe Boldt show us one powerful way by which to speak to the needs of today's youth. Outward Bound, inspired by Hahn, doggedly and creatively shaped by Josh Miner and a host of passionately caring and dedicated persons, provides just that shaking-up, intense experience many youth (and adults too) need. It provides the types of experiences we now know are essential if healthy growth is to occur: high expectations of a youth's potential; challenges that stretch capabilities; intense physical, social, and intellectual experiences that test core values and ideas about one's self; sustained involvement with small groups of peers and adults that one cannot escape; a silence with one's self that cannot be avoided or narcoticized.
I began this book and could not put it down: not just because it is humanly and movingly written; nor just because I cherish warm memories of so many the book describes; nor just because the attitudes that undergird this book resonate so fully with all that I have learned professionally about healthy growth; and not just because the book beautifully illustrates how basic are a youth's capacity to feel and act in the face of challenge to his subsequent sense of competence, even academic. No, the book is absorbing because it reflects in every chapter how a vision takes shape and grows through the inspiration and devotion of adults who care for youth. Outward Bound U.S.A. is a case study of hope!
----DOUGLAS H. HEATH
Haverford. Collegework under copyright
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