ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to put the school camping movement in the United States in conversation with back-to-nature movements in Germany from 1920 to 1950. In response to rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Germany and the United States found an increase in educators and other organizations using romantic conceptions of youth connecting with the outdoors in order to produce desirable habits, yet the way nature was conceptualized varied across time and context. This chapter is centered on the evolution of the public-school camping movement in the United States from 1930–1950 and examines the role of the school camp as an arena where larger discussions about the role and conception of democracy and the healthy body played out over time. This chapter explores how American educators involved in the summer camp and the school camping movement both borrowed from German concepts about outdoor camping and education, and shaped the aims of the school camping movement against increasing overseas totalitarianism.
