Youth Work Camps

...Contrast this period with the much earlier "separation from mother" (age 6...

...A second interesting property is the mean size of the camps...

...But increasingly they do not tolerate it anyway...

...I TO BEGIN WITH, a residential camp is a sub-community away from the parental home...

...We can see here the structural defect in the street-gang...

...To offset the standardized mass-communications, we need hundreds of Little Theaters throughout the country...

...Students of architecture at the university might think up something for youth to build...

...It is a serious dilemma for radicals: should they advocate measures which in the abstract are surely desirable but which, as they know, are likely to be gravely distorted in the context of the present society...

...Young people need ways of association within cities and towns, based on meaningful work and education...

...Now there is sexual and self-affirmation, and therefore fights at home...

...Being cut off from the adult real world, where the future values are, its enterprises are marginal, and it has to make a structure of its own interpersonal relations: pecking order, enforced loyalty, and finally gang-fighting with its similars...

...How strange it is that these excellent things, that the public insists on for work camps, seem to be irrelevant to the ordinary jobs in society...

...The idea of work camps as an adventure for all youth, as a normal institution of society, is itself a new quality of life...

...e.g., a boy who inhibits his aggression and has tight shoulders may not know how to drive a nail with confidence and beauty...

...So the youth camp is, in type, an institution of normal society...

...My conception of them is like a good progressive school but with more concretely practical projects...

...Such schools exist in our "present" society...

...They do not have a very communal Youth House in their schools...

...But at present it is worthwhile to explore this philosophical idea of the youth work camp, because it is a standard to judge what is wrong with our own community and its work...

...This entails, of course, programming excellent jobs of work...

...A young worker may lack interest in the product as worthwhile, and the therapy for this is cultural, giving information, showing meaning and importance...

...Such camps, for me at least, have always been connected with a repressive style, both socially and in regard to private life...

...and perhaps we hit on the idea of forest work camps, postponing for a year the question what they will do when they "return to the community...

...These would not ordinarily be thought of as work camp projects, but why not...

...One's memories of the 1930s stir uneasy associations of joy-through-work, authoritarian patterns of life in the camps, and in general a false and semi-military kind of discipline...

...But of course the opposite is the case: since many will be benefited, nobody is competent to administer or responsible to finance...

...Such work must also be useful, not made, work, in order to build self respect, for the youth says, "I have done that, therefore I am...

...He is one of the few living writers who thinks in terms of concrete human needs and possibilities, rather than from some ideological or institutional premise...

...The family, as it now works out, is our American fascism...

...Projects undertaken by the government within a society dedicated to private economy are necessarily stamped by the values of that society...

...And it is also true that among young people of that age there is a natural tendency to spend time and live together in groups, somewhat apart from the world of their elders...

...Under certain conditions, parts of the complex are informally provided in the on-going community itself, for instance, when the city itself has real vocations and there is a general institution of apprenticeships...

...Their contrary is not "inevitable...

...We shall see that many youth-valuable and socially-valuable work projects require being in or near town, and therefore every effort should be made to devise an urban residential camp...

...When we benevolently worry what to do with the millions of drop-outs (35% of the high school population), we start with this "problematic youth" and try to find employment useful for them and useful for society...

...The youth does not strengthen his ego against the discipline of work, but "loses himself" and grows into the work, to find himself new and larger on the other side...

...conservation, planting trees, stocking ponds, etc...

...In a work-centered camp, however, counseling is the same as good worksupervision: it springs from the product and the process and aims at discovering further vocation...

...Yet they are our model for the unproblematic in the "automated society...

...Consider the trap that American youth is maneuvered into: they are put off to a later and later sexual maturity and independence, and forced into an earlier and earlier career choice...

...The camps are first set up as a facility for delinquent youth—the first such camps in California antedated by a few years the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression, and in recent years in New York we have set up similar delinquent camps...

...It is not to be expected that the Departments of Labor and Interior, or even a county Administrator of Correction, will dream up remarkable work projects...

...a street-gang isolates itself very well...

...slipped, in modern urban and technological conditions, into the error of a later and later "maturity...

...It is relevant to leave home during middle adolescence...

...III THERE IS A SHARP DISTINCTION between the meaning of work in the delinquent and the non-delinquent camp...

...It is for this reason that we must assert what is uncompromising and really worthwhile...

...And there is a general acceptance of the desirability, or at least inevitability, of automation involving unemployment grossly underpaid (by social insurance and dole...

...It may be that one reason I feel uneasy regarding Goodman's proposals has to do with the attitude some of us have held toward work camps ever since the 1930's when the CCC was organized...

...In the delinquent camp, work is a therapeutic discipline, precisely to impose an authority and "reality principle" where just these are lacking, perhaps in the socalled psychopathic personality...

...Now IT IS CERTAINLY TRUE that the young in middle adolescence need to find ways of breaking loose from parental authority—constructive and liberating ways...

...they are nowhere to belong to, nothing to be proud of...

...On such a view, a person's work and kind of work are as important to him as in Luther's religious view that "a man is justified by his calling...

...Our nearest equivalent to such normal growing-up is, perhaps, middleclass youth going off to school and colleges, continuing the academic work they have done since childhood, and learning the verbal and symbolic skills of a bookish and technological adult world...

...An Argument Against As with most of his recent social criticism, there is something attractive in Paul Goodman's article on youth and work camps...

...No effort is made to find the job that will be useful for him, and there is no chance of trying out useful possibilities...

...The practical course for a writer is to assert the best and howl at the "inevitable" distortions of it...

...Youth are taught work habits and even particular skills that serve them on their "return to the community...

...Or a boy may work badly...

...Further, the notion that work is an "experience" and that skills should be tried out as part of education, is considered advantageous...

...This does not mean, of course, that one should therefore oppose or even be skeptical about all such projects...

...One is struck by the unanimity of the writers...

...Senator Humphrey's proposed camps *° will therefore average 40 to 50...

...But isn't that just the point—"somewhat apart...

...The youth is now past the anxieties of the onset of adolescence (age 11-14), which might still require, as Mayor Wagner says, `.'the love and warmth of family affection...

...I thought I made clear that these camps must be experiments in self-government, that was the point of the mean size...

...With the content, but not the spirit, of most of his other remarks, I am in agreement...

...Hell-raising and the need for space are good things, but how to institutionalize them...

...The community of youth must exist in a certain sociological isolation from the massive adult world, it must have its own rules...

...Irving's image of the CCC probably reflects his own adolescence—Bronx...

...Camps and the right work are not, for that age, a device for an emergency but are a natural institution of society...

...Consider our dilemma as a problem of administration and finance...

...We want the real pork-chops, but not now money, but animality, utility, community, and freedom...

...Given our "surplus productivity," we might do well to aim at a large planned paid unemployment, as Galbraith has suggested...

...Their advantages are ecological, educational, moral, economic, judicial...

...Camps have usually been located in a country or forest setting, for conservation, park maintenance, the construction of recreational facili ties...

...Various reasons are given...

...Leaving his family and choosing a community of his peers, a youth finds a structure to replace his parents in objectively valuable work, till he finds identity and vocation...

...They scrubbed the kitchen and painted the bedroom and bath at the home of two elderly sisters...

...they are bureaucrats and haven't called on inventive people to help them...

...And the answer I want to sug • The• reference here is to a bill introduced by Senator Hubert Humphrey for setting up youth camps, mainly in conservation work.—ED...

...The dangers of semi-militarism, regimentation, and narrow moral values are real...

...The earlier break consisted in finding oneself in friends like oneself, ultimately in one's gang and uniform...

...Then camps are proposed for "pre-delinquent" youth...

...Surely the normal procedure would be the reverse, to think what we need for a better quality of life and to rejoice that we have these new human resources to help meet the need...

...The disturbed delinquent—let me hasten to say that many committed "delinquents" are by no means disturbed but have gotten into trouble by influence of environment or even simply because society has foolish rules—the problem of a disturbed delinquent is likely to be inability to work at all, for he resists the objective demands of any job...

...One does not "return" from them to the community, they are part of the community, akin to the Youth House of primitive cultures...

...This is a community of peers, but there is no need to provide for it an objective work, for all the work in such a community is cultural and useful and performed cooperatively or with a simply understood division of labor...

...e.g., "The boys built a retaining wall at a neighborhood center...

...Very often, it does not provide a normal next adjustment...

...Or in another genre, a social case-worker might have a most vivid sense of some alteration or installation or service that would make all the difference to a harried family, and that youth could do...

...that is, they could not work for profits and be useless, but had to fall back on the worth of the products...

...These arguments are sound, but I do not think they hit the essential "rightness" of the idea of work camps, which is simply: that there is an intrinsic relationship among middle adolescence, living in camps, and the need for work and a certain kind of work...

...A difficulty is the wildness and in-groupness intrinsic in any transitional stage...

...From early childhood the youth has already been involved in it, trying out various skills...

...In a non-delinquent camp, however, the work is an end in itself, as process and product...

...this helps make it one's own work...

...By law, California delinquent camps "must not exceed 100 in population, including staff" (Lee Cary...

...Maybe some of them can be improved by artists and youth...

...Like any communities, the work camps are multi-purposive...

...There is another valuable kind of work, the living theater, where youth can work as builders, stagehands, and actors...

...but I would contend that if radicals and/or liberals are to advocate their establishment, they had better be prepared to expect that this is the way such camps will turn out in reality...

...Probably we exaggerated the fascistic potential of the camps, but did we simply imagine, it for no good reason whatever...

...The CCC nondelinquent camps averaged 110, but the discipline was admittedly too military...

...and then for all who are not easily employed though otherwise unproblematic...

...No politician would dare this proposal, yet to judge from the lax boondoggling and expense-account "production," it seems to be the under-current of public thinking...

...He will not need to explore problems of personality, for they project and heal themselves in the art and craft...

...There is the background of a community of peers, but the work is something more than the interpersonal relations of the camp...

...Freedom is not readily accorded to the young...

...The product must be publicly useful, manly, and admirable...

...This is the line of Carl May's Youth for Service...

...The normal approach, "This is irrefutably a fine thing, so let's get together and do it"—this is precisely infinitely difficult for us...

...The two delinquent camps in New York number 50 and 60...

...This difficulty of coping with any multi-purpose enterprise, any community enterprise, is a fair index of the state of our society...

...In America we are so committed to the psychological value, if not sanctity, of the family that we have insensibly Noi: This essay is taken from Paul Goodman's forthcoming book, Utopian Essays and Political Proposals, published this month, by permission of author and the publisher, Random House...

...For non-college youth, however, merely "getting a job" is not unproblematic, it does not provide objective productive work...

...These will not in fact be improved by private promoters whose notion of a community center is not a green but a super-market...

...For the wrong job, just to get a job, prevents growth...

...This has the advantage of our choosing the battleground, rather than always talking in their terms...

...I think Irving is too young to remember that the 20's and early 30's were importantly pacifist and internationalist...

...Not only ours but all societies are suspect, and therefore it is wise to hew to the Iine of the ideal, the normal, the natural, the open-experimental...

...Obviously in a good delinquent-camp, the productive work cannot be the goal, for, temporarily, not to do the work may be in the boy's interest...

...If there is "guidance," it is of the sort that tests the youth to see where he can be useful in the economic machine, chopping off an ear or finger if necessary...

...IRVING HOWE In reply Irving Howe's second point, on sexual segregation, surprises me...

...For it seems almost inevitable that in our present society any scheme for work camps in the forests or elsewhere will be controlled and administered by "tough" instructors stressing the dominant social versions of "patriotism" and "manliness...

...In principle, the invention of a master program of projects is prior to the location and staffing of camps and provides their context...

...Living together in such a community provides a continuum between intimate acquaintance and the public self, the citizen...

...In such a ferment, of real community, real work, and real goods, bubbling up in every likely and unlikely place, we could tolerate the system we have...

...Yet it is also felt that especially for youth and the aged, who are the least employable, unproductive life is a moral and psychological disaster...

...In modern mass society, this is the school of democracy, and possibly there is no other school...

...Even conservation, which is always first rate, has usually not been made cultural and meaningful enough by scientific explanation and experiment led by the neighboring university...

...In a great city there are a plethora of community problems—housing, delinquency, traffic, schooling, unemployment, etc., etc...

...and their careers, and academic preparation, do not, for the most part, have much flesh and blood...

...After a while, more formal vocational guidance may be added, informing the youth what jobs are available for him in the future, how to get them, where to get further training...

...or my bicycle flew across the Bronx to City Island...

...But urban conservation and urban renewal are equally important...

...At the very time young people should be learning to live with persons of the other sex, they are presumably to be brought together in camps isolated, or somewhat isolated, from towns and cities...

...His expression "seemed potentially dangerous equivalents" of fascism, reminds me uncomfortably of the CP Popular Front...

...So it recurs whenever, as now, the competitive labor market begins to fail these youth...

...So far the programmers have not been very inventive...

...A delinquent camp," says the latest manual (George Weber), "should be limited to a maximum of 60 boys, and fewer are desirable...

...The youth is paid—typically, the army minimum for enlisted men—only so that he can have spending money...

...Yet I find myself disturbed by his argument and would like to raise a few questions...

...gest is: Objective productive work, leading to the discovery of unique vocation and career...

...How topsy-turvy our thinking is...

...The camp situation is therapeutic for the emotionally disturbed...

...have this popular image...

...This hangover is the cause of the suburban flight and, in my city, has resulted in a disastrous de facto segregation...

...a chief use of them would be sexual exploration in favorable circumstances...

...I doubt, however, that "under socialism" there would' not be similar dangers, though with other narrow values...

...IN MY OPINION, we are now drifting into a kind of fascism, but it is a fascism-of-the-majority and will not even "seem" regimented or militaristic...

...In Scheme I of Communitas my brother and I therefore locate all the high schools and junir colleges in the forest belt...

...The job gives economic independence, but the employer turns into a substitute father, and the youth (and man) repeats the pattern of resentful dependency...

...out of fifty of their inventions, one would be both remarkable and feasible...

...It had never occurred to me that the camps would not be co-ed...

...One is reminded of the kind of figure mentioned for a residential progressive school, 50 to 100...

...But here the university is not on speaking terms with the government...

...We are at a crisis in America, when we either improve the quality of our life or begin to give up...

...We are in a unique dilemma...

...To say it wryly, the CCC jobs, like the WPA, were not allowed to compete with private "enterprise...

...And indeed, in cases like the Red Rocks amphitheater in the Denver Rockies, he might well be proud, for it is a lovely thing...

...I am not sure that the youth "returning to the community" would tolerate it, having known better...

...I have thus in an abstract way brought together the problems of a stage of adolescence with the need for residential camps with a program of real work...

...Now I grant that there may be nothing inherent in the idea of work camps that requires them to have such undesirable aspects...

...but one must surely have some sense of their probable outcome...

...II GO BACK A MOMENT to the comparison with the primitive Youth House...

...Therefore it should be easy to get funds for them from several groups...

...These are dealt with by a bewildering maze of departments, but there is no community plan—even though the problems cannot be solved in isolation, for the isolated "solution" of one problem (housing) in fact aggravates the other problems (traffic, delinquency...

...Naturally I am speaking of good camps, not reformatories, where the work is likely to be either punishment or slave labor...

...V WE DO NOT INVENT great programs because not enough mind is put to the task...

...But the break during 14 to 18 consists in finding oneself in the public real world...

...Work is therapeutic...

...At that time the CCC camps seemed potentially dangerous equivalents of the youth camps set up in totalitarian societies —and whatever the faults of the family as an institution, it can play a decidedly healthy role as one of the last points of resistance against encroachments of the authoritarian state...

...Indeed, the actual productive work done proves—surprisingly, as in the case of the CCC—immensely valuable...

...This organization has now changed its name to the National Committee on Employment of Youth, to protect youth from wasting away unemployed...

...it gets them out of their (and our) environment...

...Youth needs counseling and guidance, and here again we can distinguish between delinquent and non-delinquent guidance in terms of the meaning of the work...

...In all these ways, we can speak of productive work as providing an objective structure to replace the family authority...

...it was an economic use of human resources otherwise wasted...

...I was a Washington Heights boy and importantly lived, across the then ferry, in the Interstate Park...

...A fine architect might, and might even do it gratis as a patriotic action, but we do not much rely on such men and such motives...

...IV PARADOXICALLY, THE SUCCESS of a great program of work camps designed for the advantage of youth depends on the worthwhileness of the work-projects for the community at large, since only the community can give objective cultural norms...

...Perhaps he will want to return to school, for which he has now discovered his own use...

...The crucial question is this: What can give structure to this new identity, to replace the parental identity...

...The work is done cooperatively or in a division of labor arranged by the community...

...and this is why...

...Many of the youth are importantly becoming so again, though not on a basis of socialism...

...There used to be an organization called the National Child Labor Committee, to protect youth from being exploited by parents and profiteers of industry...

...Otherwise one is soon trapped into choosing the lesser of two evils, as it is called...

...I am suggesting a very broad spectrum of projects...

...We must find a substitute (I do not know one but the kibbutz has suggestive ideas...

...Yet our society does not think about it...

...My Scout troop was also a big deal for me, and I would have become a Scoutmaster except that, in the middle 30's, the organization began to be semi-militarized...

...And therefore I proposed that they should be "sociologically" but not geographically somewhat apart...

...but the camps as conceived in our society and as they perhaps must be conceived in our society, provide something quite different...

...and yet there is a complexity of social relations beyond cliques or even gangs, so that a youth must learn to take himself also as a public person...

...A counselor will not then try to get him to work, but will use the lapse to explore his personality...

...These would give the kids a refuge and give the grown-ups also a chance to breathe...

...He feels inferior and absents himself...

...It is a real project to grow on, to project on, in the real world, to find one's identity and hopefully one's vocation...

...It is remarkable how both informed opinion and popular sentiment have insisted that the camp work have exactly contrary characteristics...

...Variety of work, such as domestic work and field work, is considered an advantage...

...Finally, the job is not presented to the youth as a worthwhile occupation with useful products to be proud of...

...In principle this does not require the country or forest setting that is the usual image, though that has obvious attractions...

...Clearly in this median figure, not too few and not too many, there is implied a face-to-face community where everybody knows everybody...

...For instance, I am now urging as part of race-integrated and incomemixed public housing the inclusion of voluntary youth-dormitories in the same buildings...

...1)Goodman remarks that in the CCC camps the discipline was "admittedly too militaristic," and that is probably an understatement...

...And when by exception a great multi-purpose enterprise like the TVA is implemented, with whatever crippling "safeguards," it is a wonder of the age...

...Ideally I would think that the young in middle adolescence should be allowed a way of bunching together as a sub-community—but not geographically and socially cut off from—the larger community...

...2) The work camps, again within the present society, inevitably bring with them one or another degree of sexual segregation...

...Finally, Irving's plug for the bourgeois family is strictly for the birds...

...The mayoral prescription to curb youth by stricter home supervision is not only unrealistic but disastrously unhealthy...

...e.g., in 1936 they supported the Democratic Mayor of Chicago who had just killed 17 workers at Republic Steel, because Landon "might" win and introduce fascism...

...Further, the job-market being what it is, the job rarely has any relation toaptitude...

...Would this not make for that "later and later sexual maturity" which Goodman rightly describes as a "trap...

...his support is his by right as a member of the community...

...And public projects like conservation are carried through...

...There is no period for adolescence...

...often in our society the enterprise is not worthwhile, and the products are useless...

...As for the actual CCC, so far as I observed or have heard, some of the camps were lousy, some were pretty good...

...We thus continue the only natural discipline of behavior which consists not of imposing the authority's wishes but of a person's coping with the nature of things, objectively demonstrable...

...One hears touching tales of the CCC boy returning 25 years later with his own son to point with pride to the park-pavilion he helped build...

...Why, for instance, is the underprivileged, or the non-bookish, boy not given vocational scholarships, for exploration and training, if the college boy is given aid...

...The best therapist in such a case may be a master-craftsman, who loves the making, the style...

...And most important, to my mind, is that fifty thousand small towns in America are ugly, shapeless, and neglected...