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Why camping is better than school
Let's talk about something that's probably crossed your mind more than once: why camping beats the heck out of school any day of the week. Now, I know what you're thinking - "But school is supposed to be this great learning experience, right?" Wrong. It's more like a never-ending cycle of stress, boredom, and feeling like you're trapped in a system that doesn't give a damn about you.
So, why is camping so much better? Well, let's start with the obvious - freedom. When you're out in the wild, you're not stuck in a classroom for hours on end, listening to teachers drone on about things that you may never use again in your life. Instead, you're breathing in fresh air, exploring nature, and actually learning useful skills like setting up a tent or starting a campfire.
Speaking of which, let's talk about the skills you gain from camping. It's not just about survival techniques (although those are pretty cool too). Camping teaches you how to be resourceful, how to problem-solve on the fly, and how to work together with others in a real, meaningful way. These are skills that will actually serve you well in life, unlike memorizing dates or equations that you can just Google anyway.
And let's not forget about the mental health benefits of camping. School can be a breeding ground for anxiety, depression, and just feeling plain old miserable. But when you're out in nature, surrounded by trees and birdsong, all that stress just melts away. You can actually relax, recharge, and come back to the world feeling like a whole new person.
So, if you're feeling fed up with the whole school thing, maybe it's time to consider a different kind of education - one that involves sleeping under the stars, roasting marshmallows, and finding yourself in the great outdoors. Because let's face it, when it comes to learning about life, camping beats school hands down.
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Posted in: Blog on April 26, 2024 @ 11:31 AM
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It breaks down if you are scared of getting a very unfamiliar new skill wrong in a social setting. There was a school friend I could have done this with but always declined for that reason. School had already had that effect on me, as I was reputed good at absorbing facts and that made more to fear from any failures.
Clearly missing from my childhood, that could already have taught it in a bigger group setting less personally in the spot, was scouts. Wonder what you think of scouts, when they had an authoritarian uniform and could be even more intense about it than schools, but were another form of learning without the classroom intensity and more in an activities way instead ?
The present day scouts in Britain say they don't oblige taking part in team sports, and that's part of being autism friendly. It looks to be the way they have been extending back a generation or so, they just had seen no motive to announce it. It would fit with how they changed a lot in the 90s including having much less of a uniform, because kids were not joining.
But I'm older than that, 70s was when I could have joined, and was interested when a schoolmate did. But I was the sensitive bookish type who hated school football and the dynamic of team sports. My grandma was my strong supporter that this mattered and not to push me to try to like or get used to it. She had picked up socially that the local cub scouts played football, and team sports are certainly part of what they do: and for it, she dissuaded me from them.
Nobody else, including the schoolmate, ever said this was wrong. It fits the role of football in a couple of same era failed memories of cubs I have seen online. That's why I was not a scout, and was never taught camping by them. The impact of a traumatic school activity, to keep taken seriously against which I could not choose voluntarily to suffer more of it outside school without good reason. But in hindsight of knowing more about what scouts did, than I could at the time, they could have introduced me to non-team sports that would be an antidote to PE, and they would have introduced me to hiking, which I found I like from teenage onwards and would have been a healthier more outdoor kid for finding at cub age. So the dissuasion now feels wrong, and a major loss blamable on school's impact.